For some people, genetic modification—GM—is not a topic for discussion but a subject of revulsion.
I have long considered GM a topic of interest, albeit one steeped in suspicion. I am all too aware that at least one company—Monsanto—aspires to monopolize common foods by substituting GM crops for their naturally occurring counterparts to the point where the natural crops no longer exist.
This strategy, accomplished by patenting the GM crop, has ominous Orwellian overtones, not to mention a potentially devastating outcome that naturally inspires the heebie-jeebies in those of us who can remember the Sixties or who simply fear Big Brother or Big Business taking control of the food supply. I personally do not want anyone—whether company or government—controlling our food to that degree. And since seeds under normal circumstances have a limited shelf life, such a goal can be accomplished all too quickly.
The food man ate over countless centuries was no doubt determined primarily by availability and secondarily by custom, religion, and taste. So biodiversity is, in my opinion, a positive concept.
Eliminating natural species simply because they are not patentable or resistant to insects or herbicides strikes me as shortsighted to a fault. True, we have selectively bred the species we consume now for centuries, so they may or may not be as wholesome as some of their ancestors. But to cast them aside for reasons having nothing to do with their wholesomeness as food makes no sense whatsoever.
The pros of genetic modification
In the abstract, genetic modification exudes a siren allure. Look at the overall problem of crop pests. If you have ever picked corn, for example, you know the joy of husking an ear of corn to discover worms within. Although chopping off the affected part of the ear solves the problem, those worms embedded in your corn are hardly an appetizing sight.
For some farmers, the notion of raising crops that are free from such pests becomes a sort of Holy Grail. It simply does not occur to Western minds to accept the worms as a part of the crop, as somehow one with the corn. Insects are damaging our crops, hurting our profits. We seek a solution.
So, rather than spraying the corn with a pesticide—the usual solution, for better or for worse—someone got the idea of putting the insecticide inside the corn. This way, only pests that actually eat the corn die. Innocent bees pollinating the crop or beetles crawling over it looking for insects to consume would be unaffected, since they do not attack the corn.
By putting the insecticide inside the corn, you pinpoint the pests in the biosphere while leaving the “good” insects unharmed. Better still, you eliminate the need for spraying. No pesticides wash off the crops into the soil, eventually ending up in the oceans or the water table and harming countless organisms in the process. It all sounds great in theory.
Perhaps we should clarify which insecticide we are talking about. The most common genetic modification for imbuing insect resistance today comprises the use of Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium already used as an insecticide and approved for use on organic foods.
B. thuringiensis produces a spore composed of proteins with insecticide properties. Scientists refer to these proteins as crystals, hence the reference to Cry you might find in the literature. The bacterium itself is the insecticide. It is also an effective one, despite approximately 30 years of use.
Where’s the beef?
Not everyone agrees with our idyllic scenario. In fact, there is considerable scientific evidence that genetic modification harms both the organism modified and those that feed on it. This makes sense when you consider that the vast majority of naturally occurring mutations are not beneficial to the mutated organism. Far beyond the realm of natural mutations, transgenic modifications could never occur naturally. How could a tomato mate with a flounder, for example?
As for the effects of eating a mutated organism, I personally always took the viewpoint that since the corn gets digested into proteins, sugars, starches and fats—the basic food components—the composition of the genes themselves does not matter all that much. Digestion breaks down the nucleic acids in the corn along with everything else. Meanwhile, the proteins the DNA regulates digest into amino acids just like any other protein; in the end, we don’t know or care what the actual starting materials were.
That was such a comforting viewpoint for so many years. One of the reasons it no longer holds is prions—bits of protein that survive cooking and digestion. Their name an abbreviation for proteinaceous infectious particles, prions cause Mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE), familial fatal insomnia, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, kuru and other horrible wasting diseases. Yet—to repeat—prions remain infectious after cooking, digestion, and even laboratory treatment with proteases (enzymes that digest or break down protein). What is worse, the diseases prions cause are always fatal.
It does matter what the starting ingredients were.
Prions showed us that messing with the proteins in food can get you into trouble. Good health does not depend solely upon proteins having the prescribed chemical composition. (By definition, proteins are large chains of amino acids.) The three-dimensional shape of the protein is important, too. Prions are malformed proteins, proteins that have the unfortunate, contagious drawback of folding in the wrong manner. Because prions can be consumed and absorbed without changing their original three-dimensional conformation, they can enter the body relatively intact and affect the conformation of proteins already existing there, causing them to change to the same malformed conformation as the prions.
Feeding ground-up cow brains to other cows was not, in hindsight, such a good idea, but apparently whoever originally came up with the notion thought it was just another swell way to fatten cattle quickly and increase profits. In fact, it is generally believed mad cow disease may have originated from this practice because sheep infected with scrapie—a disease similar to mad cow—were originally included in the mix.
In general, modern shortcuts in animal husbandry—including feeding cattle grain rather than the grass on which they feed naturally—may have done a great deal to increase the profits of large farms, but they have done little to improve public health.
The balances within the human body are far more delicate than we ever might have imagined. There are so many checks and balances, yet the slightest imbalance in the wrong direction and we have cancer, diabetes, or heart disease.
Or we just end up obese, which leads to cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
If genetically modified crops contain less protein and more allergens than their conventional counterparts—as several studies claim—there is cause for alarm. These are serious questions, and no amount of drawing-room fantasy can alter their reality. Keep in mind that we have not even begun to consider the issues of genetic modifications themselves and the tricky interactions inserted genes undergo.
Most of us, I would like to think, are no longer naïve enough to believe that insecticides in our food simply do not matter. The argument that they occur in quantities too small to matter has become suspect. There are far too many chemicals occurring in small but increasingly larger quantities in our food and in our bodies for it not to be an issue. Check out our piece on PBDEs if you disagree. Then understand that the list of pollutants—DDT, PCBs, PBDEs, dioxin, and so on—goes on ad infinitum. We could report on nothing else if we so chose. We simply wish to leave room for reporting more positive and uplifting news and developments.
So personally, I prefer the more conservative approach to issues such as GM: why not make sure there is no harm before we subject ourselves to the risks? Humans have lived without GM crops for millennia; a few years more will not harm any of us. The touted benefits are slight, with the exception of removing sprayed-on chemicals from our food, our air, our soil and our water supply.
As a result, most of what I now eat is organic or as nearly organic as possible. Despite the added expense, I eat only organic eggs from cage-free hens, and so on. We now know that contamination even with minute amounts of chemicals, whether pesticides, aromatic hydrocarbons originally produced for insulation, or even well-intended food additives can have vastly harmful effects.
Bt or not Bt
In response to an article on genetic modification published in the journal Science in November 1999, Theo Walliman from the Institute of Cell Biology in Zurich, Switzerland, wrote the following, which I thought it worth including almost in its entirety:
The issue is broader than whether Bt toxin (from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis) produced by genetically modified (GM) crops imperils Monarch butterflies. The real issue is that a strategy to constitutively express an insecticidal compound in large-scale crop monocultures (15 million acres of Bt corn was planted in the United States in 1998, 20% of the total acreage of corn), and thus expose a homogeneous subecosystem continuously to the toxin, seems bound to create Bt-toxin-resistant pests because of heavy selection pressure. Sooner or later we will likely see Bt-toxin resistance in those insects that are continuously in contact with these monocultures and feed on them. If or when this occurs, we will have lost the use of a valuable bio-insecticide. For about 30 years Bt toxin has been applied on the spot (by spraying B. thuringiensis directly onto plants) and only when there are signs of infestation of the crops by insects. It is the most successful biological insecticide control system we have and would probably retain its potency against pests for many more years to come.
Bt toxin has been found to leak through the root system of Bt-toxin GM maize into the soil, which could possibly affect a myriad of insects in the soil and give rise to horizontal gene transfer, for example, through soil bacteria. Perhaps we should consider going back to the drawing board and designing better GM strategies with less or none of such drawbacks.
The scenario I presented during the initial discussion was purely fictitious. The toxin produced by the corn apparently can leak into the environment, whether through the roots of the corn or through its pollen, and the argument that insect resistance to the toxin will not develop does have holes, according to some scientists. Nor can we blithely assume that GM food breaks down inside our bodies sufficiently that its genetic modifications might not be deleterious to our health.
Although a search of the literature shows the Bt Cry proteins to be highly specific toward the targeted pests and relatively benign towards non-targeted species, save for the Monarch butterfly and a few unfortunate Lepidoptera not mentioned in our excerpt, the story does not end there, though we certainly wish it did.
Actual studies on the safety of genetically engineered crops as food have generally been as poorly designed as they are rare. Those studies based on more stringent designs point to lowered nutritional value in some GM crops and demonstrated changes to the digestive systems of test animals fed such crops. Some of those changes appear to be pre-cancerous.
Meanwhile, the statistics on current usage of these untested GM crops in the U.S. are staggering. The figures cited in the Walliman excerpt above are a bit out of date. In 2007, 91 percent of the U.S. soybean crop and 86 percent of the U.S. corn crop grew from genetically engineered seed, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which touts these figures as though it were talking about progress in wiping out polio.
The most recent figures I can find state that 70 percent of that soy and corn are used to feed fish and livestock, so that even without any further tampering, the conventionally farmed meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products available to us also share some GM taint. In fact, there are also genetically engineered pigs in our foods supply, while milk cows consume a special genetically engineered bovine growth hormone, which, among its effects, increases the fat content of their milk. That’s not to mention the hormones and antibiotics fed to beef cattle.
I would not have found these statistics particularly alarming had I not researched the testing done (or not done) to establish the safety of these foods and techniques. From the inception of genetic engineering, the FDA simply chose to believe that GM foods presented no major modifications to conventional crops and declared them safe accordingly.
Therefore, not only does the U.S. population serve as test animals in a vast experiment in GM food safety, but there is no easy way to interpret the experimental results, since the FDA does not require labeling foods to identify their genetically modified contents.
I find it quite ironic that the USDA emphasizes the importance of content labeling and food safety on its web site, yet neither the USDA nor the FDA require labeling of foods containing GM components. Given that genetic modification specifically includes transgenic modifications such as Bt corn—which involves insertion of a gene from a non-plant species, in this case a bacterium—the possibilities for allergic reaction by some individuals are huge. Indeed, they increase markedly whenever a gene from a different species enters a target organism.
We have already witnessed the example of a Brazil-nut gene implanted into corn causing allergic reactions to consumers allergic to Brazil nuts. Some food allergies are intense, immediate, and life threatening. Without labeling to tell us where the genes originated, we have no way of knowing what foods might produce unexpected reactions. Nor is there any way to trace the harm done by genetically modified foods back to its source.
For these and other reasons, we should not be exposed to GM products without our knowledge. Unfortunately, for those of us inside the United States, that ship has already sailed. Unless you limit yourself to organically grown foods and read labels religiously, you are likely already consuming genetically modified products. Remember that as of 2007, 70% of crops grown within the U.S. are genetically modified. And at least 70% of all processed foods contain genetically modified products.
You do the math.
All of which brings us to the other, more pleasant topic of discussion for today: organic foods and organic farming.
The healthy alternative
While government agencies such as the FDA and the EPA are forced to make difficult decisions about which toxic chemicals to crack down on and what quantities of them to allow in the environment, in our food and in our bodies, the USDA applies the imprimatur “organic” to qualified foods.
This is a far different story; a story of hope and of life. It’s the kind of story that can have a happy ending, which is more than I can say for stories about the increasing toxic chemical load we all must bear so that giant chemical companies can earn their shareholders a prosperous living.
Purchasing the fruits of organic farming, you see, serves more than one simultaneous good. First, you get to consume wholesome food, to the benefit of your family’s health. What’s more, long after that, you receive an added bonus: organic farming doesn’t rely on chemical pesticides of any kind nor on chemical fertilizers, so there’s no residual poison poured into the soil to drain into our waters and evaporate into our air.
It is simply clean.
By comparison, conventional farming techniques are so harmful that the mouth of the Mississippi River is a barren wasteland extending for twenty miles into the Gulf of Mexico: a wasteland created by the dumping of toxic waste that is the runoff from our lawns and our farms. Nothing can grow in the shadow of this toxic filth that we spread willingly on our foods like breakfast spread.
So supporting organic farming by buying organic milk, meat, and produce serves a positive purpose beyond the mere ability to consume healthier food: it minimizes harm to the environment. What’s more, when you buy organic milk, you’re not buying the conventional, non-organic product; you are removing your support for the more harmful way of life that threatens the entire earth.
If no one purchased conventional produce, the food industry would stop producing it. Within a few years, the toxic side effects of that production would begin to subside. Our waters would become cleaner and begin to support life, with no pesticide and fertilizer runoff to disturb their balance.
All because you decided to switch from conventional to organic milk, potatoes, cotton, and corn.
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