by Nick Pirog
“Is that what you do?”
He shook his head. “I work in sales.”
Of course he did.
I said, “For the past three days.”
He flashed a toothy grin.
I asked, “What made you want to work here?”
His brow furrowed as he gathered his thoughts. A moment later, he said, “I grew up poor. Like poor, poor. Single mom. Food stamps, food banks, all the stuff you don’t want to be associated with when you’re a kid. For the first ten years of my life, I went to bed hungry half the time. It was miserable.” He paused for a second, then said, “I know in America, I didn’t go to bed hungry because of a lack of food. It was more of a money issue. But for a lot of the world, it is a food issue. They can’t grow enough. There either isn’t enough arable land or enough water or a thousand other agricultural problems. And it’s only gonna get worse. In twenty years, the Earth’s population will need 55 percent more food than it can produce now.”
I tried to put myself in Brian’s shoes, which for a kid who grew up as a One Percenter wasn’t easy. The only time I could ever remember going to bed hungry was when I was a hostage on a cruise ship. A cruise, I might add, that probably cost as much as Brian’s yearly salary. But I could remember the kids at my elementary and middle schools who ate for free and who seemed mortified by this fact. Hunger played an impactful role in Brian’s life, and he wanted to alleviate that pain for someone else, someone a generation, or three generations down the road. I respected that.
As for his population statistics, I’m sure they were overstated, but there was no question that with a booming global population more food would need to be produced. Someone had to take the reins and look for an answer to this problem.
I said, “So, that’s what made you want to work at Lunhill?”
“No, that’s what got me interested in biotech. I wanted to work at Lunhill because they spend the most money on research and development.” He paused, then said, “Nearly a billion dollars a year.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
Though, to be fair, Lunhill was a $91 billion company.
Brian started down the corridor and waved for me to follow. We walked for thirty yards before coming to a series of plate glass windows. It was one part greenhouse, one part meth lab. There were two people in the room, one man and one woman. The woman was dressed in jeans and a blouse. The man looked more scientisty, with a white lab coat and clear goggles pulled down over his eyes.
“Is that Walter White?” I asked.
Brian turned to me and smiled, “You know what’s funny? His name really is Walter.”
I laughed, and Brian and I went on a quick Breaking Bad tangent.
“I watched all five seasons in five days,” I told him.
“You watched an entire season each day?”
“I’d just been dumped by a girl,” I confided, not really sure why.
“Been there,” he replied, gazing down between his feet. I guessed he’d been dumped more recently than me. Or, he was still pining over his middle school crush.
I changed the subject back to science. “So if Walter there isn’t trying to grow meth, what exactly is he trying to grow?”
Brian snapped back to life. “Golden Rice.”
“Golden Rice?”
Brian nodded. “A genetically modified strain of rice that will provide a significant amount of Vitamin A.”
I suppose I didn’t look as impressed as Brian anticipated, and he explained, “Vitamin A deficiency plagues many parts of the developing world. More than a million deaths a year and half a million cases of irreversible blindness. If widely planted, Golden Rice could help reduce those numbers dramatically.”
“Wow,” I said, genuinely dazzled. “That’s pretty cool.”
“Super cool,” he echoed.
“So how does it work?” I asked. “What exactly does ‘genetically modified’ mean?”
“A GMO is any plant or animal that has been genetically modified through the addition of genetic material from another organism.” He paused to take a breath, then continued, “My favorite example is Bt-corn.”
The term Bt-corn rang familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
“Bt-corn,” Brian continued, “has been genetically modified to create its own insecticide. The donor organism is a naturally occurring soil bacterium that contains a gene which produces a protein that kills the larvae of the corn borer.”
“The corn borer?”
“Yeah, it’s an insect. A moth, actually.”
“And they destroy the corn?”
“The larvae bore into the stalk of the corn and feed off it. They can really cut into a farmer’s yields. Here in the Midwest, they are particularly bad.”
“You seem to really like the science behind all this. Why do you work in sales?”
“I failed organic chemistry in college twice.”
“Really? You seem like a whiz with all this stuff.”
“Biology, botany, all that stuff I get, but for some reason, no matter how hard I studied, I just couldn’t get OC to click.” He sighed, then said, “I was gonna take it a third time, but I was going to have to wait a full year, and I wanted to start making some money. So I changed majors.”
We watched Walter play with a plant for another minute or so, then Brian said, “There isn’t really anything else interesting to see. Most of the people who work here either work in marketing, or accounting, or sales—like me.”
“I’m pretty hungry,” I said. “How about we go grab one of those egg salad sandwiches?”
He smiled and nodded.
Chapter Twenty
The cafeteria was state-of-the-art. Ready-made sandwiches, salads, pizza, plus a few gourmet food stations. After inhaling Brian’s egg salad breath for over an hour, that was the last thing on my mind, and I opted for a salad with grilled chicken breast. Brian grabbed two more egg salad sandwiches, a bowl of cottage cheese, and a Coke.
The thought of sitting opposite him and watching him eat his meal made me shudder, but I still had some questions I wanted answered. There were twenty tables with ten people spread between them. Brian and I took up seats at one of the empty tables.
I glanced down at my salad, then asked, “Is it true the cafeteria here doesn’t use any GMOs?”
It was bad timing on my part as Brian had just taken a bite of his egg salad sandwich. He snorted, sending egg salad spittle onto my face and into my open mouth.
I wiped at my face with a napkin and fought back a series of dry heaves.
Brian seemed mortified by what he’d done, and when I said, “Well, that was maybe the grossest thing ever,” it didn’t help matters.
After we both composed ourselves, Brian said, “I’m so sorry, it’s just that your question is so absurd that it caught me off guard.”
“So, they do use genetically modified foods in the cafeteria?”
“Of course!” He pointed to my salad and said, “Everything in here is GMOs.”
I’d found this hard to believe when I read it, but I was glad to know it wasn’t true.
I stabbed at my salad with my fork, took a bite, then asked a follow-up question. “So you don’t think genetically modified foods are making people sick?”
“People have been eating GMOs for going on twenty-five years now. If they were making people sick, then there would be concrete evidence by now.”
A few minutes after Brian had finished explaining how Bt-corn worked, I recalled why the term sounded familiar. It was the guy’s blog, GMOs, Guns, and the Uprising.
I said, “I read somewhere that Bt-corn is making people sick. Studies show something about liver and colon cancer.”
“Do you have a cell phone?” he asked.
“Yeah. A smartphone.” I’m not sure why I felt compelled to add the second part other than my wanting him to know I was hip.
“Well, there are a thousand studies out there that say the cell phone you’re using is causing cancer.”
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br /> My eyebrows rose. “Really?”
“Yeah, but for every study out there that says cell phones are causing cancer, there are ten studies saying that they don’t.” He paused. “Same thing for Bt-corn. There are tons and tons of studies—done by independent agencies not affiliated with Lunhill—that prove it’s completely safe.”
He had a good point. There was probably a scientific study out there that said sitting on the couch for six months watching Netflix and gaining forty pounds was actually good for you.
“What else you got?” he said with a grin. He was having fun debunking all the conspiracy theories.
I asked, “Why is Spectrum-H banned in a bunch of countries?”
“Spectrum-H isn’t banned in any countries. Glyphosate, the active compound, is banned in a few. All I can say is that glyphosate has been around since 1970 and it is wildly considered the safest herbicide every created.”
“Then why did the International Agency for Research on Cancer declare glyphosate a ‘probable human carcinogen’ in 2015?” I read this from my smartphone. The one that was giving me cancer as we speak.
He smirked slightly, then said, “Every regulatory agency in the world has given Spectrum-H the green light.”
I waited for him to add to this, but he let the statement stand for itself.
I put the phone on the table and said, “Regulatory agencies like the FDA? Which Lunhill has hired a disproportionate amount of people from?”
“Makes good business sense. No different than hiring an accountant who used to work at the IRS.”
He got me there.
“Okay, what about food labeling guidelines? Don’t you think people have a right to know what’s in their food?”
He took a long sip of soda and said, “Personally, I’m with you on that one. But, assuming GMOs are safe, which they are, it shouldn’t matter.”
“But you agree that GMO labeling would be a bad thing for Lunhill?”
“Worse than bad. It would be devastating. Studies show your average consumer, if given the choice between buying the same product for the same price, would choose the one not containing GMOs.”
“Hence, Lunhill spending millions of dollars each year on lobbyists to prevent this from happening?”
“Like all business enterprises, they have shareholders and a board of directors to answer to. They are in the business of making money.”
I appreciated Brian’s candor.
“What about farmers?” I asked.
“What about them?”
“I read that many farmers feel like they are being forced to use Lunhill’s genetically modified seeds.”
“No one is forced to use anything. Farmers want to use Lunhill seeds. The fact of the matter is, American farmers average 160 bushels of corn per acre each year, up from 109.5 in 1979. And it’s even higher for soybeans, cotton, and many other crops.”
I hadn’t talked to any actual farmers about this, so I could hardly rebut.
“Tell me about Simon Beach,” I said.
I only knew the bare details from what I read on the internet. Simon Beach was a ghost town, but at one point it had been a thriving community of two thousand—not all that different than Tarrin. In 1990, the town was completely evacuated due to dioxin contamination from a Lunhill manufacturing plant. It was the largest civilian exposure to dioxin in the country’s history. A year later, the State of Missouri disincorporated the city.
Brian looked over both shoulders. I had a feeling Simon Beach was as taboo here as Save-More was in Tarrin.
He leaned forward and said, “That was awful.”
“First, explain to me what dioxin is.”
He looked over both shoulders a second time, then deciding the coast was clear, he said, “Dioxin is a chemical by-product of the manufacturing process. Anything manufactured, from soap to toothpaste to household disinfectants, are all going to produce dioxin.”
“And these dioxins are toxic?”
“They are when they reach a certain level in the human body.”
I took this in, then asked, “So what happened with the Lunhill plant in Simon Beach?”
“Lunhill wasn’t entirely at fault. It was their dioxins, but they weren’t the ones who spilled them. It’s actually a crazy story.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“So this is what happened,” he said. “The Lunhill plant wasn’t in Simon Beach, it was actually in a town in Southwest Missouri called Verona. Like I said, when you add all the chemicals together to make Spectrum-H, trace amounts of dioxins are created as a by-product. It would accumulate in the bottom of the stills as a thick, oily residue. For many years, Lunhill would send the still bottoms to a waste facility in Louisiana for incineration. This is the best method to destroy dioxins, but it’s also the most expensive. So trying to save a couple bucks, Lunhill contracted the services of the Midwest Petrochemical Corporation. But unbeknownst to Lunhill, MPC didn’t know shit about waste disposal. So they subcontracted the job to a guy named Russell Canto, who owned a local waste oil business.”
He took a sip of Coke, then asked, “You with me so far?”
I nodded.
He continued, “In addition to the waste oil business, Canto owned an oil spraying business.”
“Oil spraying? This is a thing?”
“Yeah. They spray oil to keep the dust down on farms and dirt roads.”
This made sense, and I waved for him to keep going.
“In 1986, the town of Simon Beach hired Canto to oil its twenty-three miles of dirt roads. Over a two-year stretch, he ended up spraying 160,000 gallons of waste oil, much of which he was getting from the Lunhill plant in Verona.
“Over the course of the next few years, a bunch of animals started dying and a lot of the citizens of Simon Beach were diagnosed with chloracne, horrible lesions on the face and neck, which is consistent with dioxin poisoning.” He paused, then said, “That’s when the EPA came in and started testing the soil. They found dioxin concentrations as high as 0.3 parts per million along the entire network of roads.”
“What concentration is considered safe?”
“0.1 parts per billion.”
Yikes.
I asked, “So why didn’t they just go in and clean up all the roads?”
“A week after the tests came back, there was the worst flood in Simon Beach history. The Meramec River rose to like fifteen feet higher than usual.”
“And that contaminated the entire town?”
He nodded and said, “So President Ronald Reagan created the Simon Beach Dioxin Task Force and they came in and bought out the eight hundred residential properties and thirty businesses for like forty million dollars.”
“And just like that, it’s a ghost town?”
“Yep.”
“Did Lunhill get sued?”
“Everyone got sued: Lunhill, MPC, and Canto. But because Canto was subcontracting with the MPC, who had the account with Lunhill, he claimed ignorance—that he had no idea what was contained in the oil. He had to pay out a couple hundred thousand dollars, but he filed for bankruptcy and I’m not sure what ever happened. But Lunhill and MPC both had to pay out two hundred million.”
“Do you think Lunhill should have been held responsible?”
“It was their oil,” he said, matter-of-fact.
I asked, “So, ethically, you have no problem working for Lunhill?”
Brian puffed out his cheeks. “I fully understand why people don’t like the company: Agent Orange, saccharine, DDT, Simon Beach. I totally get it. But over the last couple decades they have done far more good than harm. And now they are leading the fight against the world’s imminent food production problem. So no, I have no problem working for them.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re off the hot seat.”
He let out a long exhale, then asked, “How’d I do? I have my first sales call next week.”
I told him he did great, then inquired, “Is your sales call over the phone or in pers
on?”
“In person.”
“Will you do me a favor?”
He scrunched his nose. “I guess.”
“That day,” I said, “maybe lay off the egg salad.”
Brian excused himself to use the bathroom, and I made my way to the dessert bar and grabbed a tapioca pudding. I was disappointed it wasn’t the same Snack Pack Harold often snuck from the cafeteria at the nursing home. In actuality, it was rice pudding. I wondered if it was Golden Rice pudding. Was I meeting my daily requirement of Vitamin A while ingesting such a delicious snack?
I made a mental note to mention Golden Rice Pudding to Brian. And that I wanted royalties when it saved all of humanity.
As for Brian, he had laid a good deal of information on me over the past hour. Many of my initial judgments about Lunhill had been, if not completely refuted, then at the very least, softened.
But learning more about Lunhill and what they did was only half the reason I made the road trip. The other reason, the main reason I came today was to talk to someone who knew Neil Felding. I wasn’t sure if it was a calculated decision on the part of Allison the executive, but I wasn’t going to get much from the guy who had worked at Lunhill for three days.
I surveyed the tables of the cafeteria. It was closing in on 1:30 p.m. and there were only a few lunch stragglers remaining. Two men at one table. Then a lone woman at another. The men were both in suits and ties. The lone woman, on the other hand, was clad in jeans and a gray blouse, and her hair was in a bird’s nest of a bun. Even from twenty feet away, I could see the dark bags under the woman’s eyes. She was either a cook, a custodian, or an overworked scientist.
I finished the last of the pudding, stood up, and meandered over to the woman. I asked, “Do you mind if I join you?”
The woman gazed up at me. Up close, the bags under her eyes were a light gray. She moved around her salad with her fork and said, “Uh, okay.”
She was maybe in her late forties and had an unmistakable aura of owning three or more cats.
“I’m Thomas,” I said, taking the seat next to her.
“Sheila,” she said, more to her salad than to me.
