There was a time when polite conversation steered clear of two topics: politics and religion. These days, one might add genetically engineered food.
Although the safety of genetically modified products and their effects on the environment fuel the debate, a recent panel discussion at the Illinois Institute of Art showed that politics, economics and ethics influence what is becoming one of the profound issues of the day.
A chef worried about losing the diverse foodstuffs he’s come to rely on. An organic farmer said that genetic science is unable to guarantee the security of its products. A biotechnologist suggested that consumers’ ignorance leaves them unable to make reasoned decisions. A food industry spokeswoman insisted that the whole issue is not a priority for American shoppers. And a cookbook author portrayed anti-biotech activism as misinformed, at the least.
The panel discussion, one of several sponsored around the country by the International Association of Culinary Professionals, ranged far and wide, if not deeply.
Safety first
Attendees, who got a thumbnail history of biotech from Peter Day, director of the Biotechnology Center for Agriculture and the Environment at Cook College, Rutgers University, quickly pressed him to address safety.
“The best answer we’ve come up with so far is that the materials that have been produced don’t pose an unreasonable risk,” he said. “There is, in my opinion, a minute possibility that there are some differences between engineered and unengineered corn that we have not detected because we don’t know how to look for them.” He compared that danger to the risk shoppers now take in trusting that supermarket sweet corn doesn’t retain pesticides.
Despite such high profile incidents as last year’s recall of products containing Starlite corn, which had a potential allergen, most Americans don’t know much about biotech, or even the basics of genetics, Day said.
In several surveys, “people have been picked at random and asked which contains DNA: a tomato, a genetically engineered tomato, or both,” he said. “And you’d be surprised at how many people think that only a genetically engineered tomato contains DNA.”
Labels, and the price of apples
Critics of biotechnology counter that one reason consumers remain in the dark is a lack of labels on genetically modified material. Cheryl Toner, program manager for food safety with the International Food Information Council, laid processors’ anti-label stance at the door of the Food and Drug Administration.
“The FDA requires a special label on these products only if there is a change in the end product,” Toner said. “So it’s not the process by which they were grown, but if the final product has changed in nutrition content, or if an allergen has been introduced.”
Although food companies worry that labels will frighten consumers away, Toby A. Ten Eyck, an assistant professor in the sociology department at Michigan State University who also works for the National Food and Toxicology Center in East Lansing, told an apple-based anecdote: Clearly labeled irradiated and non-irradiated apples were sold side by side at the same price. Both sold equally well. But when the price for the irradiated fruit was lowered, shoppers chose it over the non-irradiated apples.
“In the U.S., compared to places like Europe,” Ten Eyck said, “it’s not necessarily a matter of ‘I’ve got to have a certain type of food.’ It’s, ‘What’s cheap?’
“We also tend to be brand loyal.” That leads him to conclude that Americans would still pick up their favorite cereal even if it carried a label acknowledging its genetically modified main ingredient.
Threat to the food supply
Much of this debate turns on how one views the reliability and integrity of scientists.
“Science doesn’t yield proof, it yields probabilities,” said Tom Ulick, director of King’s Hill Farm, an organic operation in southwest Wisconsin. He emphasized the distinction between genetic engineering and other modern technology.
“When we’re working with genetic engineering in plants, we’re working with organisms that will never go away,” he said. “We can never clean them up. Their nature is to reproduce, to evolve.
“If we have a serious, unanticipated problem with genetic engineering and we contaminate a major food crop–corn, soybeans, wheat–if we have a serious problem that destroys a major food crop and leaves it unfit for human use, we could very easily plunge the word into starvation. Can we really open Pandora’s box here, and do we open it based on financial motives? And the people who open it, do they have the level of consciousness and concern about society that’s necessary to take that kind of a risk?”
For chef Michael Altenberg, whose Evanston restaurant Campagnola uses organic produce, biotechnology threatens culinary variety.
“The issue to me is cross-pollination, of releasing some of these genetically altered food products into the environment,” he said. “If the food chain is altered, perhaps the diversity is altered and I have less product to work with.”
Politics, passion and Europeans
Author Irena Chalmers, whose pooh-poohing of the anti-biotech movement irked several audience members, laid the blame for anti-biotech alarmism on Europe, “where heavily subsidized farms are threatened by the prospect of cheaper, high quality imported food.”
The English supermarkets that ban genetically engineered foods do so not because such items are unsafe, she said,
“but because they can get more money for foods that are labeled ‘non-GMO.’ “
“National pride is also at stake,” she said. “We tend to forget that Europe experienced severe food shortages during the Second World War, and they are afraid of becoming overly reliant on imported food, as well as potential dangers to the environment.”
Here in the U.S., Toner said, shoppers worry about microbial contamination more than genetic
manipulation, according to research from the International Food Information Council.
“Focus groups are not statistically significant, but what you can get from focus groups is a general sense of what people are saying,” she said. “It has surprised us that people are still largely unaware that there are biotech foods on shelves today.”
Despite the civility of the IACP panel, on the world stage, the two camps are often engaged in demonizing one another. Proponents of biotechnology cast the opposition as tree-hugging hypocrites who cry for a clean planet but won’t go anywhere without a plastic bottle of water, while those opposed to GM food castigate multinational agribusinesses as greedy behemoths that hide their profit motives behind altruistic claims that new products will greatly enhance food production in impoverished areas of the world.
“Canning was controversial, pasteurization was controversial, microwaves were controversial,” Ten Eyck said. “Technology, when it crosses into something like food, is controversial. And this is going to be controversial for a long time.”
