Book Recommendation: Food, Inc by Peter Pringle

by: Jill Richardson

Wed Nov 18, 2009 at 23:03:50 PM PST

Here's my caveat though: I believe the content of this book is essential reading, but I disagree with the author's ultimate assessment of biotechnology. In the tail end of the book, Pringle says:

[GM foods] are scientific creations full of both promise and potential hazard. These experimental foods deserve respect from those who discover them, call for more caution from those who regulate them and grow them, and finally, at the end of this real food chain, demand close study by those of us who eat them.

My main critique here is that, from reading the book, I do not believe Pringle has an adequate background in the science of sustainable agriculture (or perhaps ecology or agriculture in general) and thus, I believe that he overestimates the promise of GMOs. Assessing GMOs also requires assessing alternative solutions to the problems GMOs are intended to address. The question is not only "Do GMOs solve a problem?" but "Do GMOs represent the BEST solution to the problem?" This book makes it clear that the science of genetic modification is not quite ready yet for prime time. I am all for science for science's sake, but I believe that agroecology is the best and fastest way to solve the world's food problems at present. If, some day, biotech presents a better, safer solution than agroecology, then I will revise my point of view. In the meantime, those who want to solve the world's problems will get their best bang for their buck (and their fastest results) via agroecology, not biotech.

First of all, it explains how genetic modification is done (and how it can go wrong) in the clearest terms I've seen to date. When a gene for a trait is inserted into a plant's DNA, it is not inserted alone. Rather a set of genes are put together in what is called a "cassette" and they are inserted together. The extra genes tell the plant when to turn on and off the trait, and they let the researchers know that the cassette was successfully received. (A favorite "on switch" is known as 35S, taken from the cauliflower mosaic virus.) When this cassette gets inserted into the DNA, it's all a bit of a crapshoot. In making one particular GMO, researchers tried 21,000+ times to insert cassettes into DNA. Out of that, they got 130 plants that received the cassette and produced enough seed for them to work on. And of those, only 44 plants were "selected as worthy of breeding." (p. 73)

So far so good though, right? In theory, if you have plant DNA plus a gene for a trait that turns on and off when it is supposed to, what could go wrong? Why would that be so different from conventional breeding to get a desired trait? Well, here's the thing. The researchers don't have control over where in the DNA the cassette lands. It can land in the middle of another gene that controls something else in the plant, for example. It can screw things up instead of acting as intended. That's why they can start with 21,000 and end up with 44.

Another question has to do with the "extra" genes in the cassette - the on and off switches, and the markers. One type of gene used is known as a "jumping gene," which Pringle defines as "a mobile segment of DNA that moves around within the genome, either by physically inserting itself as various sites or by producing a copy of itself." (p. 74) Can jumping genes inserted into a plant's DNA cause problems in the living plant? And how about the markers. Scientists use genes for antibiotic resistance or even genes from a jellyfish that make the organism produce a fluorescent green glow under ultraviolet light. Can those be harmful? Do we really want to engineer antibiotic resistance into our plants, knowing that the gene could then be (potentially) transferred to our gut bacteria when we eat the plant - and from there to harmful bacteria? This all sounds rather incredible to me, but these are questions that scientists familiar with the way genes act are asking, which makes me believe they are valid questions. And the answers might be that it's no big deal in the end, but that doesn't mean the question shouldn't be asked and fully investigated.

And even still, when all of that goes right, sometimes the plants don't act as expected. In a 1990 experiment, scientists engineered 31,000 white petunias to produce red flowers. It worked - sort of:

The first flowers were indeed red, but in the next batch, the color had begun to fade. By midsummer the flowers were all white, and by the end of the season the flowers were a mixture of red and white.

That was 20 years ago, so let's hope the scientists have figured out what they are doing by now. Clearly, DNA works in a more complex way than just "Open genome, insert gene" and you have whatever trait you wanted to produce.

Second, the book tells how poorly we are able to control GMOs once we create them. There's the well-known StarLink corn example, in which the U.S. government approved a variety of GM corn for animal consumption only and it turned up in the human food supply. But what about GM corn genes that turned up in ancestral varieties of corn in Mexico, or plants engineered to produce pharmaceuticals showing up in fields of food crops. That's happened. What about GM plants breeding with wild relatives to produce "superweeds" resistant to pesticides? (I don't know of any cases in which this has happened yet, but weeds have naturally evolved resistance to Roundup on their own already.) There's very little debate over the fact that we don't have much control over GMOs once we make them. Plants are promiscuous, and humans are sloppy and not always terribly law-abiding. The Mexican ancestral corn got contaminated because local Mexican farmers defied a government ban on GM corn and planted some anyway. The lack of control over GMOs isn't necessarily a reason to ban them, but it IS a reason to ban them until we are absolutely 100% sure they are safe and will not cause problems in our environment or our health. The GMO genie does NOT go back into the bottle.

Third, the book does a fantastic job covering issues associated with patenting life. For example, how is it fair for a person or company from one country to take a food that has grown in another country for years back to their home country and patent it. That's happened. Sometimes the patents are legally held up, even in the face of utter unfairness. If Indians or Mexicans have produced a food for years, is it fair for an American to patent it and then sue the Mexicans for trying to sell the patented food in the U.S.? That's happened. Even when patents are given for entirely new GM seeds or processes, the patent can have the effect of stifling innovation. On an unpatented seed, anyone can use the seed and its DNA to create a new, improved variety of a crop. A patent puts a stop to that possibility for everyone except the owner of the patent.

Assuming that there is some way that biotech can be put to a humanitarian use, these patents stand in the way of any new seeds created to benefit the world's poor. In the case of golden rice (rice engineered to produce beta-carotene), the rice infringed on 70 patents belonging to 32 corporations. For the rice to be given away free to the world's poor, all 32 corporations would have to waive their intellectual property rights (which they did do in the case of golden rice).

Fourth, the book blows open the myth that biotech companies invest in supposedly humanitarian technologies like golden rice. Golden rice, it should be noted, is not the miracle food it is often billed as. First off, it's the wrong species of rice. There are two species of rice, one grown in temperate climates and another one grown in the tropics. The majority of those who would theoretically benefit from golden rice are in the tropics. Golden rice is the temperate variety of rice. Also, a person would need to eat 20 lbs of rice a day in order to get enough vitamin A from golden rice. An actual person eats something closer to 1-2 lbs of rice per day, not 20. But even still, golden rice was created in hopes to benefit malnourished people in the developing world. So who funded it? Initially, the Rockefeller Foundation. Their funding "dried up" after six years, and the scientists applied for funding from the E.U. They got public funding with the stipulation that they take on a European industrial partner who would have "options on the product," which they did. Even though all of their funding came from either charitable or public sources, they could not give golden rice to poor farmers unless their "industrial partner" (AstraZeneca, which is now Syngenta) agreed. AstraZeneca didn't want to do that. The scientists ultimately got their way by patenting part of the process to make golden rice themselves and then using that as a bargaining chip to strike a deal with AstraZeneca.

Fifth, the book shows some of the legitimate problems with specific GMOs - and simultaneously shows how we fail to adequately regulate GMOs to keep problematic ones off the market. For example, there's the problem that Bt kills Monarch caterpillars. Bt is the pesticide produced by every cell of a Bt corn or cotton plant (including the pollen). When the pollen blows onto milkweed leaves that the Monarch caterpillars eat, the caterpillars eat it. They may also eat entire Bt corn anthers if those blow onto the leaves as well. When scientists found this out, Bt corn was already grown commercially in the U.S. Admirably, the U.S. government then did look into it and they decided that in most cases, it wasn't a problem. For a caterpillar to eat a lethal dose of Bt, the caterpillar would have to be at a larval stage at the same time corn pollen was blowing around in the wind, and the milkweed plants would have to be close enough to the corn to get enough pollen or anthers on their leaves to kill caterpillars. To the best of anyone's knowledge, for most Bt corn varieties, this probably wouldn't happen enough to truly endanger the Monarch population. One variety, however, was packed with a super dose of Bt that would very likely kill caterpillars. That variety was removed from the market.

(While that's a fantastic development, when I was in Iowa recently, the farmers commented to me that there were no Monarch butterflies there anymore. One farmer speculated that it wasn't just due to Bt poisoning but also due to loss of habitat. The entire state is covered in cornfields, and the cornfields are now entirely devoid of weeds. In the pre-GMO days, farmers were far less effective at keeping down the weeds, and those "weeds" included the milkweed plant that Monarchs live symbiotically with. On a brighter note, a farmer whose land was planted in prairie grass and wetlands told me she did see butterflies on her land. She was able to plant native plants instead of corn because her land was enrolled in a USDA conservation program.)

Last, the book shows what a ridiculous, stupid pie fight the GMO debate is. When a scientist comes out with a preliminary study finding that is not favorable to GMOs, they are immediately accosted by other scientist and industry as wrong, unprofessional, radical, an anti-GMO activist with an agenda, etc. The result can be that the journal publishing the research disavows the finding's legitimacy, or even that the study is canceled and the scientist fired. This is something that is extremely troubling to me. There was a recent article on this in Nature, saying that "papers suggesting that biotech crops might harm the environment attract a hail of abuse from other scientists." This is no way to do science. Science is supposed to be impartial. The worst possible thing we can do once a preliminary finding is made is to abandon the entire experiment and leave the truth unknown. And, on the other side, antibiotech activists should not be using preliminary findings as ammunition against GMOs.

Over and over, I've heard the story of Arpad Pusztai, but Food, Inc. was the first source that gave me the full story. What I usually hear is "A scientist in Europe found that GM potatoes did horrible things to rats and when he published his research, he was fired." Here's the thing: Pusztai's experiment was NOT with the versions of GMOs we eat here in the U.S. The stuff in the U.S. is engineered to resist herbicide or to produce a pesticide. The potatoes in Pusztai's experiment were engineered to produce lectin, a poison. Small wonder why the rats got sick.
UPDATE: I was just informed - and it appears to be true - that lectins from snowdrops are non-toxic to mammals. Therefore, if the rats were getting sick from the poison in the GM potatoes in this case, that's something to be concerned about. I've fixed the paragraph below to reflect this.

The lectin-producing gene came from a flower called a snowdrop. It produces lectin to resist pests. Scientists decided to put that gene into potatoes. (Some lectins are toxic to mammals, but apparently not this one.) In order to get the potato legalized, they had to prove that the lectin wouldn't harm people who ate the potatoes. The question Pusztai was specifically testing was: Is there a difference between a GM lectin-producing potato and a non-GM potato laced with lectin obtained from snowdrop flowers? After a few years of research, he found that the rats fed the GM potatoes were having problems. He told the media about his finding prior to finishing the study or having his work peer reviewed and he came under attack. It was alleged by GMO advocates that perhaps the rats were sick because the GM potatoes lacked enough protein to keep rats healthy or because the potatoes weren't cooked. (I've heard from other sources that the potatoes DID have enough protein and that they WERE cooked, at least in some of Pusztai's experiments.)

We're at a real loss that the research was not finished, in my opinion. The question of whether potato-produced lectin was different from snowdrop-produced lectin is significant because in the U.S., the FDA allowed the safety of a Bt potato to be assessed by testing Bt produced by GM E. coli (because it's cheaper than testing the Bt produced by the potato itself). So was that a bad idea, or not? Could it lead to incorrect results? In theory, Bt is Bt (or lectin is lectin), whether a potato or a bacteria produced it. But it would be nice if we knew that with more certainty, wouldn't it?

All in all, I think you'll agree with me that this is a very valuable book and it lays out the facts in a way that neither the pro- nor the anti- biotech advocates usually do. I think the important point that the book misses is that it's more than just the seed that determines the success of any particular plant. The soil is hugely important as well. That is a major blind spot of the biotech industry in my opinion (and let's hope it stays that way so they don't try to patent and sell it). In describing the effects of the Green Revolution and industrial ag on soil, Pringle notes that the soil becomes degraded and then says:

Some saw the future in genetic engineering, in the insertion of alien genes into food plants to create crops that could cope with the aslty soils and better extract whatever nutrients were available.

That is an accurate description of the biotech industry's agenda, but Pringle neglects to state the very obvious point that rather than spending millions to create seeds that could better extract nutrients, we could spend a lot less money to put nutrients back in the freakin' soil!!!