You should consider dropping that instinct. If you look into how corporations have behaved historically you'd assume evil until proven innocent. Especially US corps.

We need some more nuance here.

Companies are not evil, they are profit driven, and they make profit by responding to demand. If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good. I think it is too easy to blame them when ultimately, we are the one who support them.

In the case of farming, we want cheap food, and the way to make cheap food is intensive farming, with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. So, companies make pesticides, farmers use them, and we eat the cheap food. Because we recognize that some checks need to be put in place, we elect governments to regulate all that, and or vote goes to whoever makes the best balance between cheap food, taxes and subsidies, and general health and precautions. This is crucial because cheap food is a matter of survival to some.

So in the end, there are no "baddies", just a system that's not perfect. Also keep in mind that big corporation are made of a lot of people, you may be one of them. I am. Does it make us evil? Maybe a little, but I don't think any more than average, as middle-class, I even tend to think we define the average.

It is a consequence of our current model of living, where the only thing that matters is proffit.

Checking in from cancer alley!

There are refineries within a stone's throw from my house. One of them sits on the highest point in our water table and the vacuum it creates has been destroying our famously soft water by creating underground fault lines which pollute the aquifer with leeched hard minerals.

But hey, oil.

Seeing how much having an unlimited upside corrupts corporations seeded my first serious doubts about capitalism.

I used to be a proponent of the industrial agriculture, because technological progress of all kinds (genetics, chemicals, mechanisation) are the reason why food is now abundant.

But the massive disinformation campaigns and targeted harassment of researchers, as well as the outright corruption of science is where they lost me. Surely you wouldn't do things like that if you had clear consciousness.

> One example of them clearly being the baddies is them paying people to social media astroturf to defend the roundup pesticide online [2].

It certainly looks bad but I'm not sure the logic really follows.

It's just modern PR. Companies used to just do that by having good relationships with journalist but now social media has taken a lot of that role away. It's a fairly natural transition for companies to make and I'd be surprised if you couldn't find a lot of major corporations that don't do something similar.

And, also, it doesn't necessarily follow that they are either willingly lying or that their products are unsafe.