All your food is owned and locked up by major corporations under patent law, for profit purposes which are protected and in league with the government. I have a moral problem with it. Yeah it doesn't really impact me but it impacts poor Mexican farmers and a lot of people in the 3rd world.
The Plant Patent Act excludes "sexual and tuber-propagated plants" - basically, pretty much all the crops you have to replant each season aren't covered, though it does restrict the propagation of fruit trees and the like. Prior to GMOs, sexually-propagated crops like corn were covered by the Plant Variety Protection Act, which is much less restrictive than the utility patents on GMOs - for example, it allows farmers to save and replant seeds, which is illegal with GMOs.
To cut a long story short, plants were ineligible for utility patents (in the US at least) because they were considered "products of nature". However, the US Supreme Court decided that because GMOs existed, plants now count as something made by man rather than a product of nature and could be patented - including non-GMO ones produced using traditional breeding techniques that were previously not patentable. It's a strange decision and I'm not sure I follow their logic, but it's the law now.
The dystopian part of it, in "The Calorie Man," at least, is the implication that the global crop blight that wiped out all non-GMO crops was engineered and spread by the GMO companies, which then inherited near-total control over the economy and, thus, the government.
