Jenkins - Food fight: GMOs and the future of the American diet

ALSO BY MCKAY JENKINS

ContamiNation

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The Peter Matthiessen Reader (editor)

The South in Black and White

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Copyright 2017 by McKay Jenkins

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Ebook ISBN 9780698409835

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jenkins, McKay, 1963 author.

Title: Food fight : GMOs and the future of the American diet / McKay Jenkins.

Description: New York : Avery, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references

and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016054194 (print) | LCCN 2016056950 (ebook) | ISBN

9781594634604 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780698409835 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Transgenic plants. | CropsGenetic engineering.

Classification: LCC SB123.57 .J46 2017 (print) | LCC SB123.57 (ebook) | DDC

631.5/233dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054194

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Version_2

For my teachers, my students, and my family

CONTENTS

Square Tomatoes

B ack in 1994, when I was pulling down four bucks an hour grading papers and teaching college students how to write, a friend told me about a cant-lose investment scheme that was sure to lift me from my economic doldrums.

Forget about investing in Amazon.com, he said. Heres what you need to get into: Square tomatoes.

Theyre going to be great, he said breathlessly. Theyve had their genes altered by scientists! They stay ripe longer, and soften more slowly, and because theyre square, they can be stacked for shipping, which will bring transportation costs way down. Its like the laboratory has taken nature and made it better!

The company that makes them will make a fortune, my friend said. And so will we!

There was much truth to what my friend told me, and a good bit of misinformation as well. The product in question turned out to be the Flavr Savr tomato, a newfangled plant designed by a biotech company called Calgene. The Flavr Savr had indeed been designed not for exquisite taste, or enhanced nutrition, but to plug into an industrial food system already rapidly replacing traditional farming practices. Forget small farmers selling their fruit to their neighbors; this was big business. That year, 4 billion dollars worth of industrial tomatoes were being picked (and shipped) while still hard and green, then reddened with ethylene gas before hitting the supermarket shelves like crates of billiard balls. The genetically altered Flavr Savr, by contrast, was designed to ripen on the vine, but was still tough enough to resist rotting. This meant it could survive both mechanical harvesting and the thousand-mile truck to market.

In 1994, after three years of negotiations with government regulators, the Flavr Savr became the first genetically modified food approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be sold in the American supermarkets. Rather than being declared formally safe, the Flavr Savr was considered the substantial equivalent of a normal tomato. At the time, few people complained, and suspicious critics of genetic engineering were largely drowned out by cheerleaders in industry and the press. Connie Chung, Jane Pauley, and Katie Couric all reported on the Flavr Savr on national television; on NBC Nightly News, Tom Brokaw said the tomato stays riper, longer than the nonengineered variety, and they say its tastier.

To be honest, as a budding English professor, I could never muster much enthusiasm for a product spelled Flavr Savr. The phonetically engineered name offended my ear even before I considered the tomatos provenance or taste, or the many ethical questions surrounding its creation. I decided to save my money, and keep grading papers.

But the Flavr Savr, it turned out, was just the beginning of what would become a food revolution. Soon I started hearing stories about another tomato, this one created by a company called DNA Plant Technology, which was being outfitted with genes from an Arctic flounder. These fish tomatoes, the company hoped, would make plants resistant to frost and cold storage, making them easier to grow in northern climates.

In 2001, researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Toronto unveiled a third tomato, this one capable of growing in salty soilsa good thing, since modern irrigation practices were damaging soil so much that the world was losing 25 million acres of cropland a year.

The fish tomatoes never made it to market. So far, neither have the salt-tolerant tomatoes. The Flavr Savr tomatoes made it to market briefly, but they were a commercial flop; the agrochemical giant Monsanto bought the company in 1996, and dropped the product. The ingenuity of a human-engineered tomato never quite overcame the consensus that the Flavr Savrs tasted terrible. As for the Flavr Savr being square? Well, that turned out to be untrue. Blocky tomatoes had in fact been cultivated by California plant breeders in the 1950s, to make mechanical harvesting easier and to prevent them from rolling off conveyor belts, but squareness was never part of the Flavr Savr profile. This myth was just the first of what would become a long series of myths that continue to tangle themselves around engineered food like aggressive vines.

Now, more than twenty years later, these moribund tomato experiments seem almost quaint. Today, nearly all of our caloriesthat is to say, nearly all of our foodare grown from genetically modified plants. Chances are that three-quarters of everything youve put in your mouth todaythe eggs, the yogurt, and the cereal; the chicken sandwich, the tortilla chips, the mayonnaise, and the salad dressing; the cheeseburger, the french fries, the soda, the cookies, and the ice creamwere processed (or fed) from plants grown from seeds engineered in a laboratory. Same for the food you feed your baby and the food you feed your dog.