Denialism (14 page)
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.)
Does organic food carry a lower environmental footprint than food grown with the use of synthetic pesticides? The answer to that is complicated but it certainly isn’t yes. Locally grown food has environmental benefits that are easy to understand. Agricultural researchers at Iowa State University have reported that the food miles—the distance a product travels from farm to plate—attached to items that one buys in a grocery store are twenty-seven times higher than those for goods bought from local sources. American produce, every cauliflower or radish, travels an average of nearly fifteen hundred miles before it ends up at our dinner table. That doesn’t make for fresh, tasty food and it certainly doesn’t ease carbon emissions.
People assume that food grown locally is organic (and that organic food is grown locally). Either may be true, but often neither is the case. It’s terrific news that Michelle Obama has decided to grow vegetables at the White House; her family will eat better, not because the food is organic, but because it will be fresh. Go to a nearby farmers’ market and buy a tomato or apple that was grown by conventional means. It will taste good if it was recently picked. Then buy an apple from the organic section of your local supermarket. It will have been grown according to standards established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture: no synthetic pesticides, no genetic manipulation.
That doesn’t mean it was picked when it was ripe. If those organic apples aren’t local, they ripened while they were stored— usually after having been sprayed with ethylene gas to turn them red from green (ethylene is one of the many chemicals permitted under the USDA’s contradictory and mystifying organic guidelines). The British Soil Association rules permit the use of ethylene too, as a trigger for what it refers to as “degreening” bananas. The association says that it’s acceptable to use ethylene in the ripening process for organic bananas being imported into Europe, in part because “without a controlled release of ethylene bananas could potentially ripen in storage.” In other words, they would begin to undergo the organic process known as rotting.
Food grown organically is assumed to be better for human health than food grown in conventional ways. Recent studies don’t support that supposition, though. In 2008, for example, researchers funded by the Danish government’s International Center for Research in Organic Food Systems set out to look at the effect of three different approaches to cultivating nutrients in carrots, kale, peas, potatoes, and apples; they also investigated whether there were differences in the retention of nutrients from organically grown produce. The crops were grown in similar soil, on adjacent fields, and at the same time so that they experienced the same weather conditions. The organic food was grown on organic soil, but it was all harvested and treated in the same manner. The produce was fed to rats over a two-year period. Researchers, led by Susanne Bügel, an associate professor in the department of human nutrition at the University of Copenhagen, reported in the
Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture
that the research “does not support the belief that organically grown foodstuffs generally contain more major and trace elements.” Indeed, she and her team found no differences in the nutrients present in the crops after harvest, and no evidence that the rats retained different levels of nutrients depending on how the food was grown.