Fresco went on. “You may prefer this loaf of bread”—for reasons of taste alone it would be hard not to. “But actually, the relevant bread historically has been the Wonder loaf.” A knowing sigh spread across the room. “Don’t despise the white bread,” she said, “because it symbolizes the fact that bread and food have become plentiful and affordable to all. And that is a feat that we are not conscious of. But it has changed the world.”
Agricultural work has always been—and remains today—humanity’s principal occupation. In the United States we long ago ceased to know, or care, where most of our food comes from. We have managed to liberate ourselves so completely from that dangerous and demanding life that the Census Bureau no longer bothers to count in a separate category the number of people who live on farms. Never before has the responsibility to feed humanity been in the hands of so few, and never before have so many been oblivious of that fact.
Americans rarely think about wheat when they eat bread (let alone know how to bake it), and most have never seen a live pig or chicken, unless they have visited a zoo. Poultry and pork are not animals; they are standard parts of a meal—born and raised in a baggie. There has been an understandable reaction to this mechanized approach to our food. The organic movement—fueled by rural nostalgia and pastoral dreams—is one that shuns mass production, stresses tradition, and seeks to return to less complicated times when the land was tilled by simple farmers, not regulated by computers and planted under the care of the Global Positioning System. Call it the Old McDonald fantasy.
The desire may be genuine, but it is based on a dangerous fallacy: that the old days were better. We can think that as long as we don’t have to live it—because it is true nowhere. The old days were treacherous and painful. Nasty, brutish, and short was the rule, not the exception. Life expectancy two centuries ago in Europe and America was little more than half of what it is today. Science changed all that, helping to feed the poorest people on earth; it brought farmers throughout Asia and Latin America a new kind of prosperity.
Today the world, and particularly its poorest inhabitants, needs more science, not less. Much of the technology Africa requires has been available—to us—for decades. Without passable roads, products never make it to market. Modern irrigation systems are almost wholly absent from Africa, but they would permit farmers to grow larger crops with less water, as such systems have done nearly everywhere else in the world. More than anything, Africa needs soil that has an adequate supply of nitrogen. Without nitrogen fertilizers we would lose a third of our crops. Organic evangelists argue that the best way to get more nitrogen into Africa is to use more manure. Clearly, these are people who have never been to Tanzania or Tamil Nadu. Africans and Indians have plenty of manure. In fact, human and animal waste are often the only farming resources available to villagers. They have no other choices. In effect, that means organics have been imposed on them. Cuba is an interesting illustration; the country has often been portrayed as an organic utopia because it had no genetically engineered crops or synthetic fertilizers. Nobody could afford them. In 2009, however, the government announced that it was about to plant its first crop of engineered corn. With access to technology the ideological barriers vanished. The consequences of any other approach would be horrific. Feeding the world with organic food would require vast new tracts of farmland. Without ripping out the rain forests, there just isn’t enough of it left.
At the TED conference, Fresco was displaying pictures of African farmers, people for whom securing daily meals is no more certain than it was for our Paleolithic ancestors. “If we want small-scale farming we will relegate these farmers and their families to poverty,” she said. “What they need are implements to increase their production. Fertilize their soil. Something to protect their crops. Small-scale farming is a luxury.” She peered knowingly into the crowd. “A luxury for those of us who can afford it.”
I WAS ONCE invited to dinner by a friend who ate nothing but organic food. We picked up vegetables on the way to her house: broccoli, squash, and peppers. Then we bought swordfish. When we arrived at her house, my friend walked straight into the backyard, fired up her Weber grill, sliced the vegetables, and proceeded to cook them. “I just do it this way,” she said, “so they don’t lose their vitamins.”
Vitamins are good for you; but cancer isn’t. Charred food contains carcinogens; so does charcoal and the grease that often drips from a grill into the fire. The food we ate that night was far more likely to cause harm than any conventional product cooked another way. The genuine risks never occurred to her. Like many people, though, she buys organic food because it makes her feel safer. But there is no such thing as safer. There is only safer than something else. Skiing and driving cars are thousands of times more dangerous than walking or cycling. Yet we never refuse to enter a motor vehicle because it “may” cause death. In most parts of America, tap water is not at all dangerous, a fact that is well publicized. That hasn’t put a dent in the bottled water industry.
When people decide that science can’t solve their problems, they reject its principles. Denying the truth becomes a habit. First we say, oh, pesticide is causing illness, so I’ll eat only organic food. Or perhaps chemicals are the problem. The solution for that is simple: use only natural medicine. Lord Melchett, of the British Soil Association, put it this way: “It will be consumers, not scientists, who decide whether pesticide residues are safe to consume.” So much for the value of facts or the idea of objective standards. Why bother assessing the safety of foods or employing scientists at all? Nearly every day there seem to be new and contradictory directives about what to eat and how to eat it. For some people the most coherent response is to say, in one way or another, “Civilization causes cancer,” so they begin to turn their backs on civilization.
Many producers of organic food have seized on that fear and uncertainty, advertising their goods as natural and healthy alternatives to this intangible and remote system of corporate farms. Never mind that nearly all the organic crops in the United States are grown or sold by the same food conglomerates that grow and sell conventional produce. Giant corporations like Heinz, Cargill, Kellogg, and Kraft have gobbled up organic food companies throughout the nation. Why wouldn’t they? If customers are willing to pay twice as much for foods cultivated without synthetic pesticides or that lack genetically modified ingredients, Kellogg and General Mills will be only too happy to sell it to them.
Thoughtful proponents of precaution argue that at least with organic crops we know what is likely to happen. Genetically engineered products are so new that we can’t be sure. “No one person or group knows or understands enough about the complexity of living things or their intimate interactions or what affects them to declare that biotechnology and genetic engineering are risk-free,” Denise Caruso wrote in her book Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet. “In fact, the only thing we all share—scientists, citizens, regulators—is the profound uncertainty of this moment in history.”
She is completely right. But has there ever been a meaningful new technology that carried no risk, or that couldn’t be used for bad as well as for good? Francis Bacon recognized the answer to that question four hundred years ago. “It would be an unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be done except by means which have never yet been tried,” he wrote in The New Organon. I wonder what he would have made of the “precautionary principle,” which holds that potential risks, no matter how remote, must be given more weight than any possible benefit, no matter how great. Without accepting some risk we would never have had vaccines, X-rays, airplanes, or antibiotics. Caution is simply a different kind of risk, one that is even more likely to kill people.
In Europe, the caution industry suffocates innovation. In Rome, where I lived for several years in the 1990s, they refer to organic food as “biological” and look upon genetically engineered crops as unadulterated poison. No
sane person would swallow it willingly. And the Italian government helps ensure that they won’t. To sell their seeds to farmers, companies must present a certificate stating that their products have not been genetically engineered. At harvest time, farmers are required to do that, too, as are food processors and supermarket chains. America may seem more tolerant, but actually the food system is just less heavily regulated. If Louise Fresco had held up two ears of corn at TED—one grown organically and the other engineered with a toxin to resist worms and fungus—I am certain the voting would have been no different than it was with the bread.
“Just the mention of genetic engineering, a process that has been used for thirty years and so far has not harmed a single person or animal, can cause alarm,” Pamela C. Ronald has pointed out in Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food, which she wrote with her husband, Raoul Adamchak. The two make an unusual couple: she is professor of plant pathology and chair of the Plant Genomics Program at the University of California at Davis. He is an organic farmer. Perhaps not surprisingly, they believe agriculture can—and must—accommodate both approaches. This makes them the agronomic equivalent of James Carville and Mary Matalin—a couple who represent camps defined by their mutual hostility.
Tomorrow’s Table is a brilliant, though perhaps futile, attempt to reconcile the warring sides. “The apocalyptic quality of the anti-GE advocacy seems wildly disproportionate to the potential risk, particularly in the context of benefits,” Ronald wrote in the book. “Unlike fluoride or some types of synthetic or organic pesticides such as rotenone”—an odorless organic chemical found in the roots and stems of many plants—“which are unquestionably lethal to animals at high concentrations, GE traits are composed of the same chemical building blocks (DNA and proteins) that we eat every day. Indeed, these are the same components that Buddha ate 2,500 years ago, and they are what we will be eating 2,500 years from now.”
The National Academy of Sciences and the United Kingdom’s Genetically Modified Science Review Panel, among many other scientific organizations, have concluded repeatedly that the process of adding genes to our food by genetic engineering is just as safe as conventional plant breeding. Each group, in turn, has concluded that there is no danger associated with replacing the combination of genes that has always occurred through breeding (or nature) with a process that allows scientists to insert snippets of DNA into the walls of cells with a gene gun.
If scientific consensus mattered, there would be little debate about whether to use our most promising technology to help feed billions of people who have no reasonable alternative. Nor would there be much question that genetically engineered crops, which require fewer and less-toxic chemicals, are at least as good for the environment as organic crops that guzzle more water per acre and require up to seven times as much herbicide. The amount of pesticides used on corn, soybeans, and cotton in the United States has declined by more than 2.5 million pounds since genetically engineered crops were introduced in 1996, according to one study funded by the Department of Agriculture. In addition, the herbicide glyphosate—more commonly know as Roundup—is less than one-third as toxic to humans than the herbicides it replaces. It is also far less likely to persist in the environment.
This type of manipulation has long been accepted in medicine, largely because the risks seem minor and the benefits easy to understand. Insulin produced since 1982, for example, has been made from a synthetic gene that is a replica of one found in humans. Nobody seems to have problems with cancer or heart drugs based on biotechnology either. Yet altering the molecular genetics of the food supply remains a boundary that many people are unwilling to cross.
The opposition is so uniform and reflexive that when in 2004 the FAO issued a carefully prepared and comprehensive report that dared to suggest that “agricultural biotechnology has real potential as a new tool in the war on hunger,” nongovernmental organizations throughout the world rose as one to object. Six hundred and fifty groups banded together, signing an open letter in which they said that the “FAO has broken its commitment to civil society and peasant organizations.” The letter went on to complain that groups representing the interests of farmers had not been consulted, that the FAO was siding with the biotechnology industry, and, consequently, that the report “raises serious questions about the independence and intellectual integrity of an important United Nations agency.”
This type of response was hardly an aberration. The attack on Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, Barack Obama’s agriculture secretary, began the day Obama announced his nomination. Vilsack’s crime, according to the Organic Consumers Association, was extreme. (The OCA describes itself as the “only organization in the US focused exclusively on promoting the views and interests of the nation’s estimated 50 million organic and socially responsible consumers.”) Vilsack believes in biotechnology at least as fully as the leaders of the OCA believe in organic food, and that automatically makes him suspect. Typically, organizations like the OCA denounce any official who supports genetic engineering, no matter what the reason. Most of Iowa’s farmers grow genetically engineered foods, and they wouldn’t have it any other way. Vilsack’s central transgression was that, as governor, he considered that a good idea.
Attacks on progress have become routine. Look at these comments from a group whose members refer to themselves as “independent scientists” at the Third Joint International GMO Opposition Day, April 8, 2006: “The current generation of genetically modified crops unnecessarily risks the health of the population and the environment. Present knowledge is not sufficient to safely and predictably modify the plant genome, and the risks of serious side-effects far outweigh the benefits. We urge you to stop feeding the products of this infant science to our population and ban the release of these crops into the environment where they can never be recalled.”
Not one fact in any of those sentences is true. While 70 percent of all processed food in the United States contains at least one ingredient from genetically modified corn, canola, or soybeans, beyond using the word “billions,” it is not possible to guess with any accuracy how many doses of such food Americans have actually consumed in the past thirty years. But it is possible to count the number of people who have become ill as a direct result of eating that food: zero. Not one. Nearly two thousand Americans died after taking aspirin in 2008 (out of twenty-nine billion pills swallowed), and another three hundred drowned in their bathtubs. Aspirin sales haven’t suffered, and people are still taking baths.
“NATURAL” DOES NOT mean good, or safe, or healthy, or wholesome. It never did. In fact, legally, it means nothing at all. Mercury, lead, and asbestos are natural, and so are viruses, E. coli, and salmonella. A salmonella outbreak in 2009 killed nine people, sickened hundreds, and triggered the largest food recall in the history of the United States, sending a chill through every parent who has ever made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Other than mosquitoes, the two substances responsible for more deaths on this planet than any other are water and “natural” food. Wine and beer were invented as ways to purify water and make it safer to drink; the fermentation process destroys many of the most dangerous pathogens. If the Chinese had not understood the importance of boiling water for tea, they would have been sipping cups full of deadly fungi and other dangerous pathogens for the last five thousand years.
Organic food almost always explicitly excludes the use of genetic engineering or synthetic chemicals. “Natural” chemicals and pesticides are far more common, and no safer, however, than chemicals made in any laboratory. As James E. McWilliams, author of American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT, has written, “One issue frequently overlooked in the rush to embrace organic agriculture is the prevalence of excess arsenic, lead, cadmium, nickel, mercury, copper, and zinc in organic soil. Soil ecologists and environmentalists—and, to some extent, the concerned public—have known for more than a century that the synthetic pesticides of conventional farming leave heavy metals in
the ground. But the fact that you’ll find the same toxins in organic soil has been something of a dirty little secret.”
While the risks of genetically modified foods are constantly cited, the dangers of nature are rarely mentioned. As the Berkeley biochemist Bruce N. Ames has demonstrated, a single cup of coffee contains more natural chemicals than most people will consume in a month of eating three daily meals. That doesn’t mean coffee is dangerous. It just means nature makes lots of chemicals, and they are no less toxic than those made by man. When invoking studies of toxicity, organophiles often tell only one side of the story. (Which, of course, is a hallmark of denialism.) Any chemical, whether it comes from the root of a tree or the shelves of your medicine cabinet, can cause serious harm. It depends how much you take. That is why one of the fundamental tenets of medicine holds that “the dose makes the poison.”
For decades, plant breeders and farmers have routinely blasted crops with radiation. The practice, mutagenesis, is not organic, but has been widely—and quietly—accepted throughout the world as a way to hasten the breeding of plants. Even those who wouldn’t eat irradiated food rarely object publicly as they do with genetically engineered products. Mutagenesis produces new hybrids at remarkable speeds, but it also causes rapid mutations in their genetic structure. Seeds are typically collected, germinated, and surveyed for new traits.
In 2008, a team of plant geneticists based in Portugal published a report that compared the effects brought on by this type of radiation with those caused by genetic engineering. They examined the protein structure of four strains of rice, focusing on the nutrients, toxins, and allergens contained in thousands of their genes. Without exception, the changes induced by mutagenesis were more significant than any brought about using the tools of molecular biology. Again, that doesn’t mean mutagenesis is dangerous. It’s not. Surely, though, radiation—a process that effects the entire plant—ought to frighten people more than the manipulation of a single gene. Yet nobody has ever refused to let a ship dock at an African port because it was filled with irradiated wheat. (In 2002, 2.4 million Zambians faced starvation. Nevertheless the government rejected as “poison” tons of genetically engineered grain offered by the World Food Program.)
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