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We've always played with our food - even before we knew about genes or how to change them.

For thousands of years, humans have practiced selective breeding - pairing the beefiest bull with the healthiest heifers to start a new herd. That concept was refined to develop plant hybridization and artificial insemination. Today we've got tastier corn on sturdier stalks, bigger turkeys and meatier cattle.

Now comes an Atlantic salmon that is genetically engineered to grow twice as fast as a regular salmon. If U.S. regulators approve it, the fish would be the first such scientifically altered animal to reach the dinner plate.

Scientists have already determined that it's safe to eat. They are weighing other factors, including environmental risks, after two days of intense hearings.

Whatever the decision on salmon, it's only the start of things to come. In labs and on experimental farms are:
  • Vaccines and other pharmaceuticals grown in bananas and other plants.
  • Trademarked "Enviropigs" whose manure doesn't pollute as much.
  • Cows that don't produce methane in their flatulence.
And in the far-off future, there may be foods built from scratch - the scratch being DNA.

Sometimes when science tinkers with food, it works. Decades ago, Norman Borlaug's "Green Revolution" of scientifically precise hybrids led to bigger crop yields that have dramatically reduced hunger.


Comment: Dramatically reduced hunger? Some would argue with such a bold statement! One women in particular is physicist, activist and organic farmer Dr. Vandana Shiva. Shiva made an extensive critique of Borlaug's "Green Revolution" in her book, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Ecological Degradation and Political Conflict. In addition she wrote The Green Revolution in the Punjab for The Ecologist back in 1991, in the introduction Shiva depicts the so called benefits of the Green Revolution:
The Green Revolution has been a failure. It has led to reduced genetic diversity, increased vulnerability to pests, soil erosion, water shortages, reduced soil fertility, micronutrient deficiencies, soil contamination, reduced availability of nutritious food crops for the local population, the displacement of vast numbers of small farmers from their land, rural impoverishment and increased tensions and conflicts. The beneficiaries have been the agrochemical industry, large petrochemical companies, manufacturers of agricultural machinery, dam builders and large landowners.

The "miracle" seeds of the Green Revolution have become mechanisms for breeding new pests and creating new diseases.
One additional note is that Norman Borlaug worked for Dupont Defense Labs before he was put in charge of the agricultural Green Revolution in India.


Sometimes it flops. Anyone remember the Flavr Savr tomato? Probably not. It didn't taste good. "There was no flavor there to save," one expert quipped. But you might remember 10 years ago when genetically modified corn meant for animal feed wound up in taco shells?


Comment: Speaking of flops the following article Genetically Modified Frankenfish! states clearly how organizations like the FDA rush to approve GM products that are later found to have serious health risks:
One major problem is that the FDA has historically rushed to approve genetically modified products that are later found to be dangerous. For example, the Flavr Savr tomato was genetically engineered in the early 1990s by Calgene Inc. (now owned by Monsanto); it was designed to stay fresh on store shelves longer than regular tomatoes. Even though the FDA's own scientific advisers were concerned over Calgene's findings, which showed stomach lesions in lab rats that ingested the GM tomato, the Flavr Savr went to market!

The FDA should certainly have required the Flavr Savr to be labeled as GM: not only were there significant "material differences" between it and a non-GM tomato in terms of its taste, its risk of fungal diseases, and other physical problems, but more importantly, the Flavr Savr tomato was never deemed safe. According to biologist Arpad Pusztai, "the claim that these GM tomatoes were safe as conventional ones is at best premature and, at worst, faulty." The tomato was withdrawn from the market in 1997.

To the biotech world, precise tinkering with the genes in plants and animals is a proven way to reduce disease, protect from insects and increase the food supply to curb world hunger.


Comment: Note to the Biotech world tinkering with genes is proven to protect from insects and increase the food supply.

To the biotech industry: Protect from Insects = Massive spraying of pesticides like Roundup and Glyphosate:
The Seralini study found that Roundup's inert ingredients amplified the toxic effect on human cells - even at concentrations much more diluted than those used on farms and lawns!

Glyphosate and Roundup are advertised as "less toxic to us than table salt" in a pamphlet from the Biotechnology Institute promoting GMO crops as 'Weed Warrior.' Thirteen years of GMO crops in the USA has increased overall pesticide use by 318 million pounds, not decreased as promised by the Four Horsemen of the GMO Apocalypse. The extra disease burden on the nation from that alone is considerable.

Nonetheless after introduction of Monsanto GMO seeds commercially in the USA, use of glyphosate has risen more than 1500% between 1994 and 2005. In the USA some 100 million pounds of glyphosate are used on lawns and farms every year, and over the last 13 years, it has been applied to more than a billion acres.
Increase food supply = Control food distribution

For more about the manipulation of the food supply read the following:
The report of 400 experts from around the world, The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), is ignored by the proponents of a New Green Revolution, precisely because it shows that the best hope for ending hunger lies with local, traditional, farmer controlled agricultural production, not high tech industrial agriculture.

To feed the world, fair methods of land distribution must be considered. A fair and just food system depends on small holder farmers having access to land. The function of a just farming system is to insure that everyone gets to eat, industrial agriculture functions to insure those corporations controlling the system make a profit.
USA To Establish Genetically Modified Totalitarian Regime on World Food Market
Most of the US and Canadian grain is genetically modified. Thus, the world may begin to consume dangerous products. Up to 80 or even 90 percent of soy, corn and cotton growing in the United States is genetically modified. The USA, Canada, Brazil and Argentina are the world leaders on the volumes of GM crops.

To skeptics, genetic changes put the natural world and the food supply at risk. Modified organisms can escape into the wild or mingle with native species, potentially changing them, with unknown effects.

Over the last 15 years, genetically engineered plants have been grown on more than 2 billion acres in more than 20 countries. Consumers eat genetically engineered plant products in large quantities in the U.S., often in unlabeled products such as oils and processed foods.


Comment: Listed below are examples of GM contamination of the food supply:
Increasingly, people want more information about the food they eat. While 80% of processed foods at the supermarket in the US contain GMOs, they are not required to be labeled. Yet public opinion polls regularly show that around 90% of Americans want these products labeled.

The same crops are viewed more suspiciously in Europe and other countries, including India. China, meanwhile, is working to develop genetically modified rice that would be less prone to insect damage.

In fact, some experts say the natural food of our forebears is for the most part long gone. That's mostly due to breeding and other now-commonplace practices.

Old-fashioned breeding has led to turkeys that "can't have sex anymore because we've been breeding them for big chests," says Martina Newell McGloughlin, director of the University of California's Biotechnology Research and Education Program.

"All of the animals, plants and microbes we use in our food system, our agricultural system, are genetically modified in one way or another," says Bruce Chassy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "That, or they're wild."

The modifications are mostly from selective breeding and hybridization, the traditional ways of changing plants and animals. But these methods used for thousands of years are compared by genetic engineers to using a sledgehammer. They say their techniques are like using a scalpel.


Comment: Yeah right!

According to Dr. Vandana Shiva in her discussion at the International Meeting on Resisting Hegemony: Lessons of Fighting Hegemonies in Food and Seed for 30 Years. " What people people breed are considered primitive varieties, what corporations breed are called elite varieties or high yielding varieties" Dr. Shiva explains in the video linked above how biotech corporations manipulate yield and production with the use of chemical fertilizers and genetically patented seeds, while dismissing the small primitive farming methods that have sustained cultures throughout history.

Speaking of genetic engineers using a scalpel to genetically alter plants and animals Dr. Jeffery Smith author of Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette, explains the process as the smoking gene gun:

Jeffrey Smith on the End of Genetically Engineered Foods
The Smoking Gene Gun

To engineer, say, a corn plant to produce its own pesticide, scientists remove a gene from the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) bacterium, make millions of copies of it, then put it into a gun and shoot the copies into millions of cells, hoping that some genes get into the DNA of some cells. The cells are cloned in tissue culture and grown into a crop that has the pesticide-producing gene in every cell of every plant--and in every bite.

This process "creates massive collateral damage in the DNA," said Smith. Two to four percent of the genome expresses mostly unpredicted mutations; and up to 5% of the natural genes in the DNA change their levels of expression. Such changes "can create allergies, toxins, new diseases and nutritional problems" - the same problems that FDA's scientists anticipated. The resultant GE crops are grown and consumed with no human clinical trials, no long-term animal feeding studies and no post-marketing surveillance.

When Pusztai discovered that GE potatoes damaged rats, he publicized his concerns, becoming a hero at his prestigious institute - for about two days. Then the pro-GMO U.K. prime minister's office allegedly called the director of the institute, who fired Pusztai, silenced the 35-year employee with threats of a lawsuit and smeared his reputation. The 20-member research team was disbanded. Long-term safety protocols were never instituted. After seven months, Pusztai was invited to speak before Parliament, the gag order was lifted, his data were returned and published in The Lancet.

"Genetic engineering is more precise and predictable, yet it is regulated up the wazoo," McGloughlin says. "Yet there is no regulation at all on the traditional breeding system."


Comment: More Precise and Predictable? Read the comments above for the results of tinkering with the genetic make up of plants.


She finds fears over genetically engineered food and the regulations that accompany them hard to stomach.


Comment: I think the appropriate comment is that genetically engineered food is hard to stomach!

More than four-fifths of the soybean, corn and cotton acreage in the United States last year used genetically engineered crops, according to a 2010 National Academies of Sciences study.


Comment: As an added note: 93 Percent of Soybeans and 80 Percent of Corn in the U.S. Grow from Seeds Genetically Modified by Monsanto


David Ervin of Portland State University in Oregon, who chaired the committee that wrote the report, said it found no large-scale environmental risks associated with the current genetically engineered corn, cotton and soybeans in the United States. As for future crops, "you just have to be very cautious," depending on the nature of the plants, he says.


Comment: Really? Has David Ervin read any of the following articles that state there are large scale environmental risks associated with genetically engineered corn, cotton and soybeans in the United States:

The report, which didn't consider health impacts of eating genetically engineered crops, did recommend large-scale studies of ecological effects of such crops, Ervin said.

Marion Nestle, a New York University professor and expert on food studies and public health, says that in processed food, "if it's got beet sugar, soybean or sugar, it's got an 85 to 95 percent chance of being genetically modified."

Nestle fears unintended consequences in the food supply and environment. She previously served on Food and Drug Administration advisory boards, and she opposes the genetically engineered salmon. In the 1990s, she voted against allowing genetically engineered plants.

Animals are a bigger problem in trying to prevent mixing with nongenetically modified populations, she says. "Millions (of farmed fish) escape, not one or two, but millions."

L. LaReesa Wolfenbarger, a professor of biology at the University of Nebraska who was on the National Academies study team, finds a distinct difference between old-fashioned breeding and genetic modification. What is happening recently is that we are mixing genes of plants and animals that in normal evolution or nature don't mix, she says.

Or as Margaret Mellon, director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, puts it: You can't breed a cow with a starfish.

Such DNA-mixing is not necessarily bad, but it's something to be careful with, Wolfenbarger and Mellon say.

"These are things that we can look at as long as we also have the ability to kind of brainstorm and figure out what the unintended consequences are," Wolfenbarger says. She contends that so far, at least with plants, science has had a good handle on preventing problems.

Not so, says NYU's Nestle.

Back in the 1990s, she recalled, opponents of genetically engineered crops were "laughed out of the room ... and they turned out to be right." Just as critics warned, the pollen of genetically modified crops is drifting into natural areas. Weeds and insects have become resistant to the anti-pest modifications, she said.

But scientists who work on genetic modifications insist time has proven them correct.

James Murray, a professor of animal sciences at the University of California at Davis, says the fears surrounding genetically engineered foods sound similar to concerns about microwave ovens, which some people initially thought would give off dangerous radiation or blow up pacemakers.

Murray is working on genetically modified goats as a way to produce milk that can fight devastating diarrhea in poor nations.

With the world population predicted to surpass 9 billion before 2050, genetically engineered food is the only hope to avoid starvation, he says.

That many people cannot be fed "using agriculture as it is right now," Murray says. "What is the cost to humanity if we do not use this technology?"


Comment: Whenever the issue of GMO foods comes up supporters of the bio tech industry always use the same argument: 'Genetically Modified Crops are going to feed the world'

Scientists who are NOT working for large agri-chemical and bio tech companies have stated time and again that the data shows that GM crops do not produce more food.

The Union of Concerned Scientists -
A comprehensive analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that GMOs do not increase yield; in fact, on average they reduce yield. A USDA study showed that farmers' income doesn't increase, and in some cases, it decreases. And it doesn't help the overall economy either.
According the author Dr. Jeffery Smith:
The IAASTD (The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development) report, for example, concluded that the current generation of GMOs does not reduce hunger and poverty, does not improve nutrition, and does not facilitate social and environmental sustainability.
The 'feeding a hungry world' argument is always used when corporations want to 'create' food using mad science and except consumers to be willing guinea pigs. Then years later science emerges that experimental technology like Genetically Modified Organisms in plants and animals come with unknown side effects and health risks.