Monsanto’s Past, Our Future w/ Bart Elmore

11/06/23 • 66 min

The Monsanto Company officially ceased to exist when it was acquired by Bayer in 2018, but its legacy lives on in courtrooms, factory towns and farms across the globe. Today the company’s name is most associated with the herbicide Roundup and genetically modified seeds, but Monsanto also served as a leading producer of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, an essential supplier of caffeine and saccharin to Coca-Cola in Coke’s early years, and the sole US producer of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs). In short, Monsanto’s history is one that will continue to shape the US well into the future.

In this episode, Bart Elmore joins Bob and Ben to talk about his new book Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Future (W.W. Norton, 2021), and how a small midwestern company founded in 1901 became an agricultural powerhouse by selling solutions to the problems it helped to create.

Dr. Bartow Elmore is Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University where he specializes in Global Environmental History and the History of Capitalism. He is also the author of the award-winning book Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (W. W. Norton, 2015). You can follow him on twitter at @BartElmore.

You can hear Bart’s other appearances on The Road To Now in episode #140: Citizen Coke: The History of Coca-Cola w/ Bartow Elmore and #277: Country Capitalism w/ Bartow Elmore.

This is a fully re-edited and audio-enhanced rebroadcast of RTN Episode 208, which originally aired on September 27, 2021. This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.

Monsanto’s Past, Our Future w/ Bart Elmore

You can hear Bart’s other appearances on The Road To Now in episode #140: Citizen Coke: The History of Coca-Cola w/ Bartow Elmore and #277: Country Capitalism w/ Bartow Elmore.

This is a fully re-edited and audio-enhanced rebroadcast of RTN Episode 208, which originally aired on September 27, 2021. This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.

Previous Episode

#289 The Dead Bodies in Your Favorite Museum w/ Tanya Marsh

Two things you probably don’t know: 1) your favorite museum probably holds human remains and 2) it’s completely legal to sell human bones on the internet. Not surprisingly, those two things have caused a lot of controversy. In this episode, Tanya Marsh joins Ben for a conversation about recent developments in the legal-social-political nexus of dead bodies; the controversy surrounding the acquisition and treatment of human remains in American museums and what we’ll simply call “the Harvard morgue case.”

Tanya Marsh is Professor of Law at Wake Forest University, where she specializes in the law of human remains. She is the author of The Law of Human Remains (2015) and co-author (with Daniel Gibson) of Cemetery Law: The Common Law of Burying Grounds in the United States (2015).

This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

Zachary Small, “Facing Scrutiny, a Museum That Holds 12,000 Human Remains Changes Course,” New York Times, Oct. 15, 2023.

Alyssa Shotwell, “Activists Took Over Museum After Victims’ Bodies of the 1985 Philadelphia Bombing Found,” The Mary Sue, Sept. 15, 2023.

Abby Patkin, ”Group indicted for allegedly stealing and selling body parts from Harvard morgue,” Boston.com, June 15, 2023.

Tanya Marsh, “Is it Illegal to Sell Human Remains,” The Conversation, June 30, 2023.

Next Episode

#290 The Circus: An Exit Interview w/ Mark McKinnon

Bob welcomes Mark McKinnon for an exit interview about his work as co-producer and co-host of The Circus. Showtime announced last week that after eight seasons and 130 episodes this would be the final season of the political docuseries.

Mark reflects on chronicling American political history as it happened from 2016 to 2023, during a turbulent period in American history that includes the rise of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, a once in a century pandemic, and the largest war in Europe since WWII.

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.