Eva Dale 0:00 From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new now. David Staley 0:32 I am pleased to welcome Bart Elmore to the studio today. Dr. Elmore is an Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. He is a core faculty member of the Sustainability Institute here at OSU, and is the Editor of the "Histories of Capitalism and the Environment" series from the West Virginia University Press. His first book was titled "Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca Cola Capitalism", and he is currently completing a manuscript that details the international ecological history of the Monsanto company, both of which we will discuss today. Welcome to Voices, Dr. Elmore. Bart Elmore 1:07 Thank you so much. It's great to be with a good friend and someone I admire. David Staley 1:11 Likewise. So, let's start with "Citizen Coke", which is described as an environmental history of the Coca Cola corporation. So, describe what we mean by an environmental history as opposed to say, a business history or some other kind of history. Bart Elmore 1:23 I mean, it's a great question, because I didn't even know it existed. When I went to graduate school, I went off to study with a friend of ours at Ayers, who was a southern historian, he studied the history of the American South, at the University of Virginia. And I didn't even know there was a field called environmental history. And it was in my second year that I took a class that introduced me to the field. And basically, it's pretty simple. It's kind of a fusion of environmental science with history. And the interesting questions that we're focused on are, well, how does nature actually shape the course of human events? And also, how do humans, you know, affect our natural environment over time? And with all these big questions like climate change, and big issues about water resource management on the horizon today, the question is, how can historians weigh in on those questions to actually make a difference in the world? So in to your question about Coke, the story there was, I was studying with his great southern historian errors, you can't abandoned legends in the field. So I've had to think, Okay, what's a southern product that's had a big environmental impact, and Krispy Kreme donuts Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, certainly on certain members of my family, including myself, and but it really was this moment of what would be that Southern entity? That's how does, and I have to say, conventionally I thought, tobacco, or even cotton. And then I think we saw coke cannon on a desk and said, There it is, you know, I grew up in Atlanta, the home of Coca Cola, said, here's a company that operates in over 190 countries worldwide, 1.9 billion servings of its product every single day, right, every day, every day. So the idea was, let's look at the environmental impact of this firm from top to bottom. David Staley 3:05 And so what does that mean? What sorts of things did you discover about Coca Cola from this vantage point? Bart Elmore 3:10 Right. So, almost anyone who had written about Coca Cola, their main focus, up to the writing of this book had been on kind of marketing and advertising, right, that what made Coke great, was those cuddly polar bears, and you know, smiling GI and Santa Claus. And while that's all true, if you don't have a real thing on a shelf, and it was called the real thing, right, you can't be this big business that they are. So, my question was great, the advertising is certainly powerful. But how did they get the stuff they needed to be everywhere? How did they get the stuff at such low cost, that they could be on shelves and 190 countries worldwide? David Staley 3:50 The stuff, the ingredients? Bart Elmore 3:52 The ingredients. And so I was a very, I was a very lazy graduate student, so I chose a simple organizational scheme to tell the story. I just ripped the back of the Coke Can, the ingredient list, and made that my table of contents, right, so the idea was, let's look at each of these ingredients and go through it, you know, caffeine, where does Coke's caffeine come from? David Staley 4:14 I have no idea, where does...? Bart Elmore 4:15 Right? If you had to take a guest with a natural resource, right, what would be the first thing you think of, because this is what I had to do. David Staley 4:21 I associate caffeine with coffee, I guess. Bart Elmore 4:23 Coffee, and that's what I thought at first is it's got to be coffee. And just to tease this, this is what's fun about environmental history, right, you start out and this stuff is just unexplored, you know, well, they just had caffeine. Well, where did they get it? And it turns out, it was from a small company called Monsanto, and it was actually waste tea leaves. So, originally, it would have been tea leaves that were left on the floor of tea exchanges around the world, damaged, broken dusty, who wants that stuff, right? It's trash. And the idea was Monsanto could sweep up this waste, recycling in a way, right, and take this garbage that was, you know, not very expensive, and process out the caffeine and sell it to Coca Cola. Now, just to finish that point, in the 1950s, Coke needed more caffeine. They've grown so big and decaf coffee had emerged by that point for that time who drinks decaf coffee, right, the whole point is to drink the caffeine. And so, this decaf market, you know, if you've ever wondered, where did all that caffeine go, it started going into the soft drink industry. And then finally, that's what's fun, the story never ends, you just you're tracing it over time. So it changes, you know, it's first waste tea leaves, then they're getting it from decaf coffee, and by the end of the 20th century, they realize you know, what we can make this stuff synthesizes synthetically, and the original company that worked on that was Monsanto again. And it was coal tar, of course, which was the original natural resource, they were processing out urea from this black tar from coal, methylating it, and turning it into caffeine, synthetic caffeine. Now if you go to Coke's website today, they'll say we source our caffeine from tea leaves, so, these waste tea leaf products, coffee beans, so, decaf coffee industry, and appropriate sources. So, there you go, the appropriate sources is fossil fuels. David Staley 6:14 Hides a lot, doesn't it. Bart Elmore 6:15 That's right, exactly. So, I think that was what was fun, right? This is what gets us excited as environmental historians. We're going on journeys that take us around the world, through time to look at things we know, we think we know, but to really get on the ground level of how we make the stuff that makes the modern world. David Staley 6:32 What were the other ingredients or other chapters? Bart Elmore 6:34 So, you know, I could have chosen over a dozen secret ingredients, natural flavors, that's one category on that ingredient list, but I just chose one to focus on so I could get my dissertation done. That's important, I think. So I focused on the coca leaf because of its association with the name. And I think what's most exciting there is that the coca leaf remained in the drink up until the 21st century to today. David Staley 6:58 Really? Bart Elmore 6:59 Yeah. Now most people will say, Well, wait a minute, am I drinking cocaine? And the answer is no. Around 1903, Coca Cola made the decision to work with a company called Maywood Chemical Company in New Jersey, and what they wanted to do was process out the cocaine from the coca leaf, which comes from the Andes, from Peru, that was their main source, Coca Cola source of their coca leaf. And the idea in 1903, was to remove the cocaine from the coca leaf, and then use the leftover flavor. Essence of the coca leaf in their coca cola drink, this is the part Coke doesn't like but this is part of their secret formula, it's flavor number five, and it's de coca-nized coca leaf extract. David Staley 7:47 That's what it's actually called? Bart Elmore 7:47 That's what it is. And one time somebody said, Well, what happened all the cocaine, and I used to joke to the students say, well, they sold it on the black market. But the truth is all overseen by the federal government, and this is what's fun, again, about history. This is all in declassified documents that have recently been released or last several decades, at the National Archives that reveal this incredible trade. Most of us have no idea what's going on, but Coke had this special exemption under our laws to do this trade with these Peruvian coca farmers, and the federal government could oversee it most of that cocaine ended up in hospitals for legitimate medicinal uses, can be used, obviously, stimulant, but I think for eye surgeries, it can be used as an anesthetic, pretty remarkable story of how this stuff ends up in kind of hospitals and things like that. Now, there was so much coca leaf that they needed, that they're actually producing more cocaine than was needed for that industry. So, those leaves under our federal laws are regarded as special leaves, and they're special because they're basically reserved just for Coke. And under the law, the cocaine that's produced as a byproduct of those special leaves has to be destroyed. Did they burn it, I'm not quite sure, and one of the things we're trying to investigate and we're working on a documentary is to see, let's go see what's going on. Where did... what did they actually do, right, with this cocaine from these special leaves? David Staley 9:07 So, I know that for part of this research, a good chunk of this research, you were using archives from Coca Cola Company archives, and the book has won awards, well deserved awards. What was the response of Coca Cola, the company, to your book? Bart Elmore 9:21 Right. You know, it's on the back of my paperback from Coca Cola's archivist Ted Ryan, it says, you know, this book lacks complete understanding of Coke's present and past. It's not a singing, you know, ringing endorsement of the book. You know, of course, the Wall Street Journal had said something that said, you know, Coke will probably not like this book. And I should say that I never, I mean, look, I grew up in Atlanta, you know, and I think one of the things about being a good historian and you know, from your work you feel this way, too, is to give people their full range of human emotions, to not treat these characters in the story as bad people, and I never really set out to do that. Paul Austin, president of Coca Cola is a great example, in the 1960s, and 70s. You know, I got to read all of his letters and get to know him; I actually think he cared about the environment. You know, he goes on to help push for the plastic bottle, which is causing all these problems today, but I think, you know, he really believed in trying to do the right thing. And so, that makes for a much better story, in my opinion, that if you just have bad guys who are doing bad things in history, well, then we in our present day will just say, Well, I'm not a bad person, so I wouldn't do those things. It's much better to learn from the past and say, Ooh, how do good people end up in these situations where they make these decisions that have these long lasting environmental effects that they may never have seen coming? So, yeah, I mean, and that's what I detail in the book, that there are these kind of big footprints that Coca Cola has, and I think that's the side of the story. And also the secret ingredients, they do not like talking about their relationship with the coca leaf. It is one of the more you know, scary topics for them because of its association with cocaine, even though the coca leaf and cocaine, you know, really are two different things. You know, one is a mild stimulant, if you have it as a tea and you can have it in Peru, the other in purified form, you know, street powder cocaine, yeah, that's, you know, can be very problematic. So, so actually, I think there could be a great conversation Coke could be a part of, of re valorizing the coca leaf, because we basically cut off the trade for the coca leaf coming out of Peru, for most purposes, and farmers who I talked to, and people that represented the farmers, I should say, in Peru would tell you that they would love to re valorize the coca leaf right? And yet, Coke fought very hard to limit access to the coca leaf, to ban the sales of coca leaf around the world, because it gave them a monopsony, right? Define monopsony for us. Exactly, single buyer access to an ingredient or raw material, unlike a monopoly, you know, where do you own all this stuff, and you're kind of the only seller of something, monopsony is kind of the single buyer access to something. And so, I think in that case, you know, we just see this remarkable story of Coke being connected to this global trade, and really quashing the sale of coca leaf around the world, which has huge effects on these farmers. So to your point, to bring it back, I mean, these are the things I think Coke gets frustrated with with the book is that, you know, it's clear as day in the archives, but it's something that doesn't go with Santa Claus and cuddly polar bears, right? David Staley 12:31 Well, speaking of getting the ire of a company up, your next book is "Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and the Future of Food". So what now you're going after Monsanto? Bart Elmore 12:41 And again, going after, right? It's a relative term. But I think, you know, obviously, for me, what got me excited about Monsanto was that I found that they were the supplier of Coca Cola, and honestly, if you go to their website to Monsanto's website, you'll see that they would say, we would not exist were it not for these early contracts from Coca Cola. And just for those folks who might not know who Monsanto is or what they do? Well, they don't exist anymore. David Staley 13:04 That's right, yes. Bart Elmore 13:05 They've been bought out by a German company, Bayer, although in the United States, we call them Bayer, but it's actually by "Bye-er". David Staley 13:11 Like Bayer apsirin. Bart Elmore 13:13 Exactly. Chris Reid down the hall inour history department told me, so now you can actually write about them, Bart, because they're history, which I think was great. So yeah, basically, they're one of the largest genetically engineered seed sellers in the world, they really revolutionized this genetically modified food system that we have today and became one of the biggest players in that world, largely because of another blockbuster product they had, which is Round Up, this huge herbicide that made billions of dollars for the company, and revolutionized really our agricultural system, but now is in the headlines, because there's suggestions that it may be linked to cancer. And so, this has taken me all over the place, to Brazil to Vietnam. Monsanto was one of the producers of Agent Orange. In fact, by volume, they were the largest producer of Agent Orange by volume used during the Vietnam War, used during the Vietnam War as a defoliant to try and you know, expose enemy troops in these dense jungles of Vietnam, but we still are seeing the lasting effects there. I think what's interesting about this story is it's taken me around the world and this past is still very present. We're just beginning in many places to clean up the dioxin, which is the contaminant in Agent Orange that was sprayed and used in Vietnam. So, I actually went to places where we're cleaning this stuff up now, and you can think the Vietnam War decades ago. It's a very living history for me, lots of interviews with people trying to think about how the history actually informs our present day. David Staley 14:43 So when you say you're traveling around the world in support of this research, you're not necessarily going to archives. What are you doing when you're going to Brazil and these other places? Bart Elmore 14:50 Right, so a lot of it and Brazil, for example, is meeting with agricultural specialists and one of the great things we have here at Ohio State is the is incredible Brazil gateway program, and we have gateways in other countries, I'm gonna say, India? David Staley 15:07 India and China. Bart Elmore 15:07 And China. And it's known... David Staley 15:09 Mumbai and Shanghai. Bart Elmore 15:10 Shanghai, and it's like these embassies, for Ohio State, it was incredible. I came from another university that had a good football program, so I won't mention their name, but when I came here, it was one of the biggest things that I noticed was a huge difference. When I started doing these international trips, I had these gateways that could say, look, what do you need, do you need a driver, do you need someone that can translate, oh look, we have contacts at this university, people that can you know, connect you with all these different folks. So, that was incredible. In Brazil, I was basically going around in these big trucks with people who were Ohio State affiliated agricultural scientists who were linking me in to Embrapa, which is their big government state research Agricultural Research Institute. And, you know, going into fields, we're heading out these massive soybean fields and being able to talk about the specifics of the science in those locations. So, incredible stuff in Vietnam. It was a mixture, it was really remarkable journey, meeting veterans, US veterans who are now living in Hanoi and other cities, who are part of this cleanup effort in going back years later and saying, What can we do to change these situations, meeting with Vietnamese citizens who've been affected by Agent Orange meaning with USAID, an agency government agency that's been involved in trying to restore relationships with the Vietnamese people, after this war and kind of doing a lot of these cleanup projects. But most importantly, I think this is one thing I want to say about being a writer. I think it's critical that if you're going to write about a place, you go there, you know, and I think it's amazing what happens when you just show up. There's one story on this is important. So, this also includes like knocking on the doors of these corporate headquarters in these places, and just seeing what happens now my blood pressure goes up about 100 points. Now I bring a filmmaker with me, someone to document what's happening so that no matter what happens, we have kind of a record of those situations. And so, I'll tell you the story. Recently, in Brazil, we tried to get into the headquarters of Monsanto, there's no trespassing involved, there's no violation of laws, I don't want to end up in jail, but the idea is you go and knock on doors and see what happens. And, you know, we're coming up this escalator, it kind of felt like, you know, that Donald Trump scene, you know, he's filming me, as I'm kind of coming up this elevator, just to see what happens, you know, we go up to the front desk, and of course, get kind of turned away, you know, thanks for coming, but no dice. And so, we go outside, and we're just getting shots. It's amazing what you see what you understand about a firm by just paying attention to the building, we were actually in a coffee area, and some people were talking about business deals and things that we're trying to just get a sense of what's going on, there's so much in those spaces that you can actually mine as a scholar, right? And we're sitting out there, and these people come over to us and say, Hey, you guys speak English? You know, what are you doing? And we're just talking to them, I said, Where are you guys work? Monsanto? And they said, Well, let's go have drinks tonight, you know, and so amazingly, out of that one, just chance showing up, you know, I got this incredible kind of insights to various things, by running into these people who heard us talking outside, but you could say that was a plant and maybe. And, you know, part of it is trying to figure out how do we assess the validity of these oral histories we do, but it was a really pretty remarkable moment. Eva Dale 18:36 Did you know that 23 programs in the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences are nationally ranked as top 25 programs, with more than 10 of them in the top 10? That's why we say the College of Arts and Sciences is the intellectual and academic core of the Ohio State University. Learn more about the college at artsandsciences.osu.edu. David Staley 19:00 I know you're still working on the book, it's due out in 2020. So, what conclusions are you going to draw in "Seed Money" about the environmental history of Monsanto? Bart Elmore 19:09 I think there's several, and I'll maybe save some for when the book comes out. David Staley 19:12 Fair enough. Bart Elmore 19:13 But I think the couple that come to mind would be, one of the themes that goes back all the way to the founding of the company in 1901 is kind of, we're a company of liberation. David Staley 19:25 Liberation. Bart Elmore 19:25 Yeah, if you think about it, the chemical industry in the United States was always kind of beholden to German interests and European manufacturers for getting their stuff, and it really wasn't until World War One where trade was being cut off, that companies like Monsanto could kind of flourish because the US needed chemicals and now they couldn't get it from Europe, and so they kind of expand. So, the language is always about kind of freedom, like support us, you know, provide tariffs for us because we will allow the US to not have this kind of servant relationship to these European providers, and that continues, I think into the era of genetically engineered seeds, RoundUp Ready seeds, these seeds that were engineered to be resistant to Monsanto's herbicide RoundUp. It took over our agricultural system today, you know, something like 90% of all soy and corn produced in the United States are glyphosate resistant, you know, genetically engineered crops. That's incredible, and you can understand these were introduced for the first time in 1995. So that change was like, overnight, right? And it was pitched under this argument of liberation, we're freeing you from, you know, this concern about these weeds, and it worked remarkably well. The reason it took off was because people were seeing clean fields, you know, for acres and acres, wow, you can now just spray RoundUp on your crops, it'll kill almost anything else, but your crops are resistant to this stuff, so it just grows beautiful stuff. The problem was, we use so much of it, and it kind of just doused the American countryside, that we started seeing a lot of weed resistance. And that's what we're dealing with today, we're actually seeing these weeds nature, you know, finds a way to fight back. And so interesting, what's the solution? Buy a new seed, right, buy a new seed from us, right, that is not only RoundUp Ready resistant, but also Dicamba resistant, and Dicamba is this old chemical that goes back to the 1960s that's being pitched as the new solution to a problem that was created by the overuse of this product from the company itself. And so, I think, to your point, one of the things I'm going to try and show in the book is that is this liberation, you know, is this freedom, or is this something else, and are we actually seeing a system that's not designed to fix solutions, but is this a system about selling problems, right, and then fixing those problems? So we'll see how it pans out. David Staley 22:06 So, I don't want to mischaracterize here, but you seem to be as much an activist as much as a scholar. Is that a fair characterization? Bart Elmore 22:16 Yeah. David Staley 22:16 What does that mean to you, then? Bart Elmore 22:17 I think in history, we should be specific,. David Staley 22:20 Fair enough. Bart Elmore 22:20 You know that, and I think you'd agree with this, activist is seen as a, you know, a dirty word, because it implies a lack of objectivity, and it implies that... David Staley 22:31 You have an agenda or something. Bart Elmore 22:32 An agenda. But I would argue that it's totally absurd to hold yourself out as this kind of objective purveyor of the world no matter what your background is, right? There's no doubt that as somebody growing up in the outdoors with a passion for the natural environment, that I was an environmentalist, and I still am, I don't feel like saying that should be some kind of ding for me, as a scholar. I do think we have to recognize that side of ourselves when we go into these locations, and we're writing about Monsanto, and we're writing about Coca Cola. And, again, it requires us to pay attention to the people we're writing about to get to know them, because the best way that we can steal ourselves from writing histories that mute their good qualities and only focus on the bad qualities. To give you an example of that, I'm going to St. Louis on Monday, and just to sit again, you k, I'm six years in, but to sit with the papers of Edgar Queenie, he was the son of the founder of Monsanto, John, Queenie, and he's got boxes and boxes of I know what type of Martini he likes. Okay, I know how he likes to fly. I know how he feels about the New Deal. I know how he feels about his father, that matters. And I think for me, I guess what I'm saying is, it matters for me, as somebody who knows that I'm coming into this as an environmentalist, and I have my own biases and everything else, to try and understand why it is that a person would do the things that they do. And I feel like once I know them, as well as I can through papers, and radio, whatever else I can find on these votes. My goal is to make the best effort to show them for their full range of human emotions that they have. David Staley 24:21 Well, then let me try another characterization then, because I know that you write for outlets like the Huffington Post, you've written for Salon, you've written for other sort of popular media outlets. Does this make you a public intellectual? Bart Elmore 24:34 Yes, although I always find it kind of weird that we say, and we were just talking about this recently among people in our department, public facing scholarship. I mean, if we turn that on its head, well, then what's the other type of scholarship? Right? It's solely for the consumption of people who got a PhD. Why is that valuable? It? I mean, I think you could are argue that all of our work to some degree is public facing. I think this is, you know, in our field especially we're breaking down these boundaries of it's been a slow process to get people to realize that, you know, writing for The Guardian recently, right? Were probably more eyeballs were on that page than we'll ever come close to reading citizen Coke or seed money. And if we're interested in being part of the conversation, which I think we should be, my those things don't get valued more, especially when it comes to tenure and promotion of these things. I don't know. And I hope to be a part of a new generation that says, let's rethink this, right, let's try and find ways to value these things. David Staley 25:42 I know you're finishing up one book, but I'm interested to know what's next for your research, anything on the horizon? Bart Elmore 25:47 So, this almost like a reveal right here, because as people know, I'm writing a book about Monsanto, but at the same time, I'm writing another book that's due almost at the same time, whether I can actually pull this off is... my wife says, there's no way, so but it's called "Country Capitalism", writing it with UNC press. And basically, it's a history of the American South and southern businesses that came out of the American South. That changed our globe. Environmentally. The idea behind this, Dave was that, you know, I grew up in Atlanta. And when I went to go study, Southern history, it was about cotton, tobacco, and all this and look, you know, I have farm and family, my dad saw the fence from Alabama, and no doubt, huge part of the Southern history. But when I was growing up, I was surrounded by CNN. You know, I'm surrounded by delta, the largest airline in the world coming in our airport, which is the busiest airport in the world. Coca Cola, right up the street, and Memphis was FedEx, which most people didn't know, Memphis, Tennessee, why are they there? Walmart, the largest corporation in the world started in Bentonville, Arkansas. And so I really think we haven't seen the ways in which the south. And as I'm marking in the book, the companies who figured out a way to service the country, right, to get goods to the country, who focused on this think of delta, you know, most people don't know that delta is named after the Mississippi Delta. Right? I knew that. Right? I mean, I mean, most people don't. And yet, it started as a crop dusting firm down in the Delta. And the idea was that it was trying to service those cotton farmers who are dealing with the boll weevil, right? And so interestingly, there, you've got this scenario where, wow, we're spraying over large areas, we're learning how to cover large territories. And also Wow, cotton, where else can you grow cotton? Well, and South America and other places, they start going international and start working in other places and learning the trade. Right? So I think we think of the country or rural America is kind of backward or almost kind of not at the forefront of American capitalism. I think if we look at Walmart, which only went into towns, originally, it was going into towns like 5000 people, and putting these huge discount stores, they knew that they could with interstate highways, create this incredible throughput in the heartland of America, that target and other companies didn't think was possible, right? So placing the South in the center of the story of American capitalism in a different way than we've done before, I think is important to understanding how capitalism really works. And also, last thing I'd say is, how do we fix some of its environmental problems? The South is largely seen as a colony, right is a place in southern history. It's where things came in, companies came in and did bad things in that location. I'm kind of arguing that the South was a conduit, that it created these conduits of capitalism, these incredible ways of creating these flows, FedEx, right, Delta moving people, FedEx moving packages, but across these large distances, and it's that distance economy, that large distance that we're traveling over, that we've really got to confront, right, because that's where these greenhouse gas issues are. That's where a lot of this kind of infrastructural issues are. And we're not focusing on that I think we're focusing on in our regulations still like smokestacks, instead of a Walmart, or in one of the chapters is actually Bank of America, which is, you know, one of the largest banks in the world. Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, started in California, part of it but nation's bank, it was from Charlotte, North Carolina gobbled up Bank of America, in California. And, again, there's a story there. It had everything to do with the rural character of North Carolina. So I think we really have to reimagine how the south plays in the story of American capitalism, not just because it's interesting, but because I think we can understand how the economy works. And then if we want to intervene and say, how do we fix environmental problems? If you put pressures on the conduits of capitalism, then we can really change things like climate change, I think we can address some of these big pollution issues. You cut off the supply You cut off the route the arteries of this economy, right or you find ways to regulate those things, then you've got a game changing decision that affects millions and millions of people. David Staley 30:10 Bart Elmore. Thank you. Bart Elmore 30:12 Thank you very much. Eva Dale 30:13 Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services Studio. Sound engineering by Scott Sprague, produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale. Transcribed by https://otter.ai