Food Fight Read online

  ALSO BY MCKAY JENKINS

  ContamiNation

  Poison Spring (with E. G. Vallianatos)

  Bloody Falls of the Coppermine

  The Last Ridge

  The White Death

  The Peter Matthiessen Reader (editor)

  The South in Black and White

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by McKay Jenkins

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Most Avery books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write [email protected].

  Ebook ISBN 9780698409835

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Jenkins, McKay, 1963— author.

  Title: Food fight : GMOs and the future of the American diet / McKay Jenkins.

  Description: New York : Avery, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references

  and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016054194 (print) | LCCN 2016056950 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781594634604 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780698409835 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Transgenic plants. | Crops—Genetic engineering.

  Classification: LCC SB123.57 .J46 2017 (print) | LCC SB123.57 (ebook) | DDC

  631.5/233—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054194

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_2

  For my teachers, my students, and my family

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY MCKAY JENKINS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE: Square Tomatoes

  Part One

  ROOTS

  1. Are GMOs Safe? Is That the Right Question?

  2. The Long, Paved Road to Industrial Food, and the Disappearance of the American Farmer

  3. Mapping and Engineering and Playing Prometheus

  Part Two

  SEEDS

  4. The Fruit That Saved an Island

  5. Trouble in Paradise

  6. Fighting for That Which Feeds Us

  Part Three

  FRUIT

  7. Feeding the World

  8. The Plant That Started Civilization, and the Plant That Could Save It

  9. Can GMOs Be Sustainable?

  10. The Farm Next Door

  EPILOGUE: Getting Our Hands Dirty

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  Square Tomatoes

  Back in 1994, when I was pulling down four bucks an hour grading papers and teaching college students how to write, a friend told me about a can’t-lose investment scheme that was sure to lift me from my economic doldrums.

  Forget about investing in Amazon.com, he said. Here’s what you need to get into: Square tomatoes.

  They’re going to be great, he said breathlessly. They’ve had their genes altered by scientists! They stay ripe longer, and soften more slowly, and because they’re square, they can be stacked for shipping, which will bring transportation costs way down. It’s like the laboratory has taken nature and made it better!

  The company that makes them will make a fortune, my friend said. And so will we!

  There was much truth to what my friend told me, and a good bit of misinformation as well. The product in question turned out to be the Flavr Savr tomato, a newfangled plant designed by a biotech company called Calgene. The Flavr Savr had indeed been designed not for exquisite taste, or enhanced nutrition, but to plug into an industrial food system already rapidly replacing traditional farming practices. Forget small farmers selling their fruit to their neighbors; this was big business. That year, 4 billion dollars’ worth of industrial tomatoes were being picked (and shipped) while still hard and green, then reddened with ethylene gas before hitting the supermarket shelves like crates of billiard balls. The genetically altered Flavr Savr, by contrast, was designed to ripen on the vine, but was still tough enough to resist rotting. This meant it could survive both mechanical harvesting and the thousand-mile truck to market.

  In 1994, after three years of negotiations with government regulators, the Flavr Savr became the first genetically modified food approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be sold in the American supermarkets. Rather than being declared formally “safe,” the Flavr Savr was considered the “substantial equivalent” of a normal tomato. At the time, few people complained, and suspicious critics of genetic engineering were largely drowned out by cheerleaders in industry and the press. Connie Chung, Jane Pauley, and Katie Couric all reported on the Flavr Savr on national television; on NBC Nightly News, Tom Brokaw said the tomato “stays riper, longer than the nonengineered variety, and they say it’s tastier.”

  To be honest, as a budding English professor, I could never muster much enthusiasm for a product spelled Flavr Savr. The phonetically engineered name offended my ear even before I considered the tomato’s provenance or taste, or the many ethical questions surrounding its creation. I decided to save my money, and keep grading papers.

  But the Flavr Savr, it turned out, was just the beginning of what would become a food revolution. Soon I started hearing stories about another tomato, this one created by a company called DNA Plant Technology, which was being outfitted with genes from an Arctic flounder. These “fish tomatoes,” the company hoped, would make plants resistant to frost and cold storage, making them easier to grow in northern climates.

  In 2001, researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Toronto unveiled a third tomato, this one capable of growing in salty soils—a good thing, since modern irrigation practices were damaging soil so much that the world was losing 25 million acres of cropland a year.

  The fish tomatoes never made it to market. So far, neither have the salt-tolerant tomatoes. The Flavr Savr tomatoes made it to market briefly, but they were a commercial flop; the agrochemical giant Monsanto bought the company in 1996, and dropped the product. The ingenuity of a human-engineered tomato never quite overcame the consensus that the Flavr Savrs tasted terrible. As for the Flavr Savr being square? Well, that turned out to be untrue. Blocky tomatoes had in fact been cultivated by California plant breeders in the 1950s, to make mechanical harvesting easier and to prevent them from rolling off conveyor belts, but squareness was never part of the Flavr Savr profile. This myth was just the first of what would become a long series of myths that continue to tangle themselves around engineered food like aggressive vines.

  Now, more than twenty years later, these moribund tomato experiments seem almost quaint. Today, nearly all of our calories—that is to say, nearly all of our food—are grown from genetically modified pl
ants. Chances are that three-quarters of everything you’ve put in your mouth today—the eggs, the yogurt, and the cereal; the chicken sandwich, the tortilla chips, the mayonnaise, and the salad dressing; the cheeseburger, the french fries, the soda, the cookies, and the ice cream—were processed (or fed) from plants grown from seeds engineered in a laboratory. Same for the food you feed your baby and the food you feed your dog.

  The reason for this is simple: The American diet is composed almost entirely of processed foods that are made from two plants—corn and soybeans (and canola, if you want your food fried). Their seeds, full of dense calories, can be broken down and reconstituted into an infinite variety of prepackaged foods. The vast majority of the 40,000 food products Americans choose from every day are built from ingredients made from engineered plants. This includes almost anything made with high-fructose corn syrup, vegetable oil, or sugar—which is to say, almost all processed food. They can also be ground up and fed to the animals who provide our boundless appetite for meat and dairy products. Fully 85 percent of the feed given to cattle, hogs, and chickens is grown from genetically modified crops. There’s more: About half of the sugar we consume is grown from engineered sugar beets. Genetically modified wheat has not yet hit the commercial market, but some of the biggest seed and chemical companies in the world have been working on it for years and have it ready to go.

  Strangely—and despite the fact that we’re talking about plants—the one place you mostly won’t find engineered food is in the produce aisle. Your carrots, your peaches, your lettuce—they are all grown the old-fashioned way. (This, by the way, is true whether or not the produce is labeled “organic.”) But travel to the middle of your supermarket—or into most fast-food restaurants, convenience stores, or gas stations—and you will discover GM foods at every turn.

  Depending on whom you ask, “genetically modified organisms,” or more simply “GMOs,” represent either a great stride forward in the history of food production or are part of a destructive and dangerous system that allows global food companies to radically damage our land and water, control the way we eat, and flood our bodies with unhealthy food.

  At the most basic level, genetic engineering is a crop-improvement technique, one of many used by plant growers, to alter the quantity, quality, and usefulness of the plants used to make food. A GMO is a plant grown from a seed genetically engineered to express a specific set of traits. These traits can range from an increased tolerance to floods or drought (a critical need given rising global temperatures) to beneficial nutrients (like rice that produces its own beta-carotene) to an improved resistance to certain viruses or insects. Such experiments—often designed by scientists at universities or nonprofit research centers—hold tremendous potential for improving the lives of people around the world. Childhood blindness in Asia, insect infestations in Africa, famines caused by typhoons in the Indian subcontinent: all are problems being addressed by GMO researchers around the world.

  But it is also true that the giant agrochemical companies that produce the vast majority of the world’s GMOs do very little of this work—despite their frequent claims that GMO technology can feed the world. These companies, like their cousins in the pharmaceutical industry, are far more interested in creating billion-dollar products for the American consumer market than they are in developing products—cassava, rice, sorghum—that people in the developing world actually eat. In fact, just one-half of 1 percent of American food exports actually goes to developing countries with dire food needs, a recent study by the Environmental Working Group shows. Fully 86 percent goes to wealthy, highly developed countries in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. Indeed, far from solving problems, GMO-based industrial farming actually contributes both to a wide variety of health problems, like obesity, diabetes, nutritional deficiency, and exposure to pesticides, and ecological problems, like water pollution, soil depletion, and a profound drop in the biodiversity of plants, animals, and insects. There’s a reason the monarch butterfly has become a symbol for anti-GMO activists: Monarch food supplies have been erased by chemical sprays applied to hundreds of millions of acres of monoculture GM crops. Nationwide, monarch populations are down by 96 percent. So when companies say GMOs are necessary to “feed a starving world,” the slogan can sound empty, cynical, a bait and switch.

  In the United States, and increasingly in the developing world, GMOs are planted not to improve global nutrition but to maximize corporate profits through the production of corn and soybeans, which are then funneled into a global system of processed food and industrial meat. In order to support production, they are engineered to tolerate vast quantities of chemical sprays, which are often made by the same companies that make the seeds themselves. These sprays significantly damage both human health and environmental integrity. And because only large companies can fund most GMO research and development, they patent any seeds they create, which means they can control how and by whom they are used. Since time immemorial, farmers developed, saved, and traded seeds from one year to the next, bartering their way to better, more fruitful crops. No more. Now, GM seed companies force farmers to sign agreements that they will not save or share seeds, and hire investigators to badger (or sue) them when they do. As a result, our food supply is essentially controlled by a very small number of enormous biotech companies, most of which got their start making explosives, plastics, and pesticides.

  This trend has given rise to a symbiotic but imbalanced relationship between these companies and our government. Because of their size and power, companies hold tremendous sway over federal food policy, from the way food and chemicals are (or are not) regulated to what kinds of farms (and food companies) receive hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies to how much information companies need to disclose about their processes and products. The companies that design and sell GM seeds are some of the biggest in the world, and yet they are oddly invisible. You may have heard the names Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow, but these company names do not appear anywhere on your cereal box. In 2009, the top six agrochemical companies (Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow, plus Syngenta, Bayer, and BASF) earned a combined $27.4 billion in seed sales and $44.4 billion in chemical sales. Collectively, they control two-thirds of the world’s agrochemical market. By 2019, the global agrochemical industry is expected to reach a value of $261 billion. And since several of the biggest companies are in the process of merging, their influence will soon be consolidated further.

  The closer you look at the GMO debate, the more you are confronted with questions and paradoxes and passionate believers on all sides. Take, for example, the seemingly innocuous question “Are GMOs safe?” A great many scientists say altering a plant’s genes in a laboratory is merely one incremental improvement in a long history of plant breeding, that GMOs are among the most studied—and thus the safest—foods ever produced, and that there is absolutely nothing to worry about. A library of scientific reports, and reputable organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, support this claim.

  But such pronouncements are less than entirely satisfying, given that many GM crops are grown (indeed, are designed) to be sprayed with hundreds of millions of pounds of petrochemical insecticides (to kill bugs) and herbicides (to kill weeds). Whether or not genetically altered seeds themselves are benign, the chemicals that accompany them are not. The World Health Organization recently declared glyphosate, an herbicide sprayed on Monsanto’s Roundup Ready food crops around the world and long considered a relatively tame herbicide, to be a “probable human carcinogen.”

  The agrochemical companies—and the giant food-processing companies they supply with grains—have argued vigorously that GMOs are entirely safe. Yet when market demands change—when consumers express fears about GMOs—some of these same companies boast long and loud when they remove them from their products. In a nod to anxious mothers, the Hershey Company says it will stop using GM sugar beets to make its milk chocolate and Hershey’s Kisses. Gener
al Mills will stop using GM ingredients in Cheerios and recently announced it will label any of its products that contain GMOs. Del Monte, one of the country’s biggest producers of canned fruits and vegetables, says it will cease using GM ingredients in most of its products.

  McDonald’s refuses to sell GM potatoes grown by J. R. Simplot, one of its biggest french fry suppliers. Do these moves constitute a stance on GMOs, or only a desire to satisfy a nervous market? Hard to say. The meat McDonald’s sells is still raised on GM corn, and the soda it sells is still sweetened with GM corn syrup. Cheerios are made mostly of oats, which are never grown with GMOs, so the only change General Mills really has to make is to replace sweeteners made from GM sugar beets and cornstarch made from GM corn. And the company has made it plain that it will continue using GMOs in its other cereals.

  A lot of consumers who pay close attention to the GMO debate are convinced that GMOs are in fact unsafe, and a great many of them shop in stores that take advantage of this anxiety. Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Chipotle—these national chains have all made a fuss about going “GMO free” to one degree or another. Are these claims trustworthy, or are they merely marketing schemes?

  In Europe, centuries of intertwined, small, local farms have made GMOs a thing of almost continental contempt. As hard as they have tried, giant food conglomerates have had a tough time persuading the French, and the Italians, and the Spanish, to give over their land—and their diets—to industrial corn and soybeans. Globally, there are currently twenty-six countries with total or partial bans on GMOs, including Australia, China, India, Mexico, and Russia. In early 2015, thousands of Polish farmers drove their tractors into the streets in Warsaw to push for a ban on GMOs and to fight a perceived land grab by big ag-biotech companies like Monsanto. “The health and welfare of the nation depends on consumers and farmers having access to traditional seeds and good-quality food,” one farmer said. “The Polish government does not accept this and is destroying the roots of Polish agriculture by listening to corporations rather than the Polish people.”