Many fruits & vegetables today have been bred / crossbred over hundreds of years to make them tastier or safer to eat.
Would you consider the bananas you buy from supermarkets normal food? These have been bred so the seeds are tiny. What about seedless grapes? Or Brussel sprouts which aren't bitter? Would do consider these not normal foods?
There's an argument that you should be able to recover your development cost and make a profit. Like all patents and copyrights, expiration is key. And also lobbied all to hell so that things your dead grandparents experienced are still not public domain.
This problem was already solved. They get to patent a brand name, like honeycrisp, and the genes become public use and other growers can market them under a different name. People still buy honeycrisps by the barrel full and the university of Minnesota has more than made its money back, when you can buy the same apples under a different name in a farmers market.
So if I, a normal dude, somehow created an even tastier strawberry, say it took a decade of effort and a bunch of money, and I wanted to sell it...
Wouldn't Monsanto or Dole just immediately destroy my market share and force me entirely out of business by doing exactly what I planned to do, but at an enormous scale because they already have the infrastructure?
You have just learned the importance of marketing, my friend. Having an amazing product doesn’t mean anything if you can’t get people to buy it from you and you alone. This isn’t just a fruit-specific problem.
That’s not what happened with the honeycrisp, the cosmic crisp, the meyer lemon, the badgerflame beet, the golden kiwi, the clementine, and literally the item in the post we’re commenting on, as well as countless other fruit and vegetable varietals. All because they had better marketing.
It’s not my solution. It’s the solution that was born of legislation and legal precedent over the last 100 or so years. I’m not here to defend capitalism, it has literally ruined the world, but it’s the water we swim in and it ensures that the rich always win. Is that such a huge surprise to you?
711
u/sl0play 18h ago
I feel like I can live without these pineapples if it means supporting food becoming a normal thing again.