The Genetic Modification Debate Continues

March 25, 2016 by Mark Dewey

Let’s get personal: my opposition to genetic modification of the world’s food supply is motivated more by political concerns than by concerns about health. Most GMOs are seeds which Monsanto has altered to make them tolerate large doses of glyphosate, an herbicide they produce and sell under the RoundUp trademark. They’ve created a cycle, in other words: buy these seeds from us, and then soak your fields in glyphosate so that nothing will grow there except the seeds you buy from us, which by the way we have patented, along with the glyphosate, so you can’t buy either of them from anyone else or we’ll sue you. And then next year buy more seeds and glyphosate from us! Doesn’t that deserve a smiley-face emoticon?

The perpetuation of that cycle under the guise of flag-waving benevolence makes me angry, regardless of whether eating corn with that gene will hurt me or not. On that issue, the jury is still out, and may continue to be out for a couple of generations, but the politics are present-day.

Because the jury is still out, we don’t use GMOs at Great Country Farms, but that doesn’t mean we’re reflexively opposed to them. We like to learn as much as we can about genetic modification, and we like to pass information on to you. So please read this excellent article in Modern Farmer. It looks at genetic modification from the vegan perspective.

Still Life with Mass Hysteria: Are GMOs Really That Bad?

By Brian Barth on March 22, 2016

Photographs by Plamen Petkov; Styled by Richard Alfredo

On a recent Saturday afternoon in Chicago, a handful of vegans gathered for a potluck lunch. Between bites of soy nuggets, tofu steaks, and baked pasta blanketed in faux cheese, the friends compared notes about a recent animal-rights demonstration and discussed the merits of a raw-food diet. For dessert, they chose among dairy-free brownies, eggless pumpkin pie, and two bowls of sliced apples—one labeled “Golden Delicious (conventional)”; the other, “Arctic Golden Delicious (non-browning GMO).”

Twice as Much Food

December 11, 2014 by Mark Dewey

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 Mark Dewey

“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.

Are We Round-up Ready?

November 19, 2014 by Mark Dewey

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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The Genetic Modification Debate Continues

Still Life with Mass Hysteria: Are GMOs Really That Bad?

Twice as Much Food

A Civil Discussion about GMOs?

Are We Round-up Ready?

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