Humans have strived to improve their food supply by using new techniques and technologies since the beginning of the historical era. This is what agriculture has always been about. One of the earliest techniques for improving the food supply was selecting which valuable plants and animals would have children. This is called breeding, and it has been an effective improving technique since the dawn of agriculture. It has been a technique considered to be beneficial, therefore acceptable, by most of the communities of the world for just as long.
Oddly, one modern addition to the breeding tool kit, genetic modification, raises a firestorm of controversy in some civilized communities. This is most strange, and a most expensive tool to walk away from! Walking away from this tool is goat sacrificing because we lose all the benefits of improved food quality, safety and efficiency that this tool can bring to the food making and preparing process. Not using this tool is waste caused by from-the-heart- thinking.
Breeding is doing genetic modification in the natural way. When we are selecting which members of a species will have children, we are deliberately changing the mix of genes in the species. This is why domesticated versions of a species become different from the wild versions. This “natural way” of gene selecting – breeding – consists of observing generation after generation of the species being bred and only allowing “the best” to produce more generations. The best is determined purely by observation and is based on the breeder's opinion.
The results are impressive; the changes that have been made are dramatic. Those plants and animals that have been subject to breeding techniques for many generations are quite different from their wild counterparts. Dogs are not wolves anymore, the domestic strawberries we pick up and pop down at salad bars are twenty times the size of wild ones, and wild cattle no longer exist (the last of their successful niche in earth's ecosystem vanished in the 1600's). This dramatic difference is why those animals that have been bred for many generations are called domesticated. One of the more recent and dramatic breeding successes has been the “Green Revolution” of the late 1940’s through late 1960’s which revolutionized crop growing in developing nations.
Genetic modification is simply adding an additional tool to the species-modifying tool bag: the ability to scientifically analyze genetic structure by looking directly at DNA and making small tweaks to it. These days, the tweaks are quite small because the technology is so new. One example is adding a gene that makes a crop resistant to the herbicide (weed killer) Roundup. The gene modification allows the herbicide to be used to kill weeds, but the crop is protected and thrives. Soy, the crop that grows soybeans, was the first beneficiary of this gene tweak. With time, we will get much better at these tweaks... much better and be able to do a lot more.
I should say, “perhaps, we will be able to do a lot more”, because the firestorm about using the GM tool has been kindled already and is burning furiously in some communities. Given its potential for doing a lot of good by producing a lot more food and fiber from any given piece of land, why is the fear of gene modifying’s dark side so virulent? Urban legend has stoked powerful fears of “Franken-foods”. So powerful, the term has become the title of books and a TV series. This indicates there is a lot of instinct being stroked here. Let’s look at the nexus of instincts that come together on this issue in the next section.
GM foods seem to be at the nexus of several chronic instinctive concerns. One is the fear of bad food - concern that GM techniques will poison food. This fear is age old. Fluoridation and the endless cycle of health food fads are the previous icons for this instinct. Another is the fear of not supporting the idyllic farm lifestyle - the icons for this are farmers markets and the organic food movement. Yet another is distaste for the intellectual property (IP) protection tactics used by agribusiness companies - the real and urban legendary actions of Monsanto are the icon for this issue.
More in Europe than in the US, there is also a distrust of the pronouncements of scientists - the icon that comes to mind here is the Thalidomide crisis of the late 1950's/early 60's. Thalidomide was a wonder drug of the 1950’s. It was a tranquilizer, and it was being widely used in Europe. Europe’s science establishment said it was safe. But it turned out that if pregnant women took it, their unborn children suffered from deeply twisted arms and legs. These children became famous in the 1960’s as Thalidomide Babies. This was the scandal that put the US FDA on the map as a hero because it had delayed giving approval to the drug. It is still considering when the scandal broke.
The combination of all of the above emotional concerns has allowed interest and fear of GM foods to flare up and be sustained in some social circles for more than a decade now. The result has been two-fold:
None of the above help the community cooperate. This becomes Us versus Them thinking, which leads to missed opportunities and waste.
Genetic modification is just another tool in humankind's breeding tool kit. It is a powerful one. It can accomplish changes that traditional breeding can't, and it can be used in many places where traditional breeding can't. We are faced with a serious situation: if we don't use this tool, we are making our lives more expensive and less pleasant with increased food prices, lower quality foods, and a growing risk of food shortages. This is a case where we need to learn the tool not turn away from it. When we reflexively turn away from using genetic modification, because of from-the-heart-thinking, we are carrying out a perfect example of goat sacrificing.