I won’t name names, not ever with letters provocatively reversed, but these verses of a haunting Bruce Cockburn song (full lyrics here) caught my attention as I listened to music while pushing my delightfully quiet Fiskars Momentum mower tonight:

Years ago when my brother was in India
A small town baker got a bright idea
He cut his flour with pesticide
and sent a bunch of neighbours on their longest journey
He was just being cheap -trying to make a profit
Didn’t even have shareholders to answer to

But it’s worth remembering, as we sell off the forest
gene-splice the world’s food into an instrument of control
maim and destroy as acts of theatre,
what came next –
That when the survivors looked around
and understood what had been done
they butchered
that baker

Snow swirls in the parking lot light like flour
like pesticide There’s a trade war brewing – or at least that’s the face they paint on it

But it’s only more transnational manipulation
It’s all bad magic and gangrene politics
Hormone disruptors and carcinogenetics
Greed twists eternal in the human breast
But the market has no brain
It doesn’t love it’s not God
All it knows is the price of lunch

“[G]ene-splice the world’s food into an instrument of control.” Sound like any companies you’ve heard of?