Feeding Frenzy
Americans are suddenly outraged about biotech food. What
took so long?
By MICHAEL POLLAN
New York Times Magazine
Dec 13, 1999
Gazing nervously across the Atlantic at European
outrage over genetically modified food, industry and government
leaders have been quick to reach for words like
"hysteria" and "madness." How else to explain
the uprooting of biotech crops in English fields? Or naked
protesters in Rome pelting American cabinet secretaries with
genetically engineered ("G.E.") soybeans? It's
irrational, surely, to reject out of hand such a shiny new
technology, especially one that comes with the seal of approval
of American regulators (the vaunted Food and Drug Administration,
no less).
Stylistically, too, the European protests seem so old. There they
go, those Brits, indulging their Luddite fear of the new,
actually taking seriously a prince (a prince!) who declares that
this technology lacks the sanction of God. And the French!
Hopelessly sentimental, urinating in protest on shipments of
high-tech seed and nattering on about "culinary
dispossession" as if this were 1968. "Europe seems to
be gripped right now by a collective madness," Senator
Richard Lugar suggested during a visit to Germany last summer.
"And we don't want that to spread to the rest of the
world."
Since then, of course, the "madness" has spread;
witness the events in Seattle. In a global economy, protest moves
as easily across borders as products.
In recent months, activists dressed as monarch butterflies have
popped up in London, Chicago and Washington (as well as Seattle),
reminders of a famous recent study at Cornell that found biotech
corn may pose a threat to the beloved insect. A cliche of chaos
theory holds that the flutter of a butterfly's wing in, say,
Timbuktu, can set off a hurricane half a world away.
So it was with these butterflies in Ithaca, who moved the biotech
story from the business pages to the front pages. For most
Americans, it came as news that there were already some 20
million acres of biotech corn planted in the United States. You
mean we're already eating this stuff? And how come nobody thought
of doing these tests 20 million acres ago?
The wonder is that it has taken so long for the political debate
about G.E. food to reach our shores. One theory about why
Europeans got so hysterical so quickly about G.E. food is that
they lack a trusted regulator like the F.D.A. protecting their
food supply. Sounds rational enough, until you discover that the
F.D.A.'s "regulation" of biotech is voluntary;
companies decide for themselves whether to submit a new biotech
food to the agency for review. In other words, the agency's
oversight of biotech food has been based less on law and science
than on faith.
Last year, the Center for Food Safety, a public-interest group,
sued them F.D.A., charging that its 1992 rules covering biotech
food were illegal because the agency had failed to seek public
comment or conduct a thorough scientific review. The agency's
response was alarming: since we have no regulations concerning
biotech food, they can't be illegal. Just last month, seven years
after first approving G.E. food, the F.D.A. held its first public
hearings about it.
The industry and its regulators evidently didn't think we needed
to be informed that our entire food supply was about to be
transformed. After all, Americans are by now so far removed from
the farm that we know remarkably little-at least compared with
the Europeans-about the processes by which food finds its way to
our plates. Food? That comes from the supermarket. So who was
going to notice or care if one more high-tech link was quietly
added to a food chain already so long and intricate? We are the
people who eat Olestra, after all.
Labeling was rejected out of hand-too cumbersome and too risky.
For who, given the choice, would reach for the spuds with the
biotech label?
Right there, in the produce section, lurks the question that goes
to the heart of what it means to be rational or hysterical about
biotech food. What if I approach the matter as rationally
as possible and decide which vegetables to buy based on a strict
"cost-benefit analysis"? First, I'll need a little
information-a label (which we may yet get: last month a bill was
introduced in Congress calling for the labeling of biotech food).
Next, I'll need to know what benefits these novel foods
offer. According to the industry that makes them, today's biotech
crops (like Round-Up Ready soybeans that resist herbicides, and
potatoes and corn that produce their own pesticide) offer plenty
of advantages to farmers. They acknowledge, however, that the
benefits to consumers are negligible. The food is no cheaper,
safer or tastier.
Now add to this calculus what we know about the risks. None to my
health have been established, but then, no one's looked very long
or hard, either. So: probably safe, but no guarantee. As
for risks to the environment, several have already been
identified-the threat to butterflies, the prospect of superweeds
and superbugs.
The cost-benefit analysis seems clear: I'd have to be crazy to
buy this stuff.
The industry realizes that, in its case, an educated consumer is
not its best customer, so lately it has adopted a new
tack-suggesting my produce-aisle calculus is shortsighted and
selfish. That's because the real benefits of genetically
engineered food will be reaped in the future by hungry people in
the third world. Some day, "golden rice" will nourish
the malnourished and bananas will be re-engineered to deliver
vaccines.
The industry, in other words, is asking consumers to do something
it has yet to do itself: Forget rational self-interest, and act
on faith. Maybe Monsanto and the others are sincere. So bring on
the golden rice! And what will they say about this epiphany in
the aisles of my supermarket or on Wall Street? A word leaps to
mind: hysterical.
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