By moveforchangebkculturejam
Filmed July 14, 2013, 5:40pm, Brooklyn Arts Exchange.
A play about mud, seeds, dirt, and Monsanto.
Directed by Dan Kinch, with Kathleen Stansell as Vandana.
It was during the late 1990′s that I first heard the phrase biopiracy and the woman talking about it was Vandana Shiva, a food and human rights activist from India. Shiva and others like her have been calling out Monsanto and other US multinationals for years over issues about patenting Indian plants like Neem and Basmati Rice. there was also widespread concern about Monsanto’s re-engineering of the genes in common agricultural products such as rice and tomatoes. So it was in the 1990′s that an intrepid group of troublemakers called the Biotic Baking Brigade staged a pie attack on Monsanto’s CEO Robert Shapiro to protest genetically engineered foodstuffs.
So in the 1990′s, I wrote a play about the attack. I gave it the title A GOOD DAY 2 PIE because that seemed in the anarchic spirit of the Bakers, and it harkens back to the struggles of the Lakota and other native people against the White men taking their land. It’s about taking on an uphill task at the point of personal hardship or even death.
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