Vanity Fair has a multi-thousand word exposé on Monsanto that is a reminder of just how capital-C crazy our food chain is in this country. The article, by the famed investigative duo Donald Barlett and James Steele, goes deep into Monsanto's m.o. This is a company that surveils farmers going in and out of seed stores. It pursues its many patents with a vigor that Microsoft would find unsettling. And we've centralized nearly every step of our very food system -- from seed engineering to food production -- into the hands of companies like this.

Monsanto is sorta like Google of the food world, without the "don't be evil" ethos or the transparency that comes from being an online company. Of course, Google just handles our searches and online advertising and calenders and mapping and... But Monsanto is shaping the very food we eat and the morsels we put in the hungry maws of our kiddies. While it's CNN.com banner news when someone complains that Google Street View has an image peeking into their living room, biotech companies like Monsanto and Dow Agro file patents on seventeen different varieties of corn and thirteen different soybean strains and we don't bat an eye.

It's great to see a major piece in a popular general-interest magazine like Vanity Fair for that reason. I've started to think that one way of thinking about our food system in the U.S. as "black box food," meaning that we don't know what goes into it and don't really understand what comes out of it. Great to see a little light shined into that box.