Eating Dangerously Read online

  Parents hear protests against the unknown allergens of genetically modified foods, and they wonder if every child with allergies needs to fear soda with high-fructose corn syrup made from genetically modified corn. Does the fact they once created Dolly the cloned sheep mean there are now space-age, test-tube replicas of other sheep in my lamb chop? Is Quorn that thing made from quinoa, or is it that fungus-based meat substitute that somebody said could be toxic?

  Surely someone must be on the lookout, sorting all these new foods for us before they become part of our dinner?

  A plethora of government agencies, nonprofit organizations, scientific groups and societies, and independent journalists track the waves of allegedly beneficial changes to the food supply in the United States, not to mention a seemingly formidable international gauntlet including the World Health Organization, various UN branches, and the European Union. Genetic engineering’s promoters complain that the thicket of regulators and agitating commentators is so dense it costs them more than $100 million in research to get one modified crop through to market.2

  Yet those watchdogs are overwhelmed by the quickening pace of technology and lobbying efforts by billion-dollar private corporations demanding the earliest possible payback on their lab investments. A business culture addicted to earnings reports every ninety days doesn’t have the patience for long-term, government-sanctioned safety studies that many scientists say are the only legitimate test of how a new food will behave inside human consumers years down the road. The main U.S. safety agencies admit that even if they were inclined to, they don’t have the time, people, or money to review each and every food gene alteration in the way they might demand for, say, a new cancer drug. A recent Food and Water Watch study cited an estimate that twenty new food-related products embedded with nanotechnology were arriving on world markets every month. Summing up its own inability to sip from the firehose of nanotech—not to mention genetically engineered crops, cloned animals, or “mock meat”—the FDA said, “Few resources currently exist to assess the risks that would derive to the general population.”3 Not exactly a consumer confidence builder.

  For many consumers, when it comes to what we eat, delight in the new has been largely replaced by shock of the “new and improved.” We’ve been falsely reassured too many times by Madison Avenue pseudoscientists in costume white lab coats, smiling through enthusiastic plugs for the pesticide DDT, the stimulating effects of tobacco, the lifesaving properties of asbestos, and countless other endorsements later retracted after damning revelations. Yet a good portion of consumers are also exhausted by the daily-terror approach of modern health writing, where the Monday report on the dangers of caffeine is contradicted by the Tuesday endorsement of coffee, and quickly overridden by the Wednesday warnings about margarine. Perhaps we could try to assess the future of food without celebration or condemnation, but with accurate description.

  Here are some of the more important and most complex issues encompassing the confusing intersection of food safety and food technology. From GE canola oil to gene-spliced salmon to nanosilver to (Test) Tubesteak, the final answers may be years or decades in the future, but the challenges are already arriving at the grocery store every day, by the truckload.

  Genetically Modified Foods

  The science of splicing or injecting new genes into old foods is thick with the alphabet soup of GEs, GMOs, GMs—and less formal, more insulting terms like Frankenfish or Mutant Food. But they all refer to the same thing—something you’ve eaten for a long time, wedded by force of science to something that didn’t use to live in the same chromosomal neighborhood. One gene of one plant melded to another, a bacteria bonded to a cereal grain gene, a living animal’s DNA injected into another’s.

  So you’re not sure about these genetic gymnastics, not eager to tuck into those suspect foods? Far too late. What many Americans don’t realize is that they’ve been eating genetically engineered foods for years now. Commodity experts estimate GE seeds are 70 to 90 percent of the field corn market, meaning that spliced DNA is in everything from breakfast cereal to chips to the high-fructose syrup of soft drinks.4 The great majority of soybeans and canola oil seeds grown in North America are also from genetically modified plants, with other crops following fast. Many seeds come with multiple GE protections built in, a “triple stack” that will fight off herbicide, boring insects, and rootworm.

  Humans have, in fact, been genetically modifying their food for thousands of years, since they first herded the biggest wild goats into the same pen for breeding, or chose the maize seeds for next spring from the largest ears of the fall harvest.5 Whether or not they knew what they were doing at the time, prehistoric humans selected the traits they needed most in their tenuous food supply and both replicated them and enhanced them. Selection led to crossbreeding, the mating of slightly different breeds within the same species to produce better traits, and then hybrids, mating different species with a goal of even bigger improvements. When mountain miners wanted a strong, smart pack animal that could go all day and never pitch over a cliff, they bred male donkeys with female horses and found themselves a genetically modified mule. Long before new forms of genetic engineering became controversial, vast majorities of modern commodity crops were as much a result of lab work as fieldwork, through painstakingly selected and nurtured hybrid seeds.

  The iteration of genetic engineering that worries so many of us now is that forced mating we mentioned earlier: a literal injection of genetic material from one plant species into the genetic heart of another to speed up nature’s evolutionary mixing and matching by hundreds of thousands of years. (The same goes for newly engineered animal species, as in the “Frankenfish” salmon that brought together in unlikely matrimony the genetic scraps of an Atlantic salmon, a slimy, bottom-feeding eelpout, and a majestic king salmon.) The Flavr Savr tomato was the first modified produce allowed for sale in the United States, in the mid-1990s, taking a common gene that promoted rot in fruit, flipping it into its “anti” version, and inserting it back into a stock tomato to create a fruit that would last longer on the shelf before ripening to mush.6

  The tomato of tomorrow never really caught on, in part because of bad press about alleged bad reactions in rodents that later turned out to be incorrect, and in part because the sponsoring company was a science lab and not an expert food marketer.7 Produce has never really caught on in mass-market genetic engineering, because costs and consumer tastes are too unpredictable for crops with relatively small niches.8 The cereal grains and factory-ready commodities such as cotton, however, were ripe for further engineering because of their uniform nature and enormous market potential. What if you could insert a gene that tolerated drought into traditional wheat, widely expanding the growing zones in hot spots like Africa or Asia? How about a genetic nutrition-booster injected into a crop like rice that is the life staple for billions of people?

  American researchers stuck close to their home markets at first, looking at industrialized U.S. agriculture and adapting the situation at hand to the situation they had created. Chemical and seed giant Monsanto already produced the most popular herbicide, Roundup, for millions of acres of Midwestern crops. Spray the fields before planting, and kill all the weeds. But what if you could produce a crop seed that could survive a Roundup assault? Then you could spray the herbicide all through the growing season, beating back the weeds that cut deeply into yields. Monsanto found a bacterium that could survive against Roundup, and they inserted it into corn seeds. The company then had massive success selling both the resistant seeds and the chemical herbicide to farmers wanting an edge.9 The concept led the company to dominate the market in a way that left critics in awe of the audacious strategy even as they decried the results. At the same time, other researchers were injecting seeds with extra genes that naturally produced an insect-killing toxin, turning the seeds into a crop-and-pesticide combo in every plant, referred to as Bt. Both the Roundup Ready seeds and the Bt se
eds received government approval in the 1990s, and they overwhelmed the market.10

  The alleged virtues of GE or modified crops are manifold: They grow more food on less land by reducing the yield lost to weeds and pests; they lower the amounts of potentially dangerous pesticides needed to beat back insects; some varieties need less fertilizer because they produce their own, saving costs for marginal farmers and reducing water-polluting runoff; nutritious gene combinations can turn a staid crop into a vitamin pill; and future drought-resistant combinations may soften the damage of global warming.

  But what do they do to your body? It’s not natural to consume a soup of mix-and-match genes, is it? If we put future food into our present bodies, isn’t that both an evolutionary and existential disaster?

  So far, the strongest argument against the safety of consumed, genetically modified foods is that they were not studied long enough before taking over store shelves. Actual, proven harm to individual consumers does not yet exist.11 Opponents, including many credible scientific and environmental groups with a history of responsibly compiling research, have raised potential flags regarding how human digestive systems will handle spliced genes from species never before in our diet. They have also pointed to allergy concerns, and the dangers of a food item that appears to be soy, for example, but which may contain a hidden gene that’s toxic for certain users.12

  As the two-decade mark of mass GE consumption approaches, those fears are not realized.13 Occasional studies claiming a tangible impact of GE foods on lab animals have been subsequently discredited by a wide range of scientists.14 No specific allergy issues have arisen, and many commentators have mentioned how hard it would be to sort new allergies from old in a nation where millions are already affected by peanut allergies, and many mainstream foods already held allergic dangers for various subgroups. A countervailing group of mainstream scientific bodies, from the World Health Organization to the National Academy of Sciences to the American Association for the Advancement of Science,15 have conducted wide-ranging literature reviews and GE assessments, and they declared them no more a threat than traditional food sources.

  Those trying to slow down GE foods are frustrated by the food safety questions. Commerce has rushed ahead without scientific proof of safety, they say, and we don’t know what we don’t know—because GE foods do not have to be labeled as such (a wider-ranging controversy we will revisit in a few pages), people have no idea they’ve been part of the largest eating experiment of all time. How could they identify a health effect of a substance when they have no idea they are ingesting it?

  “With a drug, people know they are taking that drug,” said Patty Lovera, a modified foods expert with Food and Water Watch. “We’ve missed that opportunity to even see if there are health changes fifteen years in, because we don’t know what people are eating.”16 Because the FDA’s resources in modified foods are so limited, they have thrown up their hands since the first rounds of GE seeds won approval, Lovera argues. Each new filing for a modified food source refers extensively back to the first one approved, building on the same shaky foundation. A good portion of university agriculture and food research, meanwhile, is sponsored by the same corporations profiting from modifications. Independent researchers are not allowed to buy patented seeds for scrutiny, and when someone does dare question the science, “they hit that researcher with a ton of bricks,” she said. Lovera noted instances where companies have demanded to review university researchers’ work before publication, or where professors have suffered tenure battles after research raising new issues about modified seeds.17, 18

  There is not a good scientific case against all GE foods, or even against most of them, said Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist for food and environmental issues with the Union of Concerned Scientists. The point is that even if the first ninety-nine approved GE foods prove safe, there won’t be a way of finding the dangerous one-hundredth because no long-term testing is required, and weak U.S. regulators turn much of the review into a voluntary system, he said. “We should not be paranoid about this,” he said. But at the same time, “I should not have to guess.”19

  The stronger objections to GE foods involve issues of long-term environmental and agricultural impact and socioeconomic fairness, not the immediate safety of the food itself.

  The socioeconomic objections center on GE expanding the corporate-controlled monoculture of American farming and food. Because GE foods take millions of dollars to develop and are then locked up in airtight patents by the corporations who sell them, only enormous farms with satellite-controlled tractors and chemical tanks grouped like high rises can afford to plant them. Big Agribusiness dominates the crops, then with its accumulating cash stores dominates Congress and any regulators who would dare to raise questions. Once planted en masse, environmentalists worry crop traits and matched herbicides will spill over into nearby organic fields or small-farm operations, turning the whole world GE under clouds of gene-modified pollen. U.S. agribusiness will wield even more power when developing nations come calling for modernized agriculture, protecting their prices with GE patents and squeezing out efforts for indigenous, locavore food culture. “It drives diversity out of the food supply, which is not smart in a climate that gets crazier every year,” summed up Food and Water Watch’s Lovera.

  GE promises all sorts of cuts to pesticide and herbicide chemical use, but it produces the opposite effect, opponents add. Weeds sprayed over and over again with Roundup and other herbicides eventually mutate “superweeds” that can resist the chemical assault.20 Those superweeds are already appearing and multiplying in fields planted with Roundup Ready GE seeds. Scientists are now developing other GE modified seeds that can resist even stronger chemicals, including one called “2, 4-D,” tagged fairly or unfairly as one of the components in the notorious Vietnam defoliant Agent Orange.21 (The most toxic substance in Agent Orange was a dioxin contaminant with another name.) More chemicals spraying around the world also means more exposure to farm workers on the corporate giants’ spreads, in addition to any farmers and rural residents living nearby. Taken together, the objections paint a picture of the food powers favoring centralization and corporate science, when a good portion of consumers are heading in the other direction, toward backyard chickens, organic vegetables, and getting to know the local farmer who grew their tomatoes.

  Genetic engineering’s proponents like to counter those disturbing uncertainties with disturbing certainties.

  Just as climate change threatens to scorch some long-fertile areas and drown others, economic development in Asia, Latin America, and soon, Africa, is lifting hundreds of millions of consumers to income levels where they can afford more calories. They want access to the same commodities, from corn flakes to beef steak to tofu, that Westerners have enjoyed for a century now.22 A British activist who led much of the charge against GE foods in their first years made a highly publicized about-face in 2012, with this mea culpa at the core of his reversal: in less than four decades, the world will have 9.5 billion people and will demand a 100 percent increase in food production from current levels. Organic techniques favored by foodies, Mark Lynas added, often yield only half the crops produced by much-reviled agribusiness farming. “Over a decade and a half with three trillion GM meals eaten, there has never been a single substantiated case of harm,” Lynas said, in his oft-circulated speech apologizing for previous opposition to food technology. “The risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food,” Lynas went on, “but that millions will be harmed by not having enough food, because a vocal minority of people in rich countries want their meals to be what they consider natural.”23

  GE skeptics who used to be aligned with Lynas, facing the reality of a GE-dominated food stream and the absence of immediate harm, have turned their efforts to universal labeling.24 You’re going to splice new genes into old foods, whether we like it or not? Fine. Tell us when you’re doing it, right there on the package and on the
menu, so we can make the ultimate capitalist gesture of choosing with our wallet.

  After years of battles on the federal and local level, the labeling issue may finally be headed toward a rational compromise. And that’s good for consumers, across the spectrum of worry about GE and food safety.

  The FDA has so far declined to require labels on GE foods. European government agencies have effectively halted the spread of GE foods across the sea by requiring labels, which food companies have until recently considered a kiss of death for their packaging.25 Agribusiness and its proponents in university science have long argued that since the GE crop staples are indistinguishable in nutritional value or health effects from traditional foods, labeling will only confuse and worry the consumer. “You can scare people in 30 seconds, but I can’t educate them that fast,” said a Penn State farm scientist. They get backing from a significant group of academy-level researchers as well, including a 2012 letter from the American Association for the Advancement of Science that reads like a papal directive: In the absence of any evidence of harm, no matter how hard people look, “legally mandating such a label can only serve to mislead and falsely alarm consumers.”26

  There are dissenters, and their influence appears to be growing rather than waning even as millions more GE-modified meals are eaten every day. The AAAS letter prompted an official protest signed by twenty-one doctors and scientists, saying the “Orwellian” dismissal of labeling “tramples the rights of consumers to make informed choices.”27 The right to know is a basic human right, the dissenters said. California’s Proposition 37 in 2012 was the first of many statewide efforts to mandate labeling where the FDA and other federal agencies won’t. It failed, but closely enough to be a tantalizing rallying cry for future efforts.28 The prolabeling groups accused the seed, chemical, and food companies of buying votes with corporate media campaigns, while defenders of GE said there was just as much self-interest in the ad campaigns backed by large organic food concerns. Compromises will likely rule the day. “It’s just so obvious—even if you love the technology, why shouldn’t they tell you what’s in there?” asked Patty Lovera of Food and Water Watch. Following a narrow defeat of labeling in California, major food-related companies such as Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi–Frito Lay started meeting in 2013 with labeling proponents and the FDA, seeking a national labeling standard.29 It will be hard for the seed companies to resist if the conglomerates that purvey their GE food to the public come out in favor of a national label. The final protest of the laboratories is that silly, easily frightened consumers won’t know what to make of it if a bag of Fritos says “May Contain Genetically Modified Materials.” That may be true. Yet many labels already use words like maltodextrin that very few people stop to understand. And still they buy.