A Napa filmmaker looked and found Roundup, the weedkiller tied to cancer, ‘everywhere’
Early one winter morning, as Brian Lilla was riding his bike through Napa, California’s hills and meadows, he spotted farmworkers driving ATVs through rows of vines. They hauled huge canisters of the weedkiller Roundup. As the workers sprayed vines, a chemical smell shot through the air. … In Children of the Vine, the 54-year-old documentary filmmaker explores the use of glyphosate from the time Roundup hit the market in the 1970s to Monsanto’s creation of “Roundup Ready” genetically modified seeds in the 1990s to its present legal woes and shattered public trust. But even now, with at least 20 countries having banned or limited the use of the herbicide, Lilla was shocked to find out how ubiquitous the chemical is in our daily lives, and how trace amounts of glyphosate appears even in certified organic foods and wine (which by definition are grown without pesticides or herbicides).