There has been a bit of discussion at this web-log about GM versus organic food. My position is well known including that I consider the aversion to GM irrational. I have written in the IPA Review (March 2004, Vol 56, No. 1) that GM is the new ‘taboo food’ and suggested that organic food might be the equivalent to the Jewish kosher and Moslem halal.
Rog sent me some links this morning to information about a fellow called Marvian Harris. Harris (now deceased) wrote about ‘cultural materialism’ which is apparently “…based on the simple premise that human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence”.
Harris had some interesting ideas about food as culture including:
The Hindu ban on killing cows? Absolutely necessary as a strategy of human existence, Dr. Harris contended: they are much more valuable for plowing fields and providing milk than as a one-time steak dinner.
“Westerners think that Indians would rather starve than eat their cows,” he told Psychology Today. “What they don’t understand is that they will starve if they do eat their cows.”
In Dr. Harris’s view, then, a manufactured “divine intervention” was needed to encourage people simply to do the practical thing.
The Jewish and Muslim bans on eating pork? Pigs eat the same foods as humans, he reasoned, and are expensive to keep. Sheep, goats and cattle, by contrast, thrive on grass, and provide wool, milk and labor.
So in Harris’ view, what would the state government bans on GM food crops be about?
The links:
http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Harris/Index.htm#Web
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Votes.
Belief. Faith. Guilt. Angst. Hysteria.
Which is all brought together at a focal point identified by Neil.
Democracy; you can’t think clearly with it and you don’t want to live without it.
I reckon people don’t understand the technology. Don’t know what it does – fear it somehow carcinogenic. Distrust the “manufacturers”. Frankenstein food …. oooo…
I guess you would have to make an argument that the introduced protein sequences were damaging.
Similar issue with pesticides – plants have done battle with insects for millions of years. Plants develop nasty chemicals to repel them. We breed a lot of the chemicals out so we can eat the food. But we still ingest many more plant toxins (which are just as nasty as synthetic ones) by something like 10,000 to 1.
Plant breeders (professional and native peoples) have been fiddling with and selecting plant genetics for thousands of years.
Botulism and anthrax are natural and not GM and they’re not very good for we humans. Natural and organic doesn’t always mean good.
I think it would hard to find a study that would give you a whiff of a statistical result on improved “safety” of organic foods and control the other variables.
We all demand a good supply of food and fibre. GM is a useful technology in reducing inputs such as pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers. Extending shelf life etc.
This doesn’t give GM engineers a green light to release everything without a considered EIS and toxicity studies.
Note that the cotton industry use refugia crops with their GM cotton to minimise resistance by exclusively 100% GM crop. Who says agriculture can’t learn.