freedom_uncompromised

The most used weedkiller on American corn turns male frogs into egg-laying females at a tenth of the dose the law allows in drinking water, Europe banned it in 2004, and the company that makes it put the scientist who found out under surveillance. Atrazine goes on half the corn in America, seventy million pounds a year, and every spring the rain washes it off the fields into the reservoirs of the corn belt in a pulse the water companies can set their calendar by. In 2002 Tyrone Hayes at Berkeley, who had been hired by the maker to test it, found that at a fraction of the legal limit it castrated male leopard frogs and turned some of them into functioning females with eggs. The company tried to keep the results. He published. The documents that came out in court a decade later were the company's plan for him, by name: discredit him, investigate him, have him followed, and buy the search results for his name so his work came up last. The frogs were the warning. The water is the point. For most of the growing season the taps of Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas and Nebraska run above the European limit, and the water utilities sued the maker to pay for the filters and settled for a hundred million dollars. The European Union looked at the data and banned it because it could not be kept out of the water. The United States looked at the same data and renewed it, twice. The corn it protects is fed to pigs, burned in cars, and refined into the syrup in the drink. A pasture has never needed atrazine, and the cows on it drink from the pond. The corn belt puts a chemical through its own taps every June that changes the sex of the thing in the pond, and the official position is that the frogs are not people.

Nine in ten American strawberries come from a few valleys in California where the soil is killed with a First World War gas before every planting, and the fields are visible from the road because they are wrapped in plastic to keep the gas in. Chloropicrin was made for the trenches. It was a lung and eye agent, a vomiting gas, fired in shells to force men out of their masks. Now it is injected into the ground at Watsonville and Oxnard every year, under tarps that hold the fumes down for a week, and it does to the soil what it did to a trench: everything in it dies, the fungi, the bacteria, the worms, the insects, until the dirt is as sterile as a hospital tray. Then the strawberries go in, on raised beds of plastic, fed by drip line with everything a living soil would have given them, and the plastic and the gas go in again next year, because a dead soil has no defence against the one disease that gets through. For forty years the gas was methyl bromide, which eats the ozone layer, and when the world banned it in 2005 California's strawberry growers got themselves an exemption and kept using it for another decade, the last major crop on earth to do so. Chloropicrin was the replacement, and the state's own pesticide regulator lists it among the commonest causes of farmworker poisoning in California. The men who apply it are mostly undocumented, the drift has emptied a school in Monterey County, and the strawberry has topped the list of the most pesticide-contaminated produce in America for most of the last decade. Every year the industry calls it a heart-healthy antioxidant superfood, and every year the field it came from is gassed. The cow in the pasture next door has never once needed the soil under her sterilised. The strawberry cannot be grown at that scale without it, and the war gas is the price of a punnet in January.