Blog – Page 22

Twice as Much Food

December 11, 2014 by Kate Zurschmeide

Three take-aways from the Intelligence Squared debate on GMOs:

Robert Fraley

1. Thirty-six years from now, we’re going to need twice as much food as we produce today, Robert Fraley said, repeatedly. That sobering projection comes from an article by Jonathan Foley called “A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World,” which is part of a recent National Geographic series called “The Future of Food.” Fraley, who is Monsanto’s Chief Technology Officer and thus has much to gain from the success of genetic modification, agreed with Foley’s assertion that the either/or approach to the biotechnology debate will lead to mass starvation.

“Those who favor conventional agriculture talk about how modern mechanization, irrigation, fertilizers, and improved genetics can increase yields to help meet demand. And they’re right,” Foley asserts. “Meanwhile proponents of local and organic farms counter that the world’s small farmers could increase yields plenty—and help themselves out of poverty—by adopting techniques that improve fertility without synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. They’re right too.”

From National Geographic’s series “The Future of Food”

To feed the nine billion people who will live on Earth in 2050, Foley suggests, we have to stop trying to prove that one of those rights is wrong. And to his credit, Fraley agrees. That’s good common sense.

Charles Benbrook

2. Charles Benbrook pointed out that some GMOs, such as Bt corn, are already in their fourth or fifth generation, meaning that before enough time has passed to measure long-term effects of a particular modification, it has already been amended three or four times, which means any results available now are irrelevant because the current products are no longer the ones that were studied.

“None of the GE corns that have been on the market have had a dominant position for more than five or six years,” Benbrook said. “So, we are moving from one generation of GE crops to the next to the next before we’ve even begun to understand what the impacts of the first ones are. So, I would like to have the ability to at least do two crop rotation cycles, which might be six or eight years, to see how the farming system has responded, but in that time period, just that time period, the technology has changed. So, you never really get a handle on what has happened.”

3. Half the people in the audience changed their mind about the issue during the course of the debate. Intelligence Squared functions like an egg-head version of American Idol: audience members and the remote audience watching at home get to register their position once at the start of the show and again at the end. It’s a way to judge who won. In this case the winner was clear: 32% of voters favored GMOs before the debate, and afterwards that number jumped to 60%, with most of the converts coming from the undecided camp.

Alison Van Eenennaam

If I had seen the event live, I would have been one of those vote-changers, for two reasons: because, like Foley and Fraley, I think the world needs a variety of food-production methods, not just one. I realize that one argument against GMOs is that they may effectively foreclose on their competition, which is one of the reasons I still distrust the genetic modification movement; but Fraley and his partner Alison Van Eenennaam seemed less dogmatically entrenched than Benbrook and Margaret Mellon. And also because the pro-GMO team was better prepared for the contest. Both of them spoke in long, free-flowing sentences which created the impression that they had thought about their position thoroughly enough to see how different pieces of information connected to each other. Benbrook and Mellon, on the other hand, often spoke haltingly, as if their thoughts resembled the bent scraps of paper that Mellon fingered on the table in front of her.

Margaret Mellon

I guess presentation makes a difference.

A Civil Discussion about GMOs?

December 10, 2014 by Kate Zurschmeide

“Nature has many unknowns,” said the well-combed man in the black glasses and the avocado/boysenberry tie, “but one certainty is that tomatoes and fish do not have sex with each other.”

He paused to let me digest that statement. Then he said, “They never have.”

If that doesn’t make you swallow your caramel corn and sit up straighter in your chair, then I don’t know what will.

The man assuring me that bass do not deflower Brandywines is John Donvan, host and moderator of the Intelligence Squared debate series, and he’s priming me to watch an exhilarating 90-minute argument about the dangers and the benefits of Genetically Modified Organisms. Donvan leads with the fish-tomato sex idea because it drops your jaw — and also because, as he explains, “one of the most famous, or some might say infamous, feats of genetic engineering was the development of a tomato whose DNA was mingled with the DNA of a fish, which gave it longer life on the vine.”

John Donvan moderates Intelligence Squared debates.

I came across that debate thanks to an article in Grist entitled, “Finally, a GMO Debate Without Shouting,” and since that seemed almost as unlikely to me as a fish making moves on a tomato, I clicked on the link.

I have my own attitudes and inclinations on that issue, and I know from experience that explaining them to someone who inclines otherwise causes my voice to rise and my face to flush with blood. That’s because I don’t know why I think what I think well enough to explain why I’m right once the discourse shifts into capital letters — I JUST KNOW THAT I AM!

“The moderator, John Donvan, pulled off a small miracle in crowd control,” writes Nathanael Johnson, “cutting off participants when they strayed from the point. The result was that each side actually had to concede those points that their opponents had gotten right, rather than making a swift lateral move to another subject.”

It’s an issue that seems to encourage entrenchment. “One view, especially prevalent in Europe,” Donvan writes, “says we are crazy to be doing this.” That is, crossing tomatoes with fish. “The other view says: humans have been fiddling with food genetics forever, and this route to improved food products represents only a slight variation on an old practice. The core questions are: is this food safe, is it beneficial, and is it necessary?”

If you think those questions are important — I do — and you have some open viewing time, maybe you’ll watch this debate. I plan to watch tonight and report on what I learn tomorrow. Maybe we can use the comment section under this post as a forum for discussing what we learn.

What to Feed the World?

December 8, 2014 by Kate Zurschmeide

American industrial agriculture may be standing in the way of international cooperation.

“In the United States, they put anything in their mouths,” Jean Cabaret, an organic farmer who lives in the region of France known as Brittany, recently told a reporter for The Washington Post. “No, this must be stopped.”

Jean Cabaret and his unwashed chickens.

‘This’ is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, an agreement that would link the economies of the United States with those of the 28 nations comprising the European Union more intimately than ever before. The horse of globalization is already out of the barn, right? Why not hitch it to your cart?

Because doing so might drench your chicken in the chemical that keeps your local swimming pool from incubating all the nasty stuff that washes off of other people’s bodies: chlorine, which was recently used to thwart the annual Midwest FurFest Convention, prompting the evacuation of a Hyatt Hotel in suburban Chicago, and sending 19 people to a local hospital.

Jean Cabaret doesn’t want to eat that stuff.

Chlorinated American chickens.

According to The Washington Post, “passage of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) could be a globalization milestone, creating a megamarket of 800 million consumers from Alaska to Finland, Hawaii to Greece.”

Isn’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t it create, like, millions of new jobs, both here and in the many European countries whose economies are in worse shape than ours? Maybe, but it would also end Europe’s ban on American “Frankenfoods” — genetically-modified, hormone-boosted, or chlorine-sanitized products most Americans eat every day.

A lot of people on the far side of the pond want to keep that ban in place: last week an online petition opposing TTIP garnered its one millionth signature, a number that forces the European Parliament to hold a hearing on the matter.

“Most of these concerns about chemical use and those kinds of things are blown up in the media to become a problem that really doesn’t exist,” Scott Russell, a professor of poultry processing at the University of Georgia (who would have guessed that poultry processing had its own professoriate?), told National Public Radio back in September. Russell reports that the American poultry industry uses only one capful of chlorine per gallon of water, and the chemical poses no health threat because it gets rinsed off the chickens (with unchlorinated water?) before they’re sold to us.

“We’re not trying to force anybody to eat anything,” Michael Froman, the U.S. trade representative, told The Washington Post. He just believes that “the decision as to what is safe should be made by science.”

Workers prepare chickens at the AIA factory in San Martino, near Verona, Italy. (AP)

But safety may not be the motivating factor here — it’s probably money. According to a study by a Dutch university, it costs the American poultry industry about 80 cents to make a pound of chicken, while European chicken growers, who can’t use chlorine or hormones, have to spend a dollar. How long can principles hold out against a profit margin differential of 20 percent? Passage of TTIP wouldn’t force Parisians to eat Purdue chicken, of course, but it may price Jean Cabaret’s birds right out of the market.

The pool at Franklin Park may offer safer swimming than Stoney Creek, but I don’t go to Stoney Creek to swim in safety. I go for the drive, and for the climb up the back side of that cliff with the jumping ledges at three different levels — high, scary, and I’ve-never-tried-the-top-one. It’s true that the last time I was there my dog pooped in the water, but he was on the other bank and the turd floated downstream pretty fast.

If every dog in The Shenandoah Valley pooped in Stoney Creek, I don’t suppose I’d want to swim there, and you may not want to swim there knowing my dog did, but how many of us would prefer a version of The Shenandoah Valley where the only place to swim is Franklin Park?

Meet Corn Earworm

November 21, 2014 by Kate Zurschmeide

We thought you might like to get acquainted with the creature that helped itself to some of your peaches-and-cream sweet corn this summer: corn earworm.

Your dining companion, the adolescent corn earworm.

According to the Cooperative Extension at North Carolina State University, corn earworm is pervasive in the Western Hemishpere. It feeds on more than 100 different species, but its favorite food is corn. The guys who stole our kernels this summer were earworm larvae, which emerged from tiny eggs laid by the adult version of this creature, the corn earworm moth. In our neck of the woods, “corn earworms overwinter as ‘resting’ (diapausing) pupae in soil at a depth of more than 5 cm,” NC State reports. “Adults emerge in early May, mate, and seek suitable oviposition (egg-laying) sites. A high percentage of first generation eggs are laid on the leaves of seedling corn when it is available.”

Not a little wormie anymore.

Each female moth lays up to 3,000 eggs, one at a time, and each egg becomes a little wormie fellow. Despite those numbers, you probably never saw more than one green caterpillar on any of your ears of corn because the biggest of the nasty buggers eat their little brothers and sisters before they settle into veganism, which they practice for two or three weeks before digging into the dirt to pupate themselves. They grow wings underground, then they emerge, lay eggs, and the cycle starts again. In a Virginia growing season, that cycle repeats itself at least three times.

Earworms aren’t the primary target of the genetic modification that causes most American corn to produce the bacterium B. thuringiensis subsp. kurstaki, also known as Bt; that technology is aimed at rootworms, which eat from below, not from above; but the protein Bt makes is bad for all lepidopteran caterpillars, so a lot of earworms do succumb to its charms. However, most conventional sweetcorn growers control earworm with applications of Mustang Max, Warrior, or Capture/Brigade, all of which are toxins belonging to the pyrethroid group.

“For many years the pyrethroids have provided exceptional levels of control of earworms,” Purdue University says. However, “in recent years, there have been scattered reports of pyrethroid failures in small plot trials and in commercial fields. Recent research has shown that populations of earworms collected in Indiana and Illinois have low to moderate levels of resistance.”

And there’s the rub: when every female lays thousands of eggs, and three or four generations of females lay their thousands of eggs every summer, it doesn’t take long for the gene pool to change.

The corn we grow doesn’t produce Bt, because the seed hasn’t been genetically modified to do so, and we don’t spray the ears with Mustang Max or Warrior or any other pyrethoid because

“While pyrethroids may be amongst the least toxic of insecticides, they are an excitatory nerve poison, acting upon the sodium ion channels in nerve cell membranes:

by sending a train of impulses rather than a single one, they overload the pathways, blocking the passage of sodium ions across cell membranes; similar in action to organophosphates (which include the now banned DDT); inhibits ATPase, which affects the release of acetylcholine, monoamine oxidase-A and acetylcholine;

inhibits GABAa receptors, resulting in convulsions and excitability (and more ‘minor’ problems such as sleep disorders);

known to be carcinogenic;

liver damage

thyroid function

cause chromosomal abnormalities in mice and hamsters;

are highly toxic to insects, fish, and birds;

mimic estrogen, leading to estrogen dominant health problems in females and feminizing effects in males, including lowered sperm counts and abnormal breast development;

sublethal doses have produced a wide array of abnormal behaviors, including aggression, and disruption in learning and learned behaviors”

It seems better in the long run to share a little of our corn with worms.

Are We Round-up Ready?

November 19, 2014 by Kate Zurschmeide

The other day my sister-in-law, who’s a nuclear physicist, overheard me talking to her daughter about the corn we grow at Great Country Farms.

“Most of the corn in America comes from seeds that have been genetically engineered to produce a protein known as Bt, which kills the worms that like to eat sweet corn,” I said. “We don’t use that kind of seed, so some of our corn has worms under the husk at the top of the ear. But you just cut off the part the worms have eaten, and you eat the rest.”

“The results of a comparison of GM and non-GM corn from adjacent Midwest fields in the US that first appeared on the Moms Across America March website [1] are reproduced in Table 1.”

“I didn’t hear the beginning of that conversation,” my sister-in-law said later, “but you must have said you’re opposed to using GE seeds. Why is that?”

Knowing that I’m temperamentally inclined to subvert powerful conglomerates that pretend my welfare motivates their business models, and believing that such temperamental inclination is a sorry excuse for indoctrinating twelve-year-olds, I told the physicist that I don’t yet understand the issue as well as I’d like, and that I’m trying to learn the benefits of genetic engineering, but the downsides I’m aware of now are these:

1. Genetically engineered crops haven’t existed long enough for anyone to have a clear sense of how they might affect the human body over time.

2. One company, Monsanto, makes both the herbicide that allows for greater corn yields and the GE seeds that tolerate heavier doses of that herbicide, and I distrust that kind of profit-driven harmonious interest, especially when it controls 90% of the American corn market.

“I thought genetic engineering was supposed to reduce pesticide use,” she said.

“I think Monsanto’s corn has one added gene that makes Bt and another that tolerates glyphosate, which is the toxin in Round-up.”

“So why is the glyphosate necessarily worse than the problem it prevents?” she asked. “Isn’t glyphosate actually less toxic than pesticides farmers used before there was Round-up?”

“I think that’s true,” I said, “but Round-up is used so heavily now that its cumulative effect may be worse than the pesticides it replaced.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but it’s also possible that the adverse effects are a reasonable trade-off for a lot more food.”

That seemed unlikely to me, but without any evidence to the contrary, I had to admit that it was possible. Two days later, Mark Zurschmeide sent me a link to this article, which provides a lot of specific information that makes glyphosate look like a bad idea. The argument in favor of glyphosate has always been that it doesn’t hurt people because it works by disrupting production of amino acids that are crucial to plants but not to people, so it kills them but not us.

But Doctors Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Sennef of MIT recently published a paper pointing out that the microbial cultures in our intestines need to produce those same amino acids, and that glyphosate effects those cultures the same way it effects broadleaf cultures in a cornfield. So glyphosate may not in fact directly damage human tissues, but by killing off our inner flora, it undermines our health substantially.

“Roundup significantly disrupts the functioning of beneficial bacteria in the gut and contributes to permeability of the intestinal wall and consequent expression of autoimmune disease symptoms.” says Sarah Pope, the Healthy Home Economist.

I still consider myself relatively uninformed about these matters, and I realize that everyone who takes a stand on the issue has a bias of some kind — I’m trying to neutralize mine by copping to it — but it makes sense that glyphosate, a pesticide, would trounce my inner flora.

That can’t be good.

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