It is clear that rogue economic systems can result in toxic results for the people subject to those systems. I am reminded of the story of King Midas who wished that all that he touched would turn to gold. I think this story “How Corporations Are Secretly Poisoning Our Food Supply” at https://youtu.be/Y0lsLnXX4U8 exemplifies that cautionary tale.
Institutions like Tharaka Invention Academy (TIA) have a crucial and potentially saving role to play in addressing crises like PFAS contamination and the broader consequences of rogue economic systems. While TIA may not yet have the scale of a global regulatory body or the enforcement power of a national government, its position as a grassroots, Afrocentric, innovation-focused learning institution gives it a uniquely powerful set of tools to intervene where conventional systems have failed.
Here’s why TIA matters now more than ever:
1. Cultivating the Right Mindset
TIA is not simply teaching technical skills—it is cultivating a generation of ethical innovators. The PFAS crisis didn’t emerge from ignorance alone—it emerged from a failure of values: a system that prioritized profit over human and environmental health. TIA, by embedding African cosmology, sustainability, and community responsibility into its curriculum, nurtures inventors who ask not just “Can I build this?” but also “Should I?” That moral inquiry is essential if we are to break the cycle of toxic invention.
2. Empowering Community-Led Science
In the PFAS story, the silence and suffering of local farmers and residents persisted because they lacked the scientific knowledge and tools to test, analyze, and communicate the dangers they faced. TIA can change that by democratizing access to environmental science, chemistry, and AI-powered diagnostics, allowing young innovators to monitor and respond to toxic threats in their own regions, in their own languages, with their own leadership. Knowledge becomes power—literally life-saving power.
3. Designing Locally Appropriate Solutions
TIA trains young people not just to understand global challenges, but to build locally-relevant, resource-sensitive innovations. For example, a TIA graduate might design a decentralized biosensor to detect PFAS in well water, or create a charcoal-based soil amendment to adsorb contaminants in farmland. These kinds of practical, affordable interventions—often overlooked by Western systems—can only emerge from institutions rooted in local realities.
4. Resisting Neocolonial Technologies
One of the hidden dangers in today’s crisis landscape is the flood of “solutions” imported from abroad that reinforce dependence and disempowerment. TIA, by contrast, is grounded in technological sovereignty. Its mission aligns with helping the Global South move from being test subjects and dumping grounds to being architects of their own future. This includes questioning whose chemicals we use, whose technology we import, and who controls the flow of knowledge.
5. Creating Platforms for Advocacy and Policy Change
Institutions like TIA can serve as incubators for thought leadership that influence national and international policy. Just as Rob Bilott used the courts, TIA-trained youth can use data, AI modeling, community testimony, and creative media (comics, video, animation) to tell their own stories, present evidence, and press for change. The youth of Africa can become a powerful voice in reshaping global conversations around health, safety, and accountability.
6. Building Intergenerational Bridges
TIA is already a space where elders’ wisdom meets modern science, where African cosmological grounding informs cutting-edge problem-solving. This makes it ideal for reimagining development in a way that honors the resilience and insight of rural communities while still embracing future-facing technologies. This is exactly the kind of holistic approach that the PFAS crisis—and crises like it—require.
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In short, TIA is a blueprint for the kind of institutional shift the world needs. It teaches not just how to build, but how to care. Not just how to solve problems, but how not to create them in the first place. In a world poisoned by the golden touch of unchecked industrialism, TIA’s role may not be to reverse the damage alone—but it can raise the generation that will.
And that, more than any chemical ban or lawsuit settlement, is the long-term antidote.
I believe comparison between the myth of King Midas and the ongoing PFAS contamination crisis in America is both apt and illuminating. The Midas story, in which a king’s greedy wish to turn everything he touches into gold ultimately leads to the destruction of his family and his own humanity, is a parable about unchecked desire for wealth without wisdom or foresight. It’s a cautionary tale that resonates powerfully when set against the backdrop of real-world industrial greed and the long-term suffering it inflicts.
In the dialogue you provided, the PFAS crisis embodies the modern Midas tragedy. Corporations, like DuPont and 3M, pursued technological marvels like Teflon and chemical repellents that made consumer products “better”—nonstick, waterproof, stain-resistant. Like Midas’ golden touch, these inventions were celebrated as signs of power, progress, and profit. But hidden behind that shine was a deadly truth: the chemicals were toxic, persistent, and irreversible. And those who created and benefited from this “golden touch” knew about the danger but chose silence. That silence condemned others—especially farmers, families, and everyday citizens—to poisoned water, ruined health, broken livelihoods, and generational trauma.
Jason Grostic’s story is especially heartbreaking. Like Midas, he built something meaningful with his hands—his farm, his legacy, his family’s future. But all of it was destroyed not by his own greed, but by the system’s. His soil, animals, and family were touched not by gold, but by a chemical that cannot be undone. He is left holding the symbolic golden carcass of a farm that once nourished life but now brings only grief and decay.
The dialogue illustrates that the PFAS crisis is not merely an environmental disaster—it is a moral and systemic failure. Industry lobbyists continue to act as modern-day alchemists, spinning tales of “essential” uses for chemicals while quietly ensuring that the suffering of victims like Jason and Cindy remains invisible to lawmakers and the public. Just as Midas’s wish ultimately threatened the very people he loved, these decisions have embedded toxicity into the most intimate parts of life: breast milk, drinking water, family meals, and the very land we walk on.
In both stories, the moral is stark: when power is used without accountability, and when wealth is pursued without wisdom, the cost is borne not just by the individual but by entire communities, ecosystems, and generations. The myth of Midas ends with the king begging to have his gift taken away. The PFAS story has no such mythical resolution. But like Cindy Boyle, many are refusing to leave this problem for their children. They are fighting back—calling for legislation, demanding justice, and naming the truth.
In this way, the PFAS crisis is our real-world Midas curse—and whether we remain poisoned by gold or begin to reclaim the land with truth and collective action will define not only the future of farming, but the future of life itself.
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