I pride myself on not wearing a tinfoil hat. I don't think Bush staged 9/11, although if it turned out to be true, I would not be shocked. I think we really did put a man on the moon. I think Elvis is dead. I guess I do think Dick Cheney is actually a robot.
If you asked me four years ago, I would have told you this diary is a little too "tinfoil hat" for me. I was living in St. Louis, right in the heart of Monsanto country. That summer I went to London for a state-sponsored internship program, to work at a communications firm trying to attract foreign investment to Missouri. Monsanto was my friend. I had no idea what they did or how the heck it affected me, but if you could engineer better food, why shouldn't that be the future?
Well, folks. Monsanto is not my friend.
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I've got 3 side-notes before I jump into the diary content:
1. If you want to read more on genetically modified organism's (GMOs), Ilyana wrote up a fantastic
diary yesterday and our content does not overlap so click the link for an excellent source of more information.
2. Last week Bcgntn wrote up a diary about eating disorders. While this issue is an essential one to discuss if the topic is food, I don't think it's appropriate for someone who hasn't lived it (me) to write about it. So please, click the link for a terrific personal diary on the subject.
3. Elizabeth D asked me to remind all Wisconsin Kossacks of a meetup in Madison today. We are meeting at Michaelangelo's Coffee on State St. at 2 today.
Sorry about that. Back to talking food.]
To start, there are five crops sold as GMO in the United States: canola, corn, soy, cotton, and papaya. While this diary addresses the topic of GMOs as a whole, the main focus is those five crops.
Other than papaya, the other four probably affect you whether you think they do or not. The animals you eat fed on corn and soy. Foods are laden with high fructose corn syrup made with corn. Foods contain corn or canola oil. Your clothes - which I hope you do not eat - are made out of cotton. (As a side-note, cotton is a bitch of a crop to grow. "The fabric of our lives" should be hemp. This week's Ecotalk said that 25% of all chemicals used in agriculture are used on cotton. Chew on that.) If you want to avoid GM foods (to the extent that you can), buy organic, and read labels.
Frankenfoods, as I like to call them, came to my attention as an issue the usual way. I was listening to Ring of Fire - this time I was driving back from my parents place in Chicago, probably after Thanksgiving. The local Air America affiliate WCPT is frustrating because of its weak signal, but on this drive it was my savior. The alternative listening choices in my car were the painfully distressed meows of my kittens, the entire catalog of Andrew Lloyd Weber, and various CDs sung in Mandarin Chinese.
The hosts of Ring of Fire, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Mike Papantonio (Bobby and Pap), are credible sources. No tinfoil hats there. You can listen to the particular episode of their show here. The show featured an interview with Deborah Koons Garcia, who you might know from her documentary The Future of Food (or from her marriage to Jerry Garcia). Rather than summarizing the interview upfront, I will use the interview as a general outline to guide this diary.
I recommend checking out The Union of Concerned Scientists if you are in the market for more information. I apologizing for the gratuitous quoting and paraphrasing and referencing of the UCS site, but I think they represent the most credible source - with the most balanced point of view - I could find. Other helpful sites are Non GM Farmers and The Organic Consumers Association, so long as you realize you are getting a one-sided point of view on each site.
Monsanto (a.k.a. Monsatan)
Monsanto, founded in 1901, grew up primarily as a chemical company. In their long and illustrious history, they created many products with which you are familiar. Monsanto introduced saccharin, caffeine, and vanillin to Coca-Cola. Later, it branched out into plastics, pesticides, aspartame (they bought it from Rumsfeld's company, G.D. Searle), bovine growth hormone, PCBs, and Agent Orange. Just to take a pause right here - does anyone else automatically recoil from the company was the leading supplier of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War?
The key Monsanto product that leads us into our discussion of GMOs is an herbicide called Roundup. According to Mother Jones, Monsanto markets Roundup as an "environmentally friendly" herbicide because its main chemical breaks down quickly. Just before the patent for Roundup was up, Monsanto came up with a clever gimmick to prolong their sales. They created genetically-modified "Roundup Ready" soybeans and cotton. Instead of spraying around the periphery of their crops, farmers could douse their entire fields, killing all other plants and leaving the soybeans and cotton.
Roundup Ready crops serves two purposes for Monsanto: first, it limits farmers who plant Roundup Ready crops to spraying with Roundup instead of other herbicides; second, it boosts the volume of Roundup sales because farmers can use more Roundup on their crops than they could before. An extra boon for Monsanto is the contract farmers sign, promising they will not give away or sell Roundup Ready seeds - or even save them to plant the next year.
Bt Corn illustrates another strategy employed in genetically-modified foods. Bt corn is named for a microorganism, Bacillus thuringiensis. A gene from that strain of bacteria is engineered into every cell. The gene protects the corn against a common corn pest, the corn ear worm. Last year I found one of these little guys in an ear of organic corn I bought at the farmer's market.
I cannot think of a time I have been more alarmed while cooking my usually benign vegetables, but as I look back, I don't know if I should have been upset or happy. Finding a pest in your corn is one (unpleasant) way to know it isn't Bt corn.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists site, the list of GMO corn manufacturers boasts Dow, Bayer, and DuPont among its ranks. For the record, each of these companies was named as one of the 10 worst companies: DuPont in 2005, Dow in 2004, and Bayer in 2003.
Patenting Life
If it seems odd to you that companies can patent life, you are not alone. The precedent was established by a 1980 Supreme Court decision in the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty. The court held that:
A live, human-made micro-organism is patentable subject matter under [Title 35 U.S.C.] 101. Respondent's micro-organism constitutes a "manufacture" or "composition of matter" within that statute.
Monsanto does not claim a patent over the plant, but rather over the genes and cells. Garcia accused Monsanto of buying up seed companies, patenting seeds, and suing farmers who end up with DNA on their property, even if they don't want it. In 2004, the case Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser went to the Canadian Supreme Court. Schmeiser's canola crop contained a significant percentage of Roundup Ready canola, which he did not purchase. Schmeiser postulates that the Roundup Ready seeds blew onto his field from a passing truck or similar. The court confirmed the validity of Monsanto's patent but ruled that Schmeiser did not have to pay Monsanto as Monsanto demanded.
The case highlights the issue of "genetic contamination" as well as the David-and-Goliath factor of Monsanto suing farmers.
One last troublesome note is Garcia's allegation that Monsanto destroys seed stocks in order to control them, a practice that leads to the extinction of many vegetables (I looked for more information on this and could not find anything to substantiate it - if you've seen The Future of Food and you can comment on it, please do).
Safety - To Our Health and To The Environment
The Union of Concerned Scientists site says that there is no generic problem with GMOs in general. That is, there is no one evil that we can accuse all GMOs of causing - instead, it is important to consider GMOs on a case-by-case basis.
My skepticism is rooted in the revolving door between industry and government - which is hardly unique to GMOs. Unfortunately, when the government is in bed with big business, science and public interest are not always the motivations for the government's actions.
In the case of GMOs, I think it's important to examine the history of a man named Michael Taylor. He worked at King & Spalding, a law firm that represented Monsanto. In 1991 he swung through the revolving door into government as the FDA Deputy Commissioner for Policy. There, he issued policy on food biotechnology and rBGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone - another Monsanto product that I'll probably take on next week). In 1994 he moved to the USDA as the administrator of Food Safety and Inspection Service. The revolving door swung back around in 1998 when he became the VP of Public Policy for Monsanto.
Taylor's history alone does not mean that GMOs are harmful - it is just one piece of the puzzle that should lead people to believe that GMOs deserve more scrutiny.
I strongly recommend reading the transcript of a speech given by Jane Rissler, a UCS senior staff scientist and 17-year veteran of ag biotech regulatory policy work, both at the EPA and in the public-interest community. She argues that the problem with the safety of GMOs lies with the current research, regulation, and oversight processes themselves. Her example of is below:
The monarch/Bt corn controversy sheds light on the EPA and USDA programs for engineered plants. Both had an opportunity to identify and resolve the monarch issue before commercialization. Neither did. Neither the USDA nor the EPA required companies, before approval, to submit appropriate data to resolve whether Bt-corn pollen is a threat to monarch butterflies. The USDA, quite commendably, is now moving to fund risk assessment research which we hope will resolve the issue. That resolution should have come years ago before Bt corn was approved.
But the problem is broader than the monarch butterfly. In December of last year, the EPA convened a Scientific Advisory Panel to examine the agency's nontarget testing program. A February 2000 report of that panel, available on the EPA website, confirms that the agency has yet to develop a strong program for assessing the environmental risks of pesticidal crops.
UCS, and academic scientists, have long criticized the USDA for not requiring companies to submit sufficient original, experimental data to support rigorous risk assessments.
If you start googling around, it's not difficult to find articles describing specific studies about the safety of GM foods to our health (I recommend the OCA and Non GM Farmers links from above).
Two issues I've seen again and again have to do with allergens and antibiotic resistence. In the first instance, the risk is that GM foods will bring new allergens into the food supply that allergic consumers will not know to avoid. In the second example, eating GM foods that have antibiotic-resistence genes may decrease the potency of antibiotics you are taking.
As for environmental harms, the UCS site begins by highlighting past "oops" experiences we can thank technology for: DDT and CFCs. The point of bringing them up is that the real world is an infinitely complex and diverse place that is hard to recreate or predict in even the best laboratories.
The first issue the site brings up are fairly obvious: GM crops can be so hardy they become weeds (like kudzu in the south) or they can transfer genes to other weeds. I didn't understand kudzu until I saw it on a trip to Atlanta last November. I'd heard my Alabaman friend talk about it but the term "invasive species" doesn't even do it justice. It looked like it was suffocating the trees in Atlanta. We don't need to engineer another kudzu.
The second risk listed on the UCS site is the potential of increasing harm done to the environment by changing patterns of herbicide use. Because GM crops are tied to the use of specific herbicides, growing these crops will also affect which herbicides are used and where. It might even lead to the evolution of herbicide-resistant crops. (I lost the article I had but I think this already happened in the case of cotton - it was either a weed or a pest that evolved to outsmart the GM cotton.)
The third problem - also mentioned by Garcia - is the harm done to insects, plants, and animals. By wiping out every single plant except for the desired crop, we put at risk insects (including the beneficial ones) and animals that feed on the other plants (or on the affected insects and so on up the food chain).
Last, the UCS site mentions the potential for GM crops to contribute to the creation of new or worse viruses.
Are GMO's All Bad?
No, not inherently. I kept trying to write a conclusion in my own words, but I think the Union of Concerned Scientists just nailed it here:
... do these products actually represent societal benefits? Certainly, the companies that develop and market them believe they have benefits, and commercial success is one gauge of the need for and usefulness of a product. But the inquiry must go deeper. Society must consider whether these products are needed and whether better alternatives exist for meeting those needs.
For example, are plants that tolerate chemical herbicides or long shelf-life tomatoes necessary? Why? Answering these questions turns out to be surprisingly complicated. Whether such products deliver genuine benefits depends on the goals of agricultural and food systems, and the alternatives available for meeting those goals.
If, for example, the goal is to transport tomatoes to markets far from the fields where they grow, then long shelf lives appear necessary. If, however, the goal is to market most produce locally, then long shelf lives are less important. Such differences in goals mark the difference between current industrial agriculture and a sustainable agriculture, which is gradually arising among organic farmers and others and which UCS advocates.
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Recipes
Yesterday was an exciting day at the farmer's market! My buddy and I extended our CSA by signing up for a summer fruit share. This week I bought cherry tomatoes, radishes, mustard greens, asparagus, German butterball potatoes, and maple syrup. Last week I bought the same potatoes for a soup and they made the creamiest, best potato-based soup I've ever had.
The complete stash of recipes is here, but here are two recipes I came up with while finishing up my CSA box from last week.
Wisconsin Sorrel Soup
The CSA newsletter recommended using sorrel in French sorrel soup. I checked out the recipe - 3 egg yolks and 1 c. heavy cream. Forget that! So I made my own version...
Prep time: 30 min; Total time: 30 min
Ingredients
* 2 tbsp. flour
* 2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
* 1 onion, diced (optional)
* 2 cloves garlic, minced (optional)
* 1 bunch sorrel
* 2 potatoes, diced (German Butterball potatoes strongly recommended)
* 4 c. vegetable broth
* 1-2 c. soy milk or low fat milk
* Salt and pepper to taste
Begin by making a roux. Mix together flour and extra virgin olive oil in a saucepan over medium high heat. Once it is mixed, add onions and saute until they are translucent. Add garlic and potatoes. Cover the saucepan.
After about 5 min, add broth and sorrel. Bring the soup to a rolling boil and then reduce the heat.
In batches, puree the soup in a blender. Last, add milk or soy milk and add the salt and pepper to taste.
Oatmeal Chive Scones
Prep time: 10 min; Total time: 30 min
Ingredients
* 2 1/4 c. spelt or whole wheat flour
* 1 c. rolled oats (uncooked)
* 1 tbsp. sugar or maple syrup
* 1/3 c. nutritional yeast (you can substitute grated cheddar cheese if you want)
* 1 tbsp. baking powder
* 1 tsp. baking soda
* 1/2 tsp. salt
* 4 tbsp. butter or Earth Balance
* 1 c. soy milk or skim milk or buttermilk
* 1/2 c. or more fresh chives, chopped
Preheat the oven to 375 F. In a blender, combine 2 c. flour (reserve the last 1/4 c.), oats, sugar, nutritional yeast, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add the butter or Earth Balance and blend until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs.
Transfer mixture to a large bowl and add the buttermilk. Stir with a fork until a soft dough forms. Add the chives and knead the dough 10 to 12 times.
Spread the reserved flour on cookie sheet. Turn the dough out onto the flour and roll it out with a rolling pin. Cut the dough into small triangles.
Bake for 18-20 minutes and allow to cool on the cookie sheet.
Makes 16 scones
