Sidebar 1 Find The Frankenfoods
Sidebar 2 Supermarket Guinea Pigs
For a number of
related links click here
NWRAGE's
web site and phone number 236-5772 ext. 2.
Mark Des Marets' life changed 17 years ago when he was kissed
by Russian peasants. His parents were organic farmers in Puyallup,
Wash., and he sold their vegetables at a weekend farmers market.
One Saturday afternoon, the teenaged Des Marets was set
upon by Russian emigres in scarves and woolen coats praising
him to the skies--and, yes, kissing him. They had come to
the United States for freedom and found its supermarkets
a gulag. For them, his vegetables were manna.
Des Marets, for the first time, understood that food was
more than nutrition, that it plumbed emotional reservoirs.
Now, the 32-year-old Northeast Portlander is still tapping
emotions. The activist wants to protect the world from Frankenfoods,
as he calls them. "These crops are poison to the environment,"
he says over coffee at a Northeast Portland cafe. "They
must be banned."
He's called to the low-income life because he believes
genetically engineered crops and foods--which have wormed
their way into the American diet in an astoundingly short
time span--are a threat to humankind on the order of nuclear
weapons.
Des Marets--who heads Northwest Resistance Against Genetic
Engineering--has no rock-solid proof that genetically engineered
crops are a bane to humankind. There is no evidence on the
order of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, much less thousands of
dead sheep in southern Utah. But it doesn't seem to matter.
Over the past year, he and tens of thousands of other activists
the world over have beaten back corporate America by playing
to people's emotions.
So buffaloed is the biotechnology industry by the assault
on GE crops--also called genetically modified organisms--that
last week it launched a multimillion-dollar advertising
campaign, stressing the benefits of genetically engineered
crops and foods.
In all of this a question lingers: Are anti-GE activists
merely well-intentioned but out of touch with scientific
fact? Are they opposed to GE because it's the product of
corporate oligopolies? Or are they on a level with Rachel
Carson--who in the early 1960s pointed out the dangers of
chemicals to animals, years before most could grapple with
the concept of an ecosystem?
Ever since the Babylonians first sowed corn 7,000 years
ago, mankind has created new plant breeds by taking qualities
from a breed of corn--one that generates high yield per
acre--and crossing them with, for example, corn that can
withstand drought. It's called hybridization. At its simplest,
the process involves taking pollen from one type of corn
and mating it with the pollen of another. But the system
is typically restricted to intra-species work--corn to corn,
tomato to tomato--and is fraught with the time lags of trial-and-error,
a consequence of crossing 30,000 genes with 30,000 genes.
In 1973, all that changed.
Following the discovery of recombinant DNA, which created
the base technology for gene splicing, chemical companies
such as Monsanto began to isolate genes that had certain
qualities and inject them directly into the genetic blueprint
of a standard corn type.
As with any new technology, GE's proponents claimed it
was better, faster and cheaper. It would reduce the time
and expense required to develop new plants. And now, not
only could you take genes from one type of corn and inject
them into another, you could take genes from an insecticide
and introduce them to corn, creating a corn that would be
its own natural bug killer.
It's as if humans could be engineered from birth with protection
against the common cold.
Farmers would no longer need to spray their fields against
the European Corn Borer, for example, in the same way that
humans could skip vitamin C.
In the 1990s, Monsanto created just such a corn, which
it claims will save as much as $2 billion in crop losses
a year. Called YieldGard, it's better-known as Bt corn for
its bacterial insecticide.
And, in the mid-1990s, Monsanto hit a home run with its
so-called Roundup Ready line of soybeans, corn, sugar beets
and canola engineered to withstand repeated sprayings of
Monsanto's Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in America.
It works much like a neutron bomb: Farmers can spray their
fields aggressively and ensure that they kill every pesky
weed, leaving only their crops standing.
But the possibilities of GE don't stop there.
Although no commercial applications yet exist, scientists
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have perfected
a procedure that sounds as though it were pulled from science
fiction. Called trans-species genetics, it involves taking,
for instance, the anti-freeze gene from an Antarctic flounder--which
lets it survive in deep, cold waters--and plugging it into
a strawberry. The result: a strawberry that will shrug off
frost.
To farmers and industrial agriculture, this is a potential
godsend.
To activists, this is a Frankenfood.
The lure of higher yields, no pesticides and death to weeds
has hooked American farmers, who have seen in GE better
return on investment. Although specifics are difficult to
find, as much as 60 percent of soybeans, corn and cotton
grown in the United States is genetically engineered. GE
crops are major ingredients in products like Duncan Hines
Cake Mix, Total Corn Flakes, Ovaltine and Portland's own
Gardenburger, as well as a slew of other packaged goods,
according to Consumers Union.
Between 1996 and 1999, American acreage devoted to GE crops
increased by 2,000 percent, according to the U.S. Department
of Agriculture.
By way of comparison, Internet usage during the same period
increased by 300 percent.
There are rumblings in the scientific community that amidst
the promises that biotechnology will make the world's breadbaskets
overflow, there are real hazards.
The primary concern is gene drift. That's what happens
when pollen from one plant drifts onto neighboring plants;
the first plant then mates with the second. It's a natural
enough accident that first gave the Ancients the idea for
gathering pollen and doing the same thing by hand.
But with GE crops, gene drift might not be so benign.
In Canada, Europe and the Midwestern United States, there
is documented evidence that Roundup Ready crops have pollinated
neighboring plants.
Although that may not be tragic, it shows how easily farmers
can lose control of GE crops, and it speaks to larger concerns--specifically,
that breeds of super plants could unintentionally be created.
Monsanto says it's no big deal.
"Those farmers were planting carelessly, too close to other
crops," says Tom Nickson, director of Monsanto's Ecology
Laboratory in St. Louis, Mo.
Many scientists, however, are unconvinced. They worry that
entire species of super weeds or mutant crops might evolve--and
that they would be beyond the control of any technology.
Most are like Terry Lomax, a molecular biologist and plant
pathologist at Oregon State University: advocates for the
technology, but not blind to its effects.
"Gene drift is the most dangerous thing that can happen
with GE crops," says Lomax.
"Gene drift by pollen is the canary in the coal mine,"
says Philip Regal, professor of ecology at the University
of Minnesota. "It's the type of thing industry said they
could control, but they clearly couldn't."
"You just don't want to have these concerns in areas of
intense agricultural production," says Steve Strauss, a
professor of genetics at Oregon State University. "Yeah,
biotechnology can do some damage," he says. "It's not the
technology that's inherently bad; it's how you use it."
While the scientific community expresses mild concern about
what it does know--that gene drift may have unintended consequences--many
scientists say they are more troubled by what they don't
know about GE crops and how they have skipped onto the world
market with limited federal oversight.
Last week, a National Academy of Sciences panel concluded
that federal agencies need to do "a better job" of regulating
GE crops that work as insecticides, such as Bt corn, and
suggested that GE crops might pose risks to food safety
and the environment. During the 1990s, two earlier NAS reports
had stressed the safety and benefits of GE. ("Supermarket
Guinea Pigs," page 35.)
In their war with GE, you'd think activists would use the
scientific skepticism and the lack of federal oversight
to lob bombshells at the biotechnology industry.
But these are not the concerns you'll hear from the Mark
Des Maretses of the world. From them, you'll hear that transnational
corporations are undoing the balance of nature, cashiering
the developing world, wreaking havoc on biodiversity, spoliating
the environment and locking up the genetic keys to life.
It's always easier to market fear than linear arguments.
Even some of those who'd seem to be sympathetic to the
anti-GE cause have problems with its to-the-barricades mentality.
"The mood around the anti-GE movement is a new extremism,"
says Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, who left the environmental
group in 1986 to start Greenspirit. "It's a kind of Hitler
Youth mood in its intolerance for other perspectives."
A classic example of the appeal of raw emotional arguments
came March 26.
That evening, Indian physicist Vandana Shiva (left) spoke
at downtown Portland's First Unitarian Church. Sponsored
by the Des Marets-led NWRAGE, the event was thinly promoted
yet drew 550 people--a measure of the grasp this evolving
movement has on the popular imagination.
What all those people heard was a stout woman in a handmade
sari, who tied every evil--perceived or real--of the biotechnology
industry to "a level of greed that is not part of evolved
humanity."
"How did half of America's acreage go to GMOs without anyone
knowing?" the leading international anti-GE activist said.
"It's because U.S. citizens were kept in the dark" by the
biotechnology industry.
"The biotechnology industry has set its heart on the total
control of our life forms and our health," she roared. "It
amounts to dictatorship and does not tolerate individual
choice."
When Shiva finished flaying the agricultural biotechnology
complex with a call to Ghandian rebellion, the audience
leapt to its feet, pleased with Shiva and pleased with itself.
Des Marets and Steve Chase, a co-founder of the year-old
NWRAGE, were pleased, too; the event raised approximately
$2,000 for the nonprofit, which has 20 core members and
meets twice a month in an office filled with sagging couches
in Southeast Portland. There they map a strategy to educate
Oregonians about what they see as the dangers of GE food.
Fliering at area supermarkets is about as aggressive as
they get.
"All we need to do is tell people about the danger," says
Des Marets, who has a degree in environmental science from
Evergreen State University in Olympia, Wash. "Americans
might just say, 'This is something we don't want.'"
A veteran forest activist who's done everything short of
tree sits--he's afraid of heights--Des Marets knows it's
crucial to hit people where they live; in this case, that
means taking the anti-GE cause to the supermarkets.
Last Wednesday, almost half of the people he approached
outside the downtown Safeway took home fliers reading, "Value
your family's health. Avoid Frankenfoods."
Even the security guard who asked Des Marets to move off
company property came up to him moments later to ask for
a copy.
"These are technological fixes for something that doesn't
need fixing," Des Marets explains to those who ask. "What
we need is sustainable agriculture."
Perhaps the best example of how activists don't let facts
trip up a good argument comes from a study of Monarch
butterfly larvae published in Nature last May.
In it, three Cornell University scientists argued that
pollen from GE corn killed the larvae.
For the anti-GE movement, the Monarch study rates with
the Virgin Birth.
Vandana Shiva told WW that it's "proof" that GE
kills.
Predictably, at last December's World Trade Organization
protests in Seattle, butterfly outfits were high fashion.
And the Monarch's symbolism has played right into the hands
of groups like NWRAGE, "galvanizing a movement," as Des
Marets puts it.
"The Monarch butterfly is the spotted owl of the anti-GE
movement," says Des Marets.
The problem is that all the 500-word Monarch study established
was that if you feed enough insecticide to butterfly larvae,
they will die. What the study involved was locking monarch
larvae in a laboratory with nothing to eat except for milkweed
dusted with Bt corn pollen.
Most scientists laugh at the study. There was no control
group of larvae. There was no research into how far corn
pollen blows. In effect, it had no applicability to the
natural environment.
"Oh, that study's been debunked," says Lomax, the Oregon
State University plant pathologist.
Yet so skillfully has the study been played by activists
that it's fogged the GE debate.
"I've had people ask me, 'If we can have dolphin-free tuna,
why can't we have Monarch-safe corn?'" says Strauss, OSU
genetics professor. "The study was rejected as a paper and
then published as correspondence. And then it becomes a
fact. I'm telling you: Scientists are pissed."
Despite the ad hocracy of activist rhetoric, it's having
a substantial impact.
In January, Pepsico's Frito-Lay, the packaged-foods giant,
asked farmers not to use GE corn.
In Portland, Vitaly Paley, co-owner of Paley's Place in
Northwest Portland, says the GE food issue is now firmly
on his radar. Although the majority of foods his restaurant
uses are organic, it's on his agenda to make sure Paley's
Place is as GE-free as possible.
David Yudkin, owner of Hot Lips Pizza in downtown Portland
and Beaverton, is trying to go GE-free but keeps running
into problems trying to locate GE-free pepperoni.
And NORPAC Foods Inc. in Stayton has had a GE-free policy
since 1997.
"Our customers, buyers from big grocery chains, don't want
them, especially the Japanese," says Manuel Silveira, the
grower-owned cooperative's vice-president of agricultural
services. NORPAC markets Santiam canned vegetables, among
other brands.
Oregon farmers, too, know which way the wind blows.
"We're being really cautious," says Dan McGrath of Oregon
State University's Marion County Extension Service.
Only 2 percent of Oregon's potatoes are GE, says Will Wise,
president of the Oregon Potato Commission. He reports that
one farmer who grew GE potatoes couldn't sell his crop.
In the half-century since the United States emerged as
the preeminent world power, progressive activists have often
alerted the American public to concerns well before all
the evidence was in. They questioned the safety of cigarette
smoking; they questioned nuclear power; they questioned
America's treatment of the environment; they questioned
the Vietnam War. They were written-off as know-nothings.
But, in each of those instances, the activists were eventually
proven right.
Their track record isn't perfect: Noam Chomsky was dead
wrong about Pol Pot, and the liberal left's insistence on
politically correct speech has defanged American culture.
With their challenge to GE crops and foods, activists like
Mark Des Marets are making people uncomfortable all over
again.
They may well turn out to be the visionaries--even if it's
for the wrong reasons.
Find the Frankenfood
Holly Jarvis has worked in the grocery business ever since
she was a checker in college. Now the general manager of
Food Front--an almost $5 million-a-year natural-foods cooperative
in Northwest Portland--she's opposed to genetically engineered
foods, or genetically modified organisms. But she's completely
flummoxed as to how to keep them out of the store.
"We have shoppers who ask why we're not GMO-free," she
says in a tone of someone tired of wrestling with the practicalities
of the matter. "And we tell them we don't know which products
are GMO and which aren't." She takes a jar of Newman's Own
spaghetti sauce from a shelf. Among its main ingredients
are soybean oil, corn oil and corn syrup: Each could well
come from GE plants.
Fifty percent of Food Front's sales are organic foods and,
under newly proposed USDA organic standards, organic foods
are GE-free.
Packaged foods are another issue. "They are a free-for-all,"
Jarvis says.
Jarvis estimates that as much as 30 percent of Food Front's
products may contain GMOs. She's frustrated that the biotechnology
industry and the federal government have usurped natural
food stores' historic ability to tell their customers what's
in the food they buy.
That's because the federal government does not require
labeling of foods containing GE ingredients unless the food
has been substantially changed. So loose are federal regulations,
however, that a strawberry altered with a flounder gene
would be considered "substantially equivalent," as the regulatory-speak
goes, to a traditional strawberry.
"It's changed the playing field," Jarvis says. "We are
committed to customer choice and we want to offer non-GMO
options. What are we supposed to do?"
Beginning this month, Food Front will create binders of
information for products it carries and believes contain
GE ingredients. The binders will be available to customers
at the front of the store.
People's Food Store Co-op in Southeast Portland will take
an even more aggressive approach. Over the next several
months, the store will attempt to go GE-free by banning
from its shelves any products containing GMOs and affixing
labels to any packaged goods where it cannot give co-op
members an ironclad guarantee of purity, according to Lucy
Hinds, a spokeswoman for the co-op.--PD
Supermarket Guinea Pigs
In many cases, before new technologies and products hit
the marketplace, federal law requires that they go through
batteries of tests to prove their safety. Pharmaceuticals
must go through animal and human trials at independent research
institutions like Oregon Health Sciences University before
obtaining Food and Drug Administration approval. New commercial
airline designs are required to go through thousands of
hours of tests--everything from traditional in-flight testing
to launching chickens into cockpit windows at 300 miles
per hour. Sometimes, the FAA goes along for the ride.
That's not the case with genetically engineered crops and
foods. The only testing GE plants go through is done by
the biotechnology industry itself. Then the USDA, FDA and
EPA--the regulatory troika that oversees GE--assess plant
and food safety using data GE companies generate. In the
11 years since the first GE plant was approved by regulators,
not one GE plant has been denied clearance by the federal
government; more than 40 are now on the market.
In fact, none of the GE foods on supermarket shelves were
tested on humans before being green-lighted.
Why?
"Other than a genetically engineered change, these plants
are the same overall as their parental variety," says Nega
Beru, the FDA's director of enforcement policy. "In terms
of safety, there is no difference."
Beru, however, acknowledged that he knows of no studies
that buttress his contention.
Since last summer, Gordon Conway, an ecologist and president
of the Rockefeller Foundation, has emerged as a leading
critic of GE crops.
Last year, in an after-dinner chat before Monsanto's board
of directors in Washington, D.C., Conway said, "The rush
to get products to market has led to mistakes, misunderstanding
and a backlash against plant technology. Unless there is
a conscious effort to proceed at a pace that is gradual
enough to observe unforeseen effects--before they do harm,
that is--this rush may remove the opportunity to benefit
from biotechnology."--PD
Other sites of interest:
The New
York Times has fine coverage of GE crops and foods
Of course, the feds have their opinions, too. Check them
out at the following: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/biotechnology/
http://www.fda.gov/oc/biotech/default.htm
And, the link that will guide you to absolutely every
possible site on GE crops and foods in existence.
Oh, anarchists have feelings, too. Lots of them, here's
a start
.
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 12,
2000
|
