What do monsanto executives eat

And that's a serious business advantage. State laws may mandate it even sooner. But those requirements won't apply to Monsanto's new superveggies.

They may be born in a lab, but technically they're every bit as natural as what you'd get at a farmers' market. Keep them away from pesticides and transport them less than miles and you could call them organic and locavore too. John Francis Queeny formed Monsanto Chemical Works in , primarily to produce the artificial sweetener saccharin.

Monsanto was the family name of Queeny's wife, Olga. It was a good time for chemical companies. By the s, Monsanto had expanded into sulfuric acid and polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, a coolant used in early transformers and electric motors, now more famous as a pernicious environmental contaminant. The company moved on to plastics and synthetic fabrics, and by the s it had sprouted a division to create herbicides, including the Vietnam-era defoliant Agent Orange.

A decade later, Monsanto invented Roundup, a glyphosate-based weed killer that farmers could apply to reduce overgrowth between crops, increasing productivity. In the early s, the company turned its scientific expertise to agriculture, working on novel crop strains that would resist the effects of its signature herbicide. Now, breeding new strains of plants is nothing new. Quite the opposite, in fact—optimizing plants for yield, flavor, and other qualities defined the earliest human civilizations.

But for all the millennia since some proto-farmer first tried it, successfully altering plants has been a game of population roulette. Basically, farmers breed a plant that has a trait they like with other plants they also like. Then they plant seeds from that union and hope the traits keep showing up in subsequent generations.

They're working with qualities that a biologist would call, in aggregate, phenotype. But phenotype is the manifestation of genotype, the genes for those traits. The roulettelike complications arise because some genes are dominant and some are recessive. Taking a tree with sweet fruit and crossing it with one that has big fruit won't necessarily get you a tree with sweeter, bigger fruit.

You might get the opposite—or a tree more vulnerable to disease, or one that needs too much water, and on and on. It's a trial-and-error guessing game that takes lots of time, land, and patience.

The idea behind genetic modification is to speed all that up—analyze a species' genes, its germplasm, and manipulate it to your liking. It's what the past three decades of plant biology have achieved and continue to refine. Monsanto became a pioneer in the field when it set out to create Roundup-resistant crops. Stark joined that effort in , when he was a molecular biology postdoc. Monsanto was focusing on GM commodity crops, but the more exciting work was in creating brand-new vegetables for consumers.

For example, Calgene, a little biotech outfit in Davis, California, was building a tomato it called the Flavr Savr. Conventional tomatoes were harvested while green, when they're tough enough to withstand shipping, and then gassed with ethylene at their destination to jump-start ripening. But the Flavr Savr was engineered to release less of an enzyme called polygalacturonase so that the pectin in its cell walls didn't break down so soon after picking.

The result was a tomato that farmers could pick and ship ripe. In the mids, Monsanto bought Calgene and reassigned Stark, moving him from Roundup research to head a project that almost accidentally figured out how to engineer flavor into produce.

He began tinkering with genes that affect the production of ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase, an enzyme that correlates to higher levels of glycogen and starch in tomatoes and potatoes. Translation: more viscous ketchup and a French fry that would shed less water when cooked, maintaining mass without absorbing grease. And he succeeded. Trait A third the size of regular bell peppers when ripe, mini- mizing waste and allowing for flexibility while cooking.

They never made it to market. Aside from consumer backlash, the EPA deemed StarLink corn, a new biotech strain from another company, unfit for human consumption because of its potential to cause allergic reactions.

Toss in the fact that production costs on the Flavr Savr turned out to be too high and it's easy to see why Monsanto shut down Stark's division in Large-scale farms growing soy or cotton, or corn destined for cattle feed—or corn syrup—were happy to plant GM grain that could resist big doses of herbicide. But the rest of the produce aisle was a no-go. Furthermore, genetically modifying consumer crops proved to be inefficient and expensive.

Well before their veggie business went kaput, Monsanto knew it couldn't just genetically modify its way to better produce; it had to breed great vegetables to begin with.

As Stark phrases a company mantra: "The best gene in the world doesn't fix dogshit germplasm. What does? Stark had an advantage here: In the process of learning how to engineer chemical and pest resistance into corn, researchers at Monsanto had learned to read and understand plant genomes—to tell the difference between the dogshit germplasm and the gold.

And they had some nifty technology that allowed them to predict whether a given cross would yield the traits they wanted. The key was a technique called genetic marking. It maps the parts of a genome that might be associated with a given trait, even if that trait arises from multiple genes working in concert.

Researchers identify and cross plants with traits they like and then run millions of samples from the hybrid—just bits of leaf, really—through a machine that can read more than , samples per week and map all the genes in a particular region of the plant's chromosomes.

Trait Tastes up to 30 percent sweeter than cantaloupe grown in winter. Method Crossbreeding cantaloupe and European heritage melons with a gene for a fruity and floral aroma. They had more toys too. In , Monsanto developed a machine called a seed chipper that quickly sorts and shaves off widely varying samples of soybean germplasm from seeds.

The seed chipper lets researchers scan tiny genetic variations, just a single nucleotide, to figure out if they'll result in plants with the traits they want—without having to take the time to let a seed grow into a plant. Monsanto computer models can actually predict inheritance patterns, meaning they can tell which desired traits will successfully be passed on.

John Francis Queeny founds Monsanto, giving the company his wife's maiden name. Queeny, a purchaser for a wholesale drug house, forms his St. Louis-based company in order to begin production of saccharin, an artificial sweetener developed in the latter part of the 19th century. The company expands to industrial chemicals and drugs and introduces now-banned polychlorinated biphenyls PCBs. Monsanto creates its first hybrid seed corn and expands production of cleaners and synthetic rubbers and plastics.

Navy tests determine that the hydraulic fluid the company is trying to sell to the military is associated with liver damage in humans. Congress bans production of PCBs after they were found to cause cancer, including damage to the liver, immune system, reproductive system, skin, eyes and brain.

The company purchases chemical manufacturer G. Searle, despite a previous FDA inquiry into Searle's chief product, aspartame, a controversial sweetener, which Donald Rumsfeld had pushed to get approved. The company introduces its first genetically modified product, recombinant bovine growth hormone rBGH in efforts to increase milk production. Early results are promising. But Grant notes that, while US corn farmers generate yields of to bushels per acre, farmers in Brazil, Mexico and India get about bushels per acre and those in Africa produce only about 20 bushels.

With a growing global population and an emerging middle class in China and India, the world is going to need a lot more food, Grant says. Others argue that there are better ways to address the problem of food security.

About one-third of all the food produced for consumption is wasted, the UN Environment Programme says. Producing meat is more resource intensive than growing vegetables. In other words, growing corn and soy to feed to livestock is wasteful because those crops can feed more people directly. The same is true for growing corn to produce ethanol. But all the evidence, he argues, indicates that people in the developing world want to eat more meat, not less.

But critics are already saying that barcodes will be of little or no help to the elderly, the poor and people without smartphones.

Grant says he has no problem with consumers who prefer to avoid genetically engineered foods, or farmers who prefer to grow organic crops.