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  • Konrad Werner: Who owns our broccoli?

Berlin

Konrad Werner: Who owns our broccoli?

Our favourite Bavarian consumer affairs minister, Ilse "I'm a ton of bricks, Facebook is a blind naked mole lying on the ground" Aigner has once again put her finger right on the day's hot button topic: who owns our broccoli? Who really owns it?

In case you didn’t know (what’s it like living under a pile of pebbles?) Ilse Aigner is Germany’s Food, Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Minister. I once mocked her for having too many remits in her job (it was a slow blogging week) but this week’s best news story – apart from the rabbit-phobe teacher – really delivered me a big deluxe box-set of comeuppance, with a bonus disc of facial egg. What’s the one thing that food, agriculture and consumer affairs have in common? That’s right – broccoli.

Aigner has, finally, spoken out against biological patents. (That’s a ‘t’ not an ‘r’ by the way. The human race is unfortunately not yet ready to face its evolutionary destiny and do away with the unnatural lie of sexual reproduction. One step at a time.)

Aigner, a former personal Facebook friend of mine, has come out against Plant Biosciences, a company that filed a patent for a strain of broccoli they had bred to be a cure for cancer. That patent is now being challenged by various people, including Aigner, at the European Patent Organisation, on the grounds that you can’t put a patent on a biological process.

“Cancer-curing broccoli is one thing, but what about the precedent? We can’t just have people going round patenting their cack every time they take a dump,” the outspoken minister said in an interview I am making up. “I mean – the patent files are full of enough shit as it is.” Budumm-TISSSSHHH!