Breakfast of Champions

The bitter taste of the world we've created

It was a muggy July morning and the sun was just rising over the corn and beans when I tasted it. I was on my bike, trying to beat the heat, trying to beat the sun, only to be hit with the bitter taste of reality.

There are many writers who have written, very well, about the smell that envelopes you in Iowa. Sometimes it’s the smell of manure, sometimes it’s the smell of fertilizer. For many ag execs, this is just the smell of money.

Seldom is anything written about the taste of these things. The taste of manure. The taste of fertilizer. The true cost of corporate profits.

Given the time of year and the crops in Iowa, the most likely taste on my palate was a pesticide.¹ I don’t know what different pesticides taste like, but the likely culprits are: dicamba, glyphosate (aka Roundup), or 2,4-D.

You’re really not supposed to be eating these.

In the Cedar Rapids Gazette this summer, Erin Jordan wrote about the Skalinski family of eastern Iowa, whose sunflowers, cherry tree, pear tree, and pine tree fell victim to dicamba that neighbors sprayed on their nearby alfalfa farm. Jordan reported that dicamba can drift for a mile of more.

These stories of beautiful trees with old roots falling victim to the chemicals we’ve created resonate with people. The image of leaves shriveling up from a reckless spraying a mile away on a windy day is horrific.

Horrific, too, are the health effects these pesticides wreak on the human body. In her piece, Jordan interviewed a man who was working on a road 50 feet away from where a crop-duster sprayed pesticides. The man said that “he could taste a funny taste in his mouth,” after.

The day Jordan’s article came out, I had just returned home to Iowa City after the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI). After multiple sleepless nights pushing my body to its limits every day, and inhaling pesticides, methane, and who knows what else, COVID-19 was having a heyday with my temporarily-immunocompromised body.

When I told some Midwesterners about this experience, that RAGBRAI was great, but the Iowa I smelled and tasted seemed harmful, I felt like I was betraying the state that built me.

Many smart people have said that the truest form of love is critique. That to ride the county highways and see beauty, but also destruction, may be necessary. To see intense agricultural production up close, outside of a car, with no shelter provided by window-panes and air-filters.

To smell it and see it, yes, but to also taste it. Swallow it. And have the feeling of sadness overcome you when you think about it entering your blood stream, attacking your cells, and maybe one day causing those cells to metastasize.

When we drive the county roads in Iowa, the 99% of us who do not farm are shielded from the worst of it. We haven’t even scratched the surface of the health effects suffered by the 1%.

Nothing is without consequence, and in Iowa, we’re seeing the consequences in the heath of our families and in our friends. Dicamba, glyphosate, and 2,4-D are all associated with causing cancer in the body. Iowa is the only state in the U.S. with rising cancer rates.

It’s now October and the bitterness lingers.

1. Fungicides, insecticides, herbicides and rodenticides are all pesticides because a “pest” can be a weed, an animal, or a fungus.