Monsanto's Old Plantation Days
Stay Free! Magazine is always worth a read, and the current issue caught our eye with this ad. We forget that Monsanto was a chemical giant long before Round-Up and genetically modified crops.
Allison Xantha Miller's article on the history of plastics the current Stay Free! notes:
Plastics from cotton? The industry didn't always show
plastics futuristically. In some cases, like this 1939 ad from Monsanto,
it reassuringly tied plastics to nostalgia for America's agricultural
heritage and for a racial order in which African-Americans worked on farms
in the South. The ad speaks condescendingly of mysterious processes that
"create new materials from nature's crops," juxtaposing its knowingness
with the innocence and ignorance of children cavorting in the soft white
piles.
- 181 Food and Agriculture
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