Edible Media: Gene blues

Why we may one day bitterly regret GM crops

Posted by Tom Philpott at 3:10 PM on 03 Jul 2007

Read more about: food | agriculture | industrial ag | GMOs

Edible Media takes an occasional look at interesting or deplorable food journalism on the web.

I spent the weekend in Atlanta at the first-ever U.S. Social Forum -- an extremely interesting event, but not the place to go for someone needing to catch up on rest. Now I'm laid up with a sore throat, which gave me a chance to do today something I never get to do anymore -- curl up with the print version of the Sunday New York Times.

I especially like to dig into the business section, where the "paper of record" often deposits its most interesting stuff.

I liked Gretchen Morgenson's piece ($ub req'd) on how investors are suddenly fleeing risk -- meaning that the stock market boom of the past several years, built on leveraged buyouts, subprime lending, and various forms of dodgy financial engineering, may be be about to unravel.

But what really got my fevered brain ticking was Denise Curuso's article on changes in gene theory -- specifically, evidence challenging the idea that genes operate in isolation, with each sequence of the DNA tied to a single function.

In other words, the whole intellectual basis for the genetically modified seed business may be flawed.

Industrial food thrives on isolation technologies.

Think of sweetness. To produce sweet foods profitably, food manufacturers long ago learned to isolate the sweet element in sugarcane -- sucrose -- and produce it in mass quantities. (More recently, manufacturers perfected the tortured process, mostly political it turns out, of profitably reducing corn to fructose.)

In the process of reducing sugarcane to sucrose, everything that makes sugarcane a nutrient-rich whole food -- B vitamins, iron, trace minerals -- get stripped out.

In the industrial mentality, that's fine -- the point is sweetness, not health. And if health is a concern, there's an industrial solution for that, too -- vitamins and minerals can be isolated and synthesized from other substances, and used to "enrich" the sweetened product.

This sort of food production -- food as an amalgamation of isolated elements -- has thrived with the blessing of the FDA for decades, and continues unabated today.

Yet as Michael Pollan reported recently, the theory is unraveling in scientific circles. It turns out that human bodies require more than a bunch of isolates mixed together, dyed, and packaged. Nutrients work not alone, but within the context of whole foods. The vitamin C bound up in an orange gives us more than the equivalent amount of ascorbic-acid isolate; the latter can't replace the former in a healthy diet.

(From another piece from Sunday's Times, I learned that 80 percent isolated ascorbic acid acid used by U.S. food companies comes from China.)

Of course, the folly of what Pollan calls our "nutritionism" wasn't immediately obvious. You can eat "enriched" white bread or drink a Coke or citric-acid-laced Tang and not keel over dead. But as incidence of obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related maladies surges, nutritionism is looking more and more suspect.

Monsanto and other GM-seed companies like Syngenta and Dupont have applied a similar theory to seeds. They take what they see as a desirable trait -- say, the ability to withstand one of their own herbicides -- isolate it, and splice it into seeds for a crop like corn or soy.

In test plots and now in vast monocultural plantings, nothing much happens immediately that's obviously different from conventional corn and soy. For 10 years now, the FDA and USDA have reliably nodded their approval when the biotech industry comes out with a new gene-altered wonder seed.

The proliferation of GM crops has been stunning -- unprecedented in the history of agriculture. Global GM plantings surged from nothing in 1995 to 250 million acres today. By 2004 in the United States, 80 percent of all soy and 45 percent of all corn -- the two crops that prop up industrial food production -- were GM. (Since then, the biofuel craze has almost certainly pushed those numbers up.)

Shockingly, according to a recent report (PDF), one company -- Monsanto -- owns the proprietary GM traits for more than 90 percent of the gene-altered corn, soy, cotton, and canola planted worldwide.

To get back to to the Times piece, Denise Caruso informs us of a recent study by the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute and carried out by researchers around the globe.

"To their surprise," Caruso writes, "researchers found that the human genome might not be a 'tidy collection of independent genes' after all, with each sequence linked to a specific function, such as a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease."

Instead, she goes on, "genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and other components in ways not fully understood."

According to Caruso, the study directly challenges the basis for the whole biotech industry, including its Monsanto-dominated ag arm. These companies operate under the assumption that they can identify a gene, patent it, and splice it into a plant organism, and control precisely how the modified organism will behave in the field.

But if the new research is correct, Monsanto really has no idea what its Roundup Ready soy or Bt-corn (corn spliced with the Bacillus thuringiensis gene toxic to beetles) will really do when planted by the millions of acres in fields.

Of course, the industry has an easy answer to this concern: we've already increased plantings to a quarter-billion acres in ten years, and everything's fine! Or as reliable industry hack (and former FDA official) Henry I. Miller told Caruso, "both theory and experience confirm the extraordinary predictability and safety of gene-splicing technology and its products."

But for 40 years, food-industry execs have been saying the same thing about the processed, "enriched" junk they churn out, even as incidence of diet-related health maladies surges.

In reality, we have no idea what sort of long-term effect all of those gene-altered corn, soy, and cotton plants are having on ecosystems.

For story: Edible Media: Gene blues
10 Comments | Post a Comment

Long term thinking required?

You mean we're supposed to think about next quarter's returns too?

The 5% Project

by JMG at 3:19 PM on 03 Jul 2007

So?...

...what about the Social Forum? Can you tell us about it? Was environmentalism on anybody's agenda? Was anyone trying to link environmental concerns with other social problems? Link global warming to the economy, as in reconstructing the economy would be good for jobs? Social justice issues, anything about Hawken's Blessed Unrest movements? Maybe when your sore throat is better.

by Jon Rynn at 7:28 PM on 03 Jul 2007

GMOs: They're What's for Dinner

Andrew Kimbrell, founder and executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Center for Food Safety and the International Center for Technology Assessment, is interviewed on Alternet.

Nearly three quarters of all processed foods contain genetically engineered ingredients, but you'd never know it by reading package labels. Andrew Kimbrell discusses the risks of genetic engineering and how to avoid it.

Click below for "There's a Lot You Don't Know About What's in Your Food:"
http://www.alternet.org/story/55847/

by Karen Lee Orr at 7:41 PM on 03 Jul 2007

Really? No S*** Einstein...

When I read this article and the item regarding Gene's I could not help, but think those exact words.

Let me give you why I have been thinking this all along. I have lived in many many countries and the latest being Switzerland. Swiss are among those that live the longest. Every now and then I glance in the obituary and when I see people who died at 70 they usually add, "but he died way too early." Having people die at 80 to 95 is not rare in the obituary.

So how is that Swiss live so long? They climb mountains, no kidding here. It is not rare to see a 65 year old mountain biking up a 3000 ft mountain. And they eat very healthy and natural. The Swiss care about their food and for the most part any food produced in Switzerland is organic by default. Combine the two and you get long life.

But what made me really skeptical about the diet is something that happened in my family. My father got brain cancer and died at 56, and my mother got breast cancer. Both of my parents were German immigrants and cancer was essentially non-existent in either family tree. About 85% died of a heart attack or old age. I cannot remember any family member who died of cancer.

This made me wonder. Why would a family that never had cancer get whacked twice? Maybe it is a statistical outlier. Or maybe there is a problem in the North American diet? My mom when she got breast cancer completely changed her diet and it appears five years and then some later all is ok even though she is living in North America.

Makes you think, and it made me change my diet pronto...

What is the diet of the Swiss, my mother and I? Easy NO, and I mean NO processed food. Cook from scratch, fresh vegetables, pumper-nickel type bread, reasonable amounts meat, plenty of natural cheese, etc.

by ChristianHGross at 12:35 AM on 04 Jul 2007

we are what we eat

I don't like that we're being experimented on, essentially chemicalized and genetically modified by what they put into our seeds, farms, and foods.

I eat veg, so I at least avoid all animals, and I try to eat organic, but most restaurants don't serve it and it's more expensive.

Please visit Eco-Eating at http://www.brook.com/veg for where I'm coming from philosophically...

Eco-Eating: Eating as if the Earth Matters at www.brook.com/veg

by CyberBrook at 8:16 AM on 04 Jul 2007

FYI

Tom Philpot wrote...

<<< But what really got my fevered brain ticking was Denise Curuso's article on changes in gene theory -- specifically, evidence challenging the idea that genes operate in isolation, with each sequence of the DNA tied to a single function. >>>

and

<<< "To their surprise," Caruso writes, "researchers found that the human genome might not be a 'tidy collection of independent genes' after all, with each sequence linked to a specific function, such as a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease."

Instead, she goes on, "genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and other components in ways not fully understood." >>>

This is very old news. The notion of DNA not being tied to a single function or multiple genes affecting a single trait was covered in my freshman genetics course over two decades ago. Its okay to be worried about it, but if researchers are surprised, they are either faking it to save their asses or not qualified to work in the area.

It is corporate efforts to cover up potential hazards that destroy the possiblity of using this technology for good purposes. They should be ashamed of themselves. It is one more reason for the public to wrestle control over GMOs from corporations.

by wiscidea at 3:42 PM on 04 Jul 2007

Another study on problematic fructose effects

Yet another piece of evidence that over-reliance on fructose can have health consequences just came out at the American Diabetes Association meeting. Investigators randomly assigned overweight study subjects to drink either a fructose- or glucose-sweetened beverage for 10 weeks, and found that fructose consumption "promoted the development of an atherogenic lioproprotein phenotype and glucose intolerance/insulin resistance."
http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/ADAMeeting/tb ...

In other words, this study suggests that people who are overweight and consume fructose-containing beverages increase their risk of developing heart disease and diabetes.

This was a pretty small study (just 23 subjects), but it's not the only one to suggest that fructose may be problematic for reasons other than just calorie density.

by Liz Borkowski at 7:24 AM on 05 Jul 2007

Wrong Culprit

I liked Gretchen Morgenson's piece on how investors are suddenly fleeing risk -- meaning that the stock market boom of the past several years, built on leveraged buyouts, subprime lending, and various forms of dodgy financial engineering, may be be about to unravel.

Well, I'm sure you'd like to think that...but the woes of the stock market over the past 10 years are more attributable to the bicycle riding, green-wearing, tree-loving Google engineers (and Apple and Microsoft) who have used the media and meme-manipulation to kite up their stocks, pulling precious capital away from technology innovators who could help us develop a truly 21st century level of technology.

Add in the propensity of the Federal Reserve to support geriatrics rather than buoyant young engineers tryting to change the world by keeping interest rates unnaturally high and you've got the real culprits at bay.

by jabailo at 11:16 AM on 05 Jul 2007

Duh

I have a number of friends who are university biologists, and some of them work in genetic engineering (of bacteria, for research). To them, the idea of non-separable, non-isolated genes falls firmly in the category of what I like to call "the science of No Duh!". It seems to be widely understood among scientists that the model we have of genetics is broken. However, it's the only model we have, and it sort of works much of the time. So the publication record supports it, engineers use it, and non-technical folks readily believe that it describes what's really going on.

by GreenEngineer at 2:17 PM on 05 Jul 2007

With the advent of quantum theory

the original model of atoms has proven to be little more than a cartoon. However, it was sufficient to create atomic weapons and power.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

by biodiversivist at 7:10 PM on 08 Jul 2007

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