Eating Dangerously Read online

  The labeling fight will intensify in coming years as genetic engineering moves past commodity crops and on to animals used for food. For those battles, environmentalists and natural food advocates have much more muscle on their side in the form of furious congressional members from frontline states. If you’re planning to make the first GE animal unleashed onto the public a double-modified salmon, you can expect to hear from an Alaskan delegation that retains a grizzly bear’s sense of diplomatic justice. When various interests ignore her efforts to block modified salmon, Alaskan Republican senator Lisa Murkowski tells them they can look forward to a visit from her to “discuss Frankenfish.”30

  Frankenfish is the scathingly dismissive name for a swimmer created by the AquAdvantage corporation. It just happens to be the nearest to market of dozens of modified fish species, which mix catfish, striped bass, or flounder with genes from other fish, mice, “or even human beings,” the Center for Food Safety warned.31 Chinook or king salmon genes spliced into a traditional Atlantic salmon allow it to grow twice as big, while cold-water, bottom-feeding eelpout genes push the salmon to feed and therefore grow year-round. The resulting fish would allow farming operations to get hefty specimens to market twice as fast as other salmon.32

  The AquAdvantage salmon seems like a boon to overfished oceans in an era where fast-developing nations rapidly catch up to Western countries in their taste for seafood as nutritious protein. Twice the fish in half the time—isn’t that a formula to save the world?

  Loosing that fish upon the oceans terrifies opponents even more than modified crops, which are too far gone to stop. Voracious, dominant GE salmon will escape leaky industrial fish farms and breed their way through the world’s oceans, threatening the extinction of the original Atlantic species, objecting scientists have concluded.33 Fast-growing GE salmon crowded into onshore pens will be so stressed they’ll require antibiotics to stay healthy, and human consumption of the antibiotic-permeated flesh will exacerbate drug resistance problems, they add. AquAdvantage, which has tried to bring the fish to market for years, says the fish eggs will be sterile so any escaped GE salmon can’t reproduce, and that the adult fish won’t ever touch the ocean.

  Fanciers of “funny fish”? Get reacquainted with the Alaska delegation.

  “You keep those damn fish out of my waters,” Representative Don Young (R-Alaska) told the Washington Post. “It will ruin what I think is one of the finest products in the world.” Of the AquAdvantage corporate parent, Young said, “I can break that company.”34

  While not giving an inch on any of their other objections, food safety advocates say if all else fails they will still demand labeling for any modified fish or subsequent engineered food animals. “Should FDA decide to approve the AquAdvantage GE salmon despite our opposition, clear, mandatory labeling is an absolute must to allow consumers to make informed decisions,” the Center for Food Safety wrote.35 Again, the argument seems more than fair. The best argument against labeling GE corn is that once it’s in your cornflake, there’s no way to ever distinguish it from any other ear of corn ever grown. But the super-salmon is a bigger threat, producing a big fish never before seen, which could eventually become the GE whale in every ocean. The least we should know is what exactly it is that we’re throwing on the grill.

  Cloning

  Cloned animals should be far less of a food safety concern for American consumers in coming years. Not because the food industry hasn’t tried, but in large part because the economics of the god-playing science haven’t worked out as planned.

  From the purest food safety standpoint, a “cloned animal issue” doesn’t exist. The clone is an exact replica of the copied animal, by definition down to the very DNA. Food safety for that new animal is only as good, or as bad, as in the original animal.36 A steer cloned for beef must still be slaughtered and packaged properly to avoid E. coli contamination; it has no advantage or disadvantage over the original.

  The operating assumption for years in cloning science was that labs would be able to produce such perfect food animals, whether all-star milk cows or best-bacon fattened hogs, that old breeding methods would be cheaply and thankfully replaced. Every steak would be top choice, every egg grade double-A. Researchers have begun adding in fatty-acid producing traits from earthworms, of all creatures, to farmyard animals, and then cloning those to a new level of alphabet soup: G(enetically) E(ngineered) C(lone). But a funny and disturbing thing happened on the way to the farmyard. Embryos that seemed perfect in the petri dish just wouldn’t cooperate months later when leaving the mother animal’s womb. A high percentage of cloned animals falter after birth, with defects or abnormally short lifespans, for reasons science hasn’t completely explained.

  The FDA declared cloned meat and milk safe for eating in 2008, but very little has reached the food supply.37 The expense of producing enough survivable, full-fledged clones makes the technique incompatible with the factory-farming scale of American beef cattle, hog farming, or chicken warehouses. Artificial insemination, though, allows clone offspring to dominate certain kinds of breeding. Companies specializing in the top agricultural sires select and copy those with the best traits, then ship vials of semen around the world to be “mated” with conventional mother animals. A Penn State animal expert estimates the great majority of U.S. Holsteins—the most popular breed of dairy cattle—are the offspring of just fifty bulls.38 Clearly, whether cloning catches on or not, we have radically wrenched control of the farm gene pool from “natural” sources.

  The few cloned or cloned-offspring cattle, hogs, and other animals do grow old and go out of useful farm service. The FDA asked farmers and ranchers to voluntarily keep such animals out of the human food supply, but that was long before the FDA itself reviewed the science and declared cloned food to be safe for consumption. Aged-out clones do end up in our food, even if in infinitesimal portions. That’s why most food activists and consumer groups have once again demanded labeling for any foods that contain cloned stock. They’ve had no more luck there than in other labeling fights—the FDA said since no one could tell the food apart on a molecular level, there’s no reason and therefore no rule to label.39

  Irradiation

  There’s another potentially game-changing food production technology that you won’t have to worry about much in the near future. But be careful what you hope against—this particular technology, which has been “the future of food” on and off for decades now, could be preventing major illness and saving hundreds of lives a year if implemented today.40 Irradiation’s pariah status can be blamed as much on intransigent consumers and opportunistic food activists as it can on any problems with the actual science.

  Food irradiation, according to the CDC’s chief epidemiologist for foodborne diseases, could stop close to a million infections, 8,500 hospitalizations, and 350 deaths each year even if only half the beef, pork, and poultry in the United States were treated before shipping.41 With more and more national pathogen outbreaks coming on the green produce side of the food ledger, imagine how many more illnesses could be stopped by existing irradiation technology applied to fruits and vegetables. Frustrated epidemiologists and farm economy experts have two words to describe ongoing opposition to irradiation: “a tragedy,” as Penn State’s Terry Etherton puts it.

  “We must begin to use food irradiation if we are really to make a difference in food safety,” argues Michael Osterholm, of the Center for Infectious Disease Research at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, echoing many of his colleagues.42 It’s an argument that for years has had the official stamp of approval, if not much public relations support, from the FDA.

  So why is only 1 percent of the current meat supply irradiated before consumption? And perhaps an even smaller percentage of produce? Because the industry is convinced you as the consumer can’t stand the idea, whether or not you actually understand it, and you are not willing to change your mind.

 
Irradiating food does not mean sticking it in a nuclear reactor core and raising the control rods. It uses one of three different technologies to focus existing particle energy onto food, bumping out free radicals that then kill the DNA of bacterial pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella. Viruses like norovirus take higher, potentially aesthetic-damaging levels of irradiation to kill, and they are not usually part of the debate. Proponents liken the process to any other outside force used to change the state of food, whether a microwave for warming, pickling for preserving, or freezing for storage. No “radiation” lingers inside treated food; only one of the processes even uses radioactive material to generate the ionizing energy, and none of that material goes anywhere near the food.43

  The FDA and many other national and international agencies have reviewed all existing science on what irradiation does to food, looking for signs of harm to the end consumer. They haven’t found any. Environmental groups say the free radicals produced “could” affect the food in unknown ways, but scientific analysis of the nutrition content and chemical makeup of irradiated foods shows no impact at approved doses. The Government Accountability Office summed it up for Congress in 2010: “The safety of irradiated foods has been extensively studied and has been endorsed by the World Health Organization, CDC, USDA, and FDA,” with approval in fifty-six countries.44

  One reason consumers still shy away is that irradiation is a rare area where labeling has stuck. The FDA and USDA both require treated foods to carry a “radura” symbol indicating they have undergone the process, with the words irradiation or radiation included in the description. Though most consumers are happy to “nuke” their frozen chicken in a microwave before putting it on the grill, they don’t want to see that it’s been “prenuked” by their supplier. Consumer groups have also been successful in fighting adoption of the irradiation process by raising questions about added costs and by charging that irradiation would become a last-second band-aid for dirty suppliers unwilling to do the hard work of cleaning up slaughter lines and packaging centers.

  “It hits people at a gut level,” said Lovera of Food and Water Watch. “What is wrong with the food that you have to treat it at this level to make it safe?”45

  It is true that cost has been a hindrance, with major suppliers fighting to shave pennies off bags of lettuce or dimes off pounds of meat in order to win the rights to shelf space at tough negotiators such as Costco, Kroger, Walmart, and more. Meat processing is more centralized in the United States and could likely withstand the added expense of mass irradiation machinery. But highly perishable produce would need to be transported long distances to warehouses large enough to make the volume-cost equation work, and farmers won’t push for that without a sense the consumer would buy the result.

  A failure in marketing has undercut the technology as well. Companies have tried to sneak through irradiated foods without fanfare, with a few minor exceptions, rather than touting the extra safety step as a desirable feature. Seattle food safety attorney Bill Marler points out in speech after speech to industry officials that yes, consumers appear to have an instinctive dislike for the word radiation.46 But, he adds, they also have a visceral hatred for words like E. coli and kidney failure and outbreaks. In the worst spinach outbreaks, entire stores empty of the bagged greens, and sales don’t just decline, they drop to zero. Why wouldn’t more food marketers take a chance on the power of modern mass marketing to improve the reputation of a proven food safety step?

  The FDA has quietly considered helping out by pondering a change of the label to less frightening words, such as cold pasteurization, which, while an obvious euphemistic ploy, is at least as accurate as irradiation. But consumer groups have risen up in arms when they hear of the proposed changes, and with an apparently disinterested food supply chain, irradiation has languished as an academic favorite and populist reject. One of the few American name brands going full force with irradiated food is Omaha Steaks.47 All the ground beef the storied company sends out has been treated first with in-house irradiation. Sales that began from one custom butcher shop have increased every year, beyond $460 million in annual sales. “Our research and development and quality assurance teams did extensive testing to determine that irradiation had absolutely no impact on the taste or the nutritional integrity of our ground beef,” said communications director Beth Weiss. After some initial questions from concerned customers when Omaha Steaks in 2000 said all of its ground beef products would be irradiated, many customers now seek out the products precisely because of the reassurance, Weiss said. The company believes it is the only one shipping treated ground beef nationwide. Though its own system is designed solely for ground beef and burgers, company officials feel irradiation would work successfully on a wide variety of consumer foods.

  Nanotechnology

  The food technology of the future that may well define “eating dangerously” for years to come, nanotechnology, may already be in your refrigerator. In fact, it may actually be your refrigerator.

  Racing far ahead of government study or control, nanotechnology—or the science of extremely small particles of known materials, with valuable properties—is already embedded in refrigerator produce drawers,48 sippy cups, tennis jerseys, and sports socks as a bacteria-fighting agent. Packaging companies join with food giants to research unique plastic film or trays whose nanoparticles sense the growth of pathogens or spoilage and change color to warn suppliers and consumers. (Green steak package = good. Red steak package = eat vegetarian tonight.)49

  A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. Nanotechnology manipulates basic materials like silver on a microscopic level, smaller than individual human cells. As one science blog explained it, if a nanoparticle was as big as a football, then a doughnut would be the size of New Zealand. The scent of salt on an ocean breeze is the result of natural nanoparticles permeating the mist we walk through. A Georgia Institute of Technology professor described the advance in manipulation this way: Compared to the particle control allowed by nanotechnology, existing manufacturing and chemical-mixing techniques are the equivalent of assembling LEGO blocks while wearing boxing gloves.50 Imagine a scientist at the control of a computer screen, in touch with a silver particle thousands of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, sending signals to the nanomessenger to maneuver in your bloodstream and destroy a concentration of E. coli infection in your intestines. Or imagine a golden French fry still dripping in canola oil; instead of worrying about the fats in the canola oil, you could be reading a label on the bottle of oil reassuring you that nanoparticles embedded in the oil will block cholesterol from entering your blood stream and clogging your arteries. Other researchers are looking for nanoparticles that could seek out the Campylobacter that, as we’ve seen, contaminates so much fresh chicken sold in the United States, and latch onto it in a way that neutralizes it as a pathogen.

  The allure is that it’s a wild and wide-open technology, ripe for exploration and exploitation. And the danger is exactly the same. You think the governments had a hard time keeping up with genetic engineering in seeds? Nanotechnology has entered American kitchens almost without government comment.

  “A research strategy for addressing possible human health or environmental risks is not in place,” ran one bleak assessment from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies. “There is no evidence that government oversight bodies are ready to conduct the kind of thorough reviews that these exciting but untested innovations demand.”

  Environmental and health groups warn that what we don’t know about the effects of nanotechnology is as massive as the particles are small. They worry about the embedded silver particles in packaging rubbing or washing off into food. They fear for worker safety in nanoparticle manufacturing, in the way we should have worried about asbestos workers long before we actually did.51 They wonder what happens to carbon, silver, and any number of other useful materials when they slough off produ
cts into watersheds or gather in landfills in unforeseen concentrations. The nanoparticles are powerful because the minute-sized materials behave differently in nature than larger particles of the same material. Size matters. But can that different behavior be perfectly controlled and affect only the one thing scientists want it to affect? Let’s say that canola oil successfully delivers the microscopic package of cholesterol blockers into the heart. What else is it going to do once it gets there? History is an ever-growing stack of technological advances, each with a flip side of unintended consequences.

  9

  So Now You’re Sick

  There is no such thing as stomach flu.

  It’s next to impossible to do the right thing about your foodborne illness if you can’t even call it by the right name. So let’s dispel one of the great lingering mythologies of medicine, uttered perhaps thousands of times a day across the United States. It’s not a touch of the “stomach flu” that ruins both ends, so to speak, of an otherwise normal day.