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Does the thought of eating cloned pork turn your stomach? Do you find yourself steering clear of "farmed" salmon? Is "organic" an ever-more appealing adjective?
You're not alone. Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, a reliable barometer of matters political and cultural, catches the mood: in an age when "storybook children who used to visit grandparents on their farms now visit them at golf course condos," she writes, "freedom from the farm is starting to feel like disconnection… . We've gone from raising crops to worrying about them."
It's a worry that seems altogether rational. "Industrial fishing practices have decimated every one of the world's biggest and most economically important species of fish," reports the Washington Post's Rick Weiss. The Scripps Howard News Service warns that due to the heavy use of pesticides consumers should "thoroughly wash produce" and "peel fruits and vegetables like cucumbers and apples whenever possible." Earlier this year, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report warning about the dangers of genetically modified organisms and calling for more effective "bioconfinement strategies." A study issued in February by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that crops of maize, soybeans, and canola have been "pervasively contaminated with DNA sequences from GM [genetically modified] varieties." A U.S. Department of Agriculture study discovered that "60 percent of the 35 major beef slaughtering and processing plants fail to meet federal standards for preventing E. coli," leading annually to an estimated 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths. Speaking of beef, how many Mad Cows are being "processed" at this moment?
To be sure, in terms of food production the 20th century figures as the most remarkable in history, when the triune juggernaut of science, government, and commerce carried agronomic expertise and abundant grain to hungry people everywhere. Experts judge that world famine was averted due to these efforts, and if so, we should marvel, humbly, at this feat. But the economic and technological trajectory of that century continues, and where it is taking us is by no means certain. Many seeming agricultural gains are now netting losses, or at best breaking even, and the emerging record of agribusiness is revealing error, flaw, and corruption in all arenas—scientific, economic, political. Nonetheless, the juggernaut rolls on. To where? That's where the controversy begins.
Mark Winston wants to put us at ease. in Travels in the Genetically Modified Zone, Winston, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, takes on issue after issue in a moderating, judicious key. Along the way his frequent references to "communal comfort zones" and "potential middle grounds" tip us off that he's leading us carefully through a minefield.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick's rhetorical blast at the European Union exemplifies the sort of thing Winston is up against. "European antiscientific policies," Zoellick thundered in January 2003, "are spreading to other corners of the world." Zoellick, it turns out, was referring to the EU's longstanding ban on genetically modified food, which, the Bush administration claims, is influencing impoverished African nations to reject the importation of American crops, despite the threat of starvation.
Is GM food—or, as the Brits have dubbed it, "Frankenfood"—the serious threat so many Europeans believe it to be? Winston thinks not; if anything, transgenic technology for him is part of the solution to a problem far more ominous: the reliance of industrial agriculture on the heavy use of pesticides, which, unlike GM foods, are already known to be hazardous to humans. Ever since scientists in the 1980s succeeded in inserting virus- and vermin-destroying genes into the dna of corn, soybeans, and other staples, the hope of pesticide-free corporate agriculture became a possibility, and North American farmers have been voting with their plows ever since: between 1996 and 2001, GM crops in the U.S. increased from four million acres to 125 million acres, 68 percent of the worldwide total of GM crops.
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