Life of Saint-Haz emblazoned Monsanto with an aura that makes people refer to them as

Monsatant.

For a lot of people around North America and around the world, Monsanto has become a bad word.

For those of you who are not familiar, Monsanto is the biggest herbicide company in the world.

They sell the stuff that farmers use to kill weeds all over the globe.

We've talked about weeds before on Gastropod, and by the way, that is indeed what you're listening to.

This is Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Cynthia Graber, and I'm Nicola Twilly, and in our first weed episode,

buried treasure, we told the story of the world's longest running plant biology experiment,

the BLC experiment.

It's designed to show how long weeds can survive in the soil, and the answer is basically forever.

In the episode, we also took a more philosophical and historical look at what weeds are,

and how humans have both decided what constitutes a weed and also kind of created them over the millennia.

In the first episode, we told you that weeds have been the bane of farmers' lives for centuries.

But, although weeds were definitely a pain in the arse, back when the BLC experiment started in the late 1800s,

since then, we've managed to turn them from a familiar frustration into a truly wicked problem.

This episode were telling the story of the dawn of the age of herbicides,

the dawn of the chemicals we've created to wipe those weeds out altogether.

Or so, we thought.

It's a tale that involves contaminated cranberries in the Vietnam War,

but also at heart, it's the story of a scrappy start-up that has become one of the most hated companies in the world.

But is Monsanto really evil?

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