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Few people can be unaware of the continuing genetically-modified organism (GMO) debate; many are opposed to research in this area. However, the imposition of messed-about-with vegetables has clear precedents.
In a society which tolerates pigs that suffer from congenital curvature of the spine – because consumers like long cuts of meat, and turkeys for whom flight and sex is merely something that their ancestors enjoyed – they’re now too heavy to either take off or get off, it was clear that plants simply weren’t pulling their weight.
First to fall to the food technologists’ short, sharp shock treatment was the tomato. Taste, having been carefully bred out in favour of colour and shape, was reintroduced by the insertion of a gene that had started off life in a fish. The imaginatively named Flavr Savr tomato never really took off and so a different strategy was adopted for the next foray into vegetable mutation.
The food ‘n’ chemical company Monsanto (strapline Food, Health, Hope – why hope, I wonder?) announced that their wholesaling operations were going to make it impossible to differentiate between their new, herbicide-resistant GMO and non-GMO soya beans. The herbicide in question was their own Roundup™ product and so the financial incentive was clear. Since much of the western world’s soya products originate from Monsanto crops, consumers were going to have to live with GMOs whether they liked it or not.
I have to admit a certain vested interest here. As a vegan of several years standing, I take exception to attempts to mess around with my protein supplies.
Even though protein in the western world is vastly overrated (two Mac-burgers a day not automatically imbuing the consumer with bright eyes and rosy cheeks) it does remain an essential part of the diet. I tend to concur with those cultures for whom daily consumption of slabs of dead flesh is not inherently a lifestyle statement. For many hundreds of years they have known that soya-derived tofu and tempeh, for instance, can readily provide high quality, tasty protein.
Not that it’s just non-meat eaters that are going to have pseudo-soya inflicted on them. A perusal of the ingredient lists of many everyday products (an eye-opener in itself!) will, likely as not, turn up soya flour somewhere.
It’s not even as if the GMO companies are happy to coexist with alternative suppliers. An organic farmer near Totnes looks set to lose its Soil Association certification and thus much of its business because a neighbouring farm has decided that there’s a bob or two to be made from helping the vegetable-meddlers by growing their trial crops.
A high court action by the hapless farmer was thrown out on the grounds that cross pollination was impossible. Unfortunately, research carried out in Denmark and America on oilseed rape, and recently reported by the Guardian shows that this may not be the case. Not only did experiments show that pollen could travel more than a mile from the test site, but that genes from the GM rape could cross into weeds from the same brassica family.
The result was ‘the worst of both worlds’ – the weeds retained their normal tenacity whilst also acquiring the herbicide resistance of the ‘parent’ GMO. Repeated application of the optimised herbicide over a period of time – something the chemical companies would certainly be hoping for – allows the GM weed to flourish by killing off its natural competitors.
The GMO-promoting companies bleat that theirs is the only method that will allow the Earth’s growing population to be fed in the future. Whilst this is not necessarily untrue, given western farming practices, it does not have to be the only solution.
Few farmers will argue that their animals will require up to ten times as much protein over their lives as is obtained at slaughter. Although some companies believed they had found a solution to this grossly inefficient system when they found that live herbivores could be persuaded to eat dead herbivores, the resulting BSE scandal has cost us all dear and looks set to continue for many years to come.
Studies have shown that a vegan population could be supported on perhaps just a quarter of the farmland in use today, removing at a stroke the need to pin our hopes to the GMO ‘miracle’. Of course, I’m biased, but its worth thinking about, isn’t it?
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