Food Fight Read online

  For a variety of reasons, such heat has not been present in the United States. Drive across the country, as my family and I did last summer, and you will find yourself crossing a continent almost entirely given over to corn and soybeans. Granted, there are boundless waves of wheat growing across the northern Midwest, but the route we took—from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to the Colorado Rockies, then up to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state—was astonishingly dichromatic. For close to 4,500 miles, my wife and I would switch off driving and snoozing, our kids in the backseat listening to audio books. This was hardly scientific, but our experience was absolutely clear: you can fall asleep passing fields of corn in Ohio and wake up passing fields of soy in Indiana, or vice versa, but that’s about it. Only once during the whole cross-country trip did we find ourselves surprised by what we saw: a large farm in Virginia that was actually growing potatoes.

  Despite all the romantic rhetoric thrown around about farming in America, it’s hard to feel sentimental when all the land you see, for thousands and thousands of miles, is being used to grow corn and soy for cheap chicken and cattle feed, or frying oil, or salty snacks, or ethanol for gasoline. These crops—hundreds of millions of acres of them, and virtually all GMO—are grown far from population centers and out of sight of anyone who is not directly involved in growing them. It’s almost like we’ve decided that the best farm is the farm we can’t see.

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  I’VE BEEN INTERESTED IN questions about food and health for many years. My last book, ContamiNation, examined similar questions about the toxic chemicals found in everyday consumer products. Big-box stores are full of things—mattresses, air fresheners, paints, cosmetics—made from some 80,000 different petrochemicals, and of these, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a full set of toxicity information for just 7 percent. Despite frightening spikes in everything from cancer rates to autism, endocrine problems and neurological disorders, 99 percent of these chemicals have never been tested for their effects on human health. In researching that book, I was shocked at the misinformation—if not the total lack of information—about the products we use in our everyday lives.

  Likewise, given the amount of confusion surrounding our food system, I set out in search of facts. GMOs, and the chemicals used to grow them, have become so ubiquitous, so stitched into the fabric of our daily lives, that they are essentially invisible. To me, this invisibility is itself a problem: How can something as intimate as the food we eat be so utterly misunderstood?

  My journey to find out took me from farms in New York and Maryland and Pennsylvania to plant laboratories in Delaware and Missouri and Kansas to the “ground zero” of the global GMO debate on three islands in Hawaii. During the course of my research, I interviewed some of the world’s great agricultural visionaries, some of whom take radically different approaches to the question of GMOs. One scientist, whose engineered papaya plants saved an entire industry from collapse, considers GMOs to be above reproach. Another, who is trying to invent a plant that would replace—replace!—millions of acres of industrial crops across the farm belt considers GMOs to be a tool the food industry has used to push the American landscape to the brink of ruin.

  I spoke with brilliant farmers who think GMOs will help move the world closer to sustainability, and others who think GMOs will accelerate our ecological demise. I spoke with geneticists who are developing plants that could save millions of people from starvation, or from going blind, and others who think such plants represent a Trojan horse that will do more to spread the influence of American companies than actually help the poor.

  It can be hard to hold these competing stories in your mind at the same time. Clearly, genetic engineering has the potential to help solve some of the world’s pressing food and nutrition problems. The problem is that this technology is mostly being used not to help small farmers or improve nutrition in the developing world but to create profits for companies selling poor-quality food in the United States. It’s not GMOs that are a problem, in other words; it’s the industrial food system that is the problem. That system is designed by and for the agrochemical industry to sell two enormously profitable products: chemicals, and the seeds that can withstand those chemicals. This system has been built so thoroughly around us that we don’t even see it.

  This book offers a look at something that is both very complex and very fundamental. Understanding what we eat, and how we have come to eat this way, requires thinking not just about food but also about history, and science, and politics, and ethics. Beneath these issues are fundamental questions of culture. How do we want to eat? How do we view the land we live on, and the plants and animals with whom we share that land? Do we trust the industries that are feeding us, or the government that is supposed to be protecting us? Do we trust that science can remain independent of corporate money and corporate power, and provide clear, independent answers to questions that directly affect our lives?

  To help answer these questions, I have organized this book into three parts. Part One examines the central questions most people want to know about GMOs. Are they safe? How are they made? Are they well tested, and are the tests trustworthy? How much control does the food industry exert over government regulators? How much control does this industry have over what we are allowed to know about what we eat? More broadly, how do GMOs fit into the evolution of American culture itself, from the very small (like the birth and growth of advanced genetic science) to the very large (like the postwar development of our highways and suburbs)?

  Part Two takes us to the front lines of the GMO debate to see how this system plays out—for better and worse—in real communities. On three islands in Hawaii, the battle over GMOs has been exceptionally heated, and for very different reasons. On the Big Island, a world-renowned professor created—without any help from industry—a GMO fruit that helped save the economy of his beloved homeland. On Kauai, the story is utterly different: there, a group of activists, worried about vast and secret chemical spraying used on experimental GMO farms, are fighting tooth and nail against some of the largest chemical companies in the world. And on Maui, a tiny island that nonetheless serves as the very birthplace for much of the world’s GM corn, indigenous Hawaiians and local organic farmers are trying to kick the GMO industry off their island completely. For them, GMOs are not just about food, they are about the misuse of sacred land and the oppression of local people.

  Part Three offers a look at alternatives to an industrial farming system that has been so destructive—and that has tarnished the reputation of GMO technology itself. I visit scientists developing GM crops they hope will prevent mass starvation in the developing world, especially as climate change threatens to undermine traditional farming practices in Africa and Asia. I spend time with farmers who use GMOs as part of a larger effort to make American agriculture more sustainable. I interview researchers who say nibbling around the edges of industrial farming isn’t enough—they want to develop crops that will overthrow the entire system itself. And I speak to organic farmers—in the country, in the suburbs, and in the city—who say that no technology, no matter how exquisitely designed, will ever take the place of local people growing food for their own neighbors. Their model, they say, is the way farming was done for 10,000 years, and that GMOs, while perhaps helpful, will be useful only if they augment traditional farming practices that take seriously the health of people as well as the health of our planet.

  Throughout the process of writing this book, I also tried an experiment of my own. I required my college students to wrestle with the GMO debate, and—at the same time—to work on a very small organic farm. Every week, my students explored the complexities of the American food system, and they tossed hay, fed sheep, and harvested tomatoes. They argued about the best way to feed the world, and the best way to feed themselves. Some left the conversation convinced that GMOs should have a firm place in the future of food. Scientists who can figure out a way to make droug
ht-resistant crops that will support billions of people in a warming world deserve nothing less than a Nobel Prize.

  Others were more cynical. Companies touting the benefits of GMOs are engaged in a global sleight of hand: they claim they want to feed the world, then turn around and sell us all chicken nuggets, cheeseburgers, and sixty-four-ounce sodas.

  Other students were more philosophical. They left convinced that the primary problem in the American diet is not nutrition or any particular technology, but ignorance. If one way to improve the way we eat is through fancy new technology, maybe another way is to get more people—including English majors—to spend time working on local, small-scale, organic farms. Getting “more eyes on the acre,” they said, may be the only way to close the enormous gap that has opened up between most American people and the food they consume every day.

  To my mind, they were all right. I hope the following chapters will explain why.

  Part One

  1.

  Are GMOs Safe? Is That the Right Question?

  The first thing, and sometimes the only thing, that people want to know about GMOs is simple: Are they safe to eat? It’s an obvious question, since we’re all consuming them at almost every meal, and a legitimate one, since it’s not always clear what GMOs are, how they are made, or where they appear in our diet. In the decades since the creation of the Flavr Savr tomato, we are all eating genetically modified food, whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not.

  Add to this the fact that basic information—even in the form of simple labels on food—is very hard to come by. Although you most likely eat GMOs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, there is simply no way to know it.

  Most people, sitting down for a meal, would rather not wrestle with the way small RNAs affect the chromosomes of the corn that went into the cow that went into the burger they are eating. They would certainly rather not contemplate whether that same corn had something to do with climate change, or the obesity epidemic, or the decline of bee populations, or whether they contribute to water pollution, the pesticide contamination of our bodies, or the destruction of small-town America.

  In a way, asking whether GMOs are “safe” is like asking whether Froot Loops are safe, or cheeseburgers, or nail polish: if you narrow the question down enough, the answer is almost certainly, sure, GMOs are “safe,” but “safe” may not be the same thing as “good for you.” Not many people get sick from eating a single bowl of Froot Loops, and not many people get sick from painting their nails once or twice. But how many bowls, or manicures, would it take to make a product “unsafe”? A great many molecular biologists argue that altering a plant’s genetic structure simply mimics natural evolutionary processes and that GM foods are more fully studied—and at least as safe to eat—as anything has ever been. Many hundreds of studies have supported this: food made from plants that have been genetically engineered do not appear to be any more harmful than food grown traditionally.

  Those who create, control, and profit from GMOs—the scientists who develop and use the technology, along with the biotech and food companies that make up our industrial food system—consider the debate over genetic engineering to be fully settled. So do highly reputable scientific organizations. The science of GMOs is clear, they say: the technology has been around for decades and has developed into a highly precise method of producing enough food to feed the earth’s 7 billion people.

  Genetic engineering is simply an incremental step—a new tool, geneticists and molecular biologists say—in the long progression of agricultural science. Since the dawn of the agricultural era 10,000 years ago, farmers have selected seeds from the season’s most successful crops and discarded the seeds from the least. This “human selection” is merely a manipulated version of the “natural selection” that forms the bedrock of evolution. Tinkering with a plant’s genome is no different from evolutionary processes that have gone on since time began. Faster, perhaps, but no different.

  These techniques are no more risky than induced mutation, or “mutagenesis,” the long-standing practice of exposing seeds to chemicals or radiation to induce random mutations. Mutations happen all the time in nature, and some produce plants with favorable traits like drought tolerance, or higher yields, or better taste. In the last century, more than 3,200 mutagenic plants—from pears to peanuts, from barley to grapefruit—have been released on the market. These crops are not GMOs, and they are considered so benign they are even allowed on organic farms.

  But the minute you open the aperture a bit, the question of “safety” becomes considerably more complicated. While the process of engineering plants may be considered “safe,” the consequences that ripple out from it are considerably more troubling. The molecular structure of a single GM plant may not be a cause for alarm, but what if almost all GM crops are grown to produce things like cheeseburgers and salty snacks and soft drinks, which have ramped up the country’s obesity epidemic? Is that a GMO problem, or not?

  What about the chemical pesticides and herbicides—many of them known to cause both health and environmental problems—that are sprayed on hundreds of millions of acres of GM crops? These chemicals existed long before GMOs, of course; indeed, they were developed decades ago by the same companies (Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Syngenta) that are now the world’s leading sellers of GM seeds. Critics often say that GMOs are less necessary for making food than they are a powerful vehicle for selling pesticides; once a company has sold farmers on the idea of GM seeds, they are far more likely to buy chemical sprays that go along with them. If they were using the company’s chemicals already, why not also buy seeds that are resistant?

  So are pesticides a “GMO problem,” or are GMOs just exacerbating the problem of industrial farming itself?

  More broadly, what happens when entire global industries—and entire swaths of North America—are constructed to keep cheeseburgers and snacks and soft drinks (and thus the GMOs that make them) flowing into our bellies? What if these industries become so enormously profitable, heavily marketed, and politically powerful that the foods they produce began to seem “conventional” (or stranger still, “traditional”)? If problems—even deep problems—began to crop up, would we even be able to see them?

  In other words, most people involved in the GMO debate—no matter what side they are on or how passionately they argue their position—consider the narrow question of safety to be the wrong question.

  “I’ve been a lawyer for over thirty years, and this is by far the most polarized issue I’ve ever dealt with,” Paul Achitoff told me. Achitoff is an environmental attorney for EarthJustice, which is handling a series of major GMO lawsuits in Hawaii. Achitoff has been in the GMO trenches since the beginning.

  “Inevitably, no matter what the subject matter—pesticides, labeling—people always spend their time talking about how dangerous GMOs are to eat. All people want to know is, ‘Is it healthy, is there proof?’ People in favor of GMOs say they are safe as mother’s milk. Others say they are dangerous. I don’t even bring that subject up in court. To me, it’s not even relevant. It’s not even reasonably disputed that there are environmental and socioeconomic consequences here.”

  Indeed, a great many organic farmers, a wide swath of health, consumer, and environmental organizations, and First Amendment “right to know” advocates say the GMO debate is about a lot more than molecular science. GMOs, in this view, are the very symbol of all that is wrong with the American food system. Whether or not the technology involved in genetic engineering is “safe” (and not all opponents are willing to concede this point), the crops—along with the pesticides and herbicides used to grow them—represent a profound insult to public health and ecological balance.

  “Nature’s been around a long time, so to think we can dance in there and take a gene off the shelf and get a product that your body will accept is really arrogant,” Gerry Herbert, an organic farmer and anti-GMO activist in Hawaii told me
. “It’s like throwing a wrench in a moving engine. You’re going to have a problem. We don’t even know what’s in the soil, and yet we’re killing it because we can get a quick profit from it. Do we want corporations to control our food? Their whole mandate is to maximize profit. That’s why they’re there. Are they worried about your nutrition? Not a bit. They will do everything necessary to rearrange genes to maximize their profits.”

  Regardless of its effect on a plant’s molecular structure (or that plant’s impact on our bodies, or the ecosystem of which the plant is a part), GMO technology is mostly used to turbocharge the engines of an unsustainable farming system that is dousing our land and water with chemicals, wearing out our soil, making us fat, and lining the pockets of companies that already hold far too much economic and political power.

  There is truth on both sides of this debate. There are also half-truths and naked cynicism. There are scientific studies that say GM foods are entirely safe to eat, and others that say they aren’t. Earth Open Source, an organization run by the molecular biologist John Fagan, recently published a book called GMO Myths and Truths with more than 300 pages of studies arguing that GMOs are unhealthy for our bodies, our environment, and our political and economic systems. “GMO Answers,” a website overseen by the biotech industry, is larded with studies heralding the benefits (and safety) of GMOs, as well as essays designed to make you feel better about your own doubts (“Skeptical About GMOs? We Understand.”).

  Which side are we to believe? Consumers can be forgiven for feeling that questions about safety ought to be simple: Is GM food safe to eat, or not? The trouble is, there are complexities at both the micro and macro levels that make such questions of “safety” a lot more complicated than they might first appear. The few journalists who have tried to navigate this jungle have found themselves with few reliable guideposts.