Viagen in the News
We have lost our way with food
By Melanie Reid, The Times (U.K.)
June 9th, 2008
Personally, I blame the Industrial Revolution. If the average British housewife had never been separated from her agrarian roots, we would not be in half the mess we are in. We’d grow our own organic vegetables, make low-fat casseroles out of pigs’ entrails and live healthily and hysteria-free beyond the subliminal control of the Tesco mother ship. We might also be a teensy bit bored, but that’s another column altogether.
Can there be anything more depressing than the oppressive superstition of today’s food shoppers - predominantly female - when faced with what they perceive as “bad food”? I doubt it. Logic doesn’t get a look in. Although faced with galloping bills, a grave world food shortage and unassailable evidence that the high-salt, high-fat and high-sugar processed diet that they favour is killing their loved ones with kindness, consumers are opposed to technological solutions.
For - surprise, surprise - the first credible survey into attitudes to food derived from cloned animals has revealed strong concerns. The public - for which read women - are worried about safety, ethics and animal welfare. The Foods Standards Agency found that they regarded cloned animal products as “interfering with mother nature”; “an unstoppable juggernaut”; and “a slippery slope” - and that they plainly preferred to die of stale clichés rather than drink fresh milk from cloned cows. They feared such products might be unsafe for human consumption and wanted extensive five to ten-year tests - presumably until the moon was in Aries and Gemini was in the ascendancy - in line with checks on new medicines.
It is a funny old world. As food riots break out in Haiti and Egypt and leaders at the UN food summit declare that a relaunch of agriculture is necessary to feed the planet, the great British shopper takes anti- science to new levels by objecting to increased food production.
We have been here before. This same emotional argument put a stop to the widespread use of genetically modified cereals in the UK. GM became a tainted brand that is now snuck into cheap food in small print. Yet if there is evidence that GM foods do any environmental or human damage, I’m still waiting to see it. (like I’m still waiting for the predicted millions to die of human form CJD from infected burgers.)
The ironies mount up: the same people who happily pay thousands of pounds for IVF babies, or seek gene therapy cures for their child’s asthma, condemn genetic modification as “dangerous”. The fastidious public, misshapen by obesity and sentenced to early death by doughnut, worry about “Frankenstein food”.
What this irrationality illustrates, vividly, is how ignorant people have become since they were divorced from the basics of agriculture. The land taught a wisdom we have lost. Genetic modification is simply selective breeding; it has been key to farming since the first hunter gatherer decided to stay put and find a bull for his cow. The slow-motion process of modifying animals by breeding has been going on for thousands of years and there is not a single strain of cow, sheep, pig, horse, dog, cat or hamster that is not the result of extensive generations of species manipulation by humans. An identical process went on with plants. And by doing so, productivity has improved immeasurably.
It is completely bonkers to think that today’s animals and plants bear any resemblance to what used to exist in the wild. Once upon a time all dogs looked the same; we simply modified them by breeding those with genetic abnormalities. And clever gardeners have done the same: creating, for example, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower as mutations from the same species of plant.
Genome selection means nothing more radical than clever breeding - discovering what kind of genes work best and using them to improve existing strains or exclude disease. Cloning is a further acceleration of that process - jumping the time period that normal reproduction takes; speeding up of the selection of the most productive. Scientists tasked with solving the world’s food crisis - and we can’t leave it to politicians - know it’s safe. Similarly, the US Food and Drug Administration has decreed produce from clones and their offspring “as safe as food we eat every day”. The European Food Safety Authority, a little more cautiously - because it works on European snail time - says the same.
What happened with GM cereals cannot be allowed to happen again over meat and milk simply because the British shopper is overwhelmed by the “yuck” factor. There is a much more at stake than the sensibilities of the squeamish. It is as simple as this: the welfare, productivity, health and sustainability of farm animals have to improve if the world is going to keep eating meat. The oceans are being fished out, agricultural land is going to biofuels: something has to produce the protein to keep the world alive. The first cloned Holstein dairy cows, said to be capable of producing 30 per cent more milk, have been born in Britain. Instead of getting the vapours, we should rejoice.