For twenty-six years, we were told the debate was settled. The science said glyphosate was safe.
That study was retracted.
When I saw the news, I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t even surprised. During the research for our documentary film, we uncovered evidence that Monsanto engaged in ghostwriting — hiring external writers or using internal staff to produce scientific reports that were then signed by independent researchers to make them appear unbiased. What looked like independent science was, in some cases, manufactured consensus. Courts and investigative journalists have since documented this practice extensively. The retraction didn’t reveal something new. It confirmed what the paper trail had already shown.
If anything, it reaffirmed what I’ve always believed when it comes to food safety: the precautionary principle matters. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for consensus when the price of being wrong could be our lives.
The Backdrop
Throughout the early 2000s, glyphosate became the most widely used crop protection chemical in the United States — roughly 280 million pounds applied annually across hundreds of millions of acres. The majority was sprayed on genetically engineered commodity crops: soy, corn, and canola, the building blocks of ultra-processed food. It also entered the food supply as a pre-harvest drying agent on wheat, and on conventional fruits and vegetables.
Most consumers never heard about it. Those who asked questions were told it was safe. The science was settled. The skeptics were fringe.
Meanwhile, rates of certain chronic conditions continued climbing. The dots were there. No one was connecting them publicly.
When It Became Personal
In 2012, this stopped being an abstract policy debate. We were dealing with multiple chronic health conditions in our home. We exercised. We cooked from scratch. We followed conventional medical advice. And still — we were not getting better.
So we started asking harder questions about what our food had been exposed to before it reached our table. We removed the crops most heavily sprayed with glyphosate — soy, corn, canola, conventionally desiccated wheat. We eliminated pesticides from our home and garden. Eventually, we went fully organic. The improvements were undeniable.
I wrote about that experience in my first book that year. It wasn’t activism. It wasn’t politics. It was survival — and curiosity.
The Illusion of Participation (2016)
By 2016, our private choices had expanded into public advocacy. Rhode Island introduced House Bill H7255, which would have required labels stating ‘produced with genetic engineering’ on food packaging. The goal was simple: consumers have a right to know what’s in their food.
I sat in those Senate hearings believing I was making a difference. I shared photos of my son’s body covered in rashes — conditions I believed were linked to glyphosate exposure. I spoke vulnerably about our family’s health crisis. There seemed to be genuine interest in our testimony.
And then I watched corporate lobbyists slip behind closed doors. When they emerged, the votes followed.
The hearing had been largely performative — a stage set to absorb public energy. The real decisions were happening elsewhere, without the constituents who would bear the consequences.
Shortly after, Congress passed the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard in July 2016, preempting stronger state-level labeling efforts nationwide. That was a turning point — not into despair, but into clarity. If the system wouldn’t prioritize precaution, families would need to build their own.
Corporate Consolidation and Legal Fallout
In 2018, Bayer acquired Monsanto, inheriting a growing mountain of litigation over glyphosate-based herbicides and cancer claims. Since then, billions of dollars have been paid in settlements and jury verdicts. The company maintains its products do not cause cancer. Approximately 180,000 lawsuits alleging a link to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma tell a different story about what families have experienced.
Around the same time, we released a documentary exploring hidden ingredients in our food system and their potential links to chronic illness — obesity, infertility, digestive disorders, anxiety, fatigue. Our story was not unique. What we had witnessed in our home was happening quietly in thousands of others.
Beyond Personal Health: The Environmental Dimension
This conversation has never been solely about individual health. Glyphosate and related herbicides affect soil biology, water systems, pollinators, and surrounding ecosystems — in ways science is still working to fully characterize.
When chemical production scales, communities near manufacturing facilities absorb costs that never appear on a product label: air emissions, volatile organic compounds, long-term environmental exposure. These don’t affect quarterly earnings. They do affect the children who grow up nearby.
Legally, cases have reached the Supreme Court, which has been asked to decide whether federal pesticide approvals override state-level failure-to-warn claims. The outcome will shape what families are permitted to know — and what companies are permitted to keep quiet.
National Security and New Complexity
In February 2026, the EPA re-approved dicamba-based herbicides following prior court restrictions — and the decision is worth pausing on. Since dicamba’s first approval in 2016, drift from its application has damaged millions of acres of farmland and caused devastating losses to orchards, vegetable farms, home gardens, native plants, trees, and wildlife refuges across the country. Experts have described dicamba drift damage as the worst of any pesticide in the history of U.S. agriculture.
Shortly after, an executive order expanded domestic production of glyphosate-based herbicides and elemental phosphorus under the Defense Production Act, framed as a matter of food-supply security and national interest. The order included legal immunity protections for domestic producers in compliance with it.
The question is no longer only: Is it safe? It is also: Who gets to decide? And who carries the risk when the answer turns out to be wrong?
What’s telling is what the order didn’t include. There was no accompanying disclosure that glyphosate-based herbicides have been linked to cancer and other serious health conditions in multiple independent studies — and classified as a probable human carcinogen by the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm. The American people deserved that transparency. Its absence was not an oversight.
The framing itself warrants scrutiny. Elemental phosphorus is used not only in glyphosate production but in military defense applications. Positioning its expansion as essential to national security — while a ‘Make America Healthy Again’ banner flies overhead — is a contradiction worth sitting with. These slogans can pave the way for what they claim to fight against. We have seen this before: wellness language deployed to manufacture consent, to make an industry decision feel like a public health victory. Secretary Kennedy called the order something that ‘puts America first where it matters most — our defense readiness and our food supply.’ But an order that expands production of a chemical linked to cancer, with no exit strategy and no acknowledgment of its environmental costs, does not put American health first.
There is no mention of soil health, wildlife, or any long-term plan to reduce dependence on herbicides that compromise the ecological systems our food supply depends on. That silence is particularly disrespectful to the farmers — hardworking, multigenerational operations — who have spent years transitioning to regenerative practices, protecting water sources, preserving habitats, and producing food that doesn’t cost the land its future. Their work represents the actual path forward for American food security. It deserved to be acknowledged. It wasn’t.
For those of us who have followed this issue across administrations and campaign slogans, the pattern is familiar. The names change. The urgency shifts. The playbook doesn't.
What Remains
Science evolves. That is its strength. But while it evolves, families are living in real time. We don’t get to rewind exposure. We don’t get to redo decades.
That is a grief worth sitting with.
Not because it leads to despair — but because it leads to clarity. The kind that doesn’t come from a headline or a retraction or a political moment. The kind that was always available at your own table, in your own kitchen, in the quiet act of paying closer attention to what you feed the people you love.
That is where this started for us. And that is where it lives — not in the noise of who’s right or who won, but in the daily, unglamorous, enormously important choice to come home to your own discernment.
This is not a new challenge. We are not starting from zero. And if you feel frustrated, you are not alone.
