the un-american food machine - part I
by Andrew Bosworth
Published: February 6, 2008
Read Part II of this article.
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“When I was a kid, you could buy meat anywhere! Eggs - they had real butter! Not this crap!” The old man, Sal, was lamenting his life in the Malthusian future of 2022 AD. New York City’s 40 million people subsisted on crackers, whose secret ingredient was human flesh. Everyone was an unwitting cannibal.
The scene is from “Soylent Green,” a 1973 science-fiction film. Now, more than three decades later, life imitates art. Chicken is spiked with steroids, hormones and antibiotics. Junk food contains diarrhea-inducing fake fat. Genetic modification has breached the animal-plant divide, mixing and matching the genetic instructions for life: deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. And yes, we are becoming cannibals, bit by bit (or bite by bite), injecting human DNA into rice for human consumption.
Headline from the Washington Post: “USDA Backs Production of Rice with Human Genes.”
“The Agriculture Department has given a preliminary green light for the first commercial production of a food crop engineered to contain human genes, reigniting fears that bio-medically potent substances in high-tech plants could escape and turn up in other foods. The plan, confirmed yesterday by the California bio-technology company leading the effort, calls for large-scale cultivation in Kansas of rice that produces human immune system proteins in its seeds.” i
Apparently, this sort of thing is now called “pharming.”
Ordinary consumers in the United States are reluctant to break one of humanity’s oldest taboos: cannibalism. As Sigmund Freud pointed out, cannibalism is the only taboo in western society people seldom actually break, unlike homicide and incest.
Furthermore, the trend towards pharming plant-human hybrids seems like a gross departure from the lifestyle of the early republic, when America was a cornucopia of Old World and New World foodstuffs. So what’s the new solution? The Great un-American Food Machine has decided to leave all the Frankenstein stuff off the label; what you don’t know won’t hurt you.
Defenders of genetically modified food claim that civilization has always been involved in “selective breeding” and “animal husbandry,” and that genetic modification merely continues these responsible traditions. This claim, however, ignores that transgenic plants and animals acquire characteristics never possible in nature, like rushing to maturity in half the time. One could wait patiently for two million years - and never witness natural selection produce, by chance, a strawberry resistant to frost because a salmon’s “anti-freeze” gene somehow got inserted into the berry. Numerous scientists have concluded that transgenic organisms, as “evolutionary novelties,” can introduce a “Trojan gene” into normal populations, leading to a reduction in biodiversity or even species extinction. ii
Complexity theory reveals why genetically modified foods are smeared carbon copies of their originals. In any complex or living system, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the system displays qualities that transcend those of its components. This basic, timeless principle is evidently lost upon the minds of the best and brightest bio-engineers, proving that intelligence and foolishness can be two sides of the same coin. iii
Indeed, changing the parts of a living system is not like changing the parts of, say, a wooden boat. There, if one replaces a wooden plank it remains the same boat. The parts of a living system are not interchangeable; one small perturbation creates a much larger feedback effect, altering the entire system - degrading it, actually, unless one has more faith in a freelance bio-engineer than in billions of years of Nature or God.
Bio-engineers play in a Newtonian attic with rather dangerous toys. Consider the “DNA gun,” for example, which shoots tiny DNA-coated pellets through cell walls. At the microscopic level this reflects the subtlety of a double-barreled shotgun. Jonathan Campbell, a natural therapist, describes the fundamental problem with the bio-engineering worldview: “The central problem underlying all of this technology is not just its short-term benefits and long-term drawbacks, but the overall attempt to ‘control’ living nature based on an erroneous mechanistic view.” Indeed, “bio” and “engineering” are fundamentally incompatible.iv
Matamoros, Mexico: aaabos@gmail.com
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Read Part II of this article.
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i. Weiss, Rick. “USDA Backs Production of Rice with Human Genes.” The Washington Post, 2 March 2007, A02.
ii. Muir, William M. and Richard Howard. “Possible Ecological Risks of Transgenic Organism.” Department of Animal Sciences and Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. 1999.
iii. Gleick, James, Chaos: Making a New Science, New York: Penguin, 1988.
iv. Campbell, Jonathan. “50 harmful Effects of Genetically Modified Foods,” Natural Therapy Virtual Clinic. WWW: http://www.cqs.com/50harm.htm
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