GMO Yeah

Hi. Today I’d like to address the plight of the poor lonely downtrodden…..scientist. Everyone these days is an armchair scientist. It doesn’t matter if they have a PhD, an MD, a degree from the school of hard knocks, or (God forbid) an English degree. What kind of loser gets an English degree? Oh wait…. Fortunatley obtaining an English degree should allow you to write a very eloquent letter of apology to your parents.

But kids, what if I told you there was an issue out there which has a fairly strong consensus among the experts and yet only about a 50/50 consensus among the public? And no, I’m not talking about the Rotten Tomatoes page for The Tree of Life, I’m talking about climate change. If the scientific community and Leonardo DiCaprio say it’s real, that’s good enough for me. But approximately 0 percent of Rush Limbaugh listeners believe it’s real even though 99 percent of them believe Hillary is a mass murderer and Obama is an ISIS spy. (NOTE: this is based on a non scientific poll).

Actually I just dug up a real survey which said 63 percent of Democrats and 18 percent of Republicans consider it a very serious issue. Our President-elect opined that it’s a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. And if you think he’s not a science expert, just note that he saw Interstellar. Half of it anyway. He got bored and told his assistant Chris Christie to load up video clips of him berating Bret Michaels on Celebrity Apprentice. That’s how he got pumped up for his rallies.

But before you leave, this blog is not about climate change or its deniers! That seems like too settled an issue to even be worthwhile. But what if told you there was another issue that apparently has a scientific consensus yet many don’t believe in? I’m afraid to even say what it is. Deep breath……GMO’s.

This English major has no firm opinion either way but I will say that I’ve come to realize climate change and GMO’s are very different. To be honest, I started to question my assumption that GMO’s are bad when I stumbled on a statement made by the celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson. This guy is an astrophysicist, so maybe even he is out of his element on GMO’s, and perhaps his “celebrity scientist” status should make us scratch our heads—as with the celebrity physician Dr. Oz, whom many believe is a pill peddling quack. Those qualifiers aside, Tyson said being anti-GMO is being anti-science no less than being a climate change skeptic is being anti-science. He also said that the very notion of non GMO food is a myth because we’ve been modifying food for millennia through selective breeding of animals and crops. The apples we eat are far sweeter than wild apples not because we discovered ones that way, but because we made them that way through our own manipulations. The only difference with modern GMO’s is we are now doing it in a lab, but that shouldn’t scare us. Maybe it’s playing God, but we’ve been playing God all along. We just changed the venue.

Oh boy. This means that if one is a climate change believer and a GMO hater, one can’t use the same argument to defend both: I trust the scientists. In fact, to be anti-GMO, it seems one has to essentially mimic the right wing argument against climate change: scientists are often wrong, scientists might be on the payroll of corporations that bribe them into saying what they want, etc. It’s the hoax argument. But my pave pounding research (you guess it: Googling at my computer) indicates Tyson’s GMO opinion isn’t the outlier, it’s pretty much the mainstream scientific view. GMO's have been studied and found to be harmless by the EU, the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of Medicine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. One method they used was to compare incidents of cancer in the US where GMO foods are everywhere and the EU where they are almost nowhere. They found no differences. Ditto many other diseases. Listen, no one is more cynical than me, but can they all secretly be on Big Food's payroll?
Or could GMO's actually cause cancer but they just haven't been around long enough to do their damage? A person who has smoked for 20 years is less likely to get lung cancer than a person who has smoked for 30 years--which is longer than GMO's have been on the market. Beats me.

But another problem: supporting clean energy as well as supporting organic food seems tricky. One is forward looking, the other is backward looking. Electric, solar, and wind energy represent a technological advancement over digging up liquefied pre-historic fossils buried in the ground and using them to fuel our SUV’s. But electricity and batteries are also a less “organic” form of energy. Oil isn’t produced in a lab; it has to be found in nature. It’s just the recycling of old life for modern usage.

Favoring organic food production is the opposite: it’s saying the old way was better. All food was once organically made—because science hadn’t figured out how to produce GMO’s any more than they had mastered the electric car or the smartphone. Clean energy is progressive technology being championed by progressive thinkers. Organic farming is regressive technology being championed by progressives. The former says, “The past is a gas guzzling nightmare we have to awake from in favor of a brighter, cleaner future”, the latter says, “Things were so much better in our grandmother’s day before modern science poisoned the well, so let’s return to that organic Eden before the GMO serpent ruined everything”.

But what are GMO’s anyway? Genetically modified organisms, but what else? And why do scientists even go through so much trouble? Much of it has to do with the two arch enemies of farmers: pests and weeds. Traditionally the farmer has had two basic weapons against them: spraying and plowing.

If you polled the average person and said, “Which do you think is more harmful for the environment and human health? Plows or chemical sprays?”, I imagine people would overwhelmingly say sprays. Plows just seem natural. There’s the tractor drawn plow which makes us think of modern country musical masterpieces like She Thinks My Tractor Is Sexy or there’s the more quaint, rustic visions of horse or ox drawn plows. It’s all so country pure. Chemicals? Cancer in a bottle!

But apparently it isn’t quite as simple as that. Tilling the soil with a plow has plenty of its own problems. In short, it’s terrible for the environment. For starters, plows are huge gas guzzlers which release carbon into the air. On top of that, when plows overturn the soil, they release still more carbon into the air. On top of that, it also releases nitrous oxide into the air—an even nastier greenhouse gas that is just no fun to deal with in non-balloon form. The irony? Organic farming in 2016 is more reliant on this traditional method. Can one even be an environmentalist and pro-organic and be intellectually consistent?

Then there is no-till farming. This reduces if not eliminates all the above mentioned problems of plowing the soil. And….it’s primarily practiced by GMO farmers.

So back to GMO’s…. One way crops are genetically modified is to add something called Bt, or Bacillus Thuringiensis: a bacteria with a crystal protein which acts as an organic insecticide. For the last 20 years, most corn, soy, and potatoes have been modified to contain Bt. The advantage is you don’t have to spray these crops with insecticides because they can now take care of pests on their own. The other advantage is Bt only targets certain pests rather than anything that comes within its sight, like a mountain lion or Donald Trump, so it’s apparently perfectly harmless to most insects and all humans. It’s understandable why eating something that contains a built-in insecticide would makes one queasy, but it should be asked: did you have a cup of coffee this morning? Or tea? Caffeine is an organic insecticide. The coffee plant—unlike corn, soy, and potatoes—has this built-in defense mechanism in nature without even needing to be modified. Nicotine and cocaine are other natural insecticides. Is it then ironic to rail against pesticides over a latte in a Starbucks? Should pesticide fearers start with quitting coffee or perhaps cutting back on freebasing cocaine as a New Year’s resolution? Also organic famers use Bt as well—in spray form.

A second GMO tactic—and this is the most controversial one—is modifying crops so they will be resistant to herbicide sprays: the most famous/notorious one being Roundup or glyphosate which is made by the shadowy and evil multinational corporation Monsanto. They also created Roundup Ready genetically modified crops which are advertised as being immune to any toxic effects from Roundup spray—but the weeds around them will be destroyed by it. Monsanto has intellectual property rights on Roundup and Roundup Ready crops AND genetically modified, Roundup resistant seeds are sterile, so instead of being able to re-use the seeds the next year, you have to buy a whole new batch from Monsanto. So yeah…..a huge proprietary money grab? Probably. And many screeds have been written about this from many a Macbook….with their proprietary ports and accessories that Apple would love to sell at a Genius Bar near you.

So in one case genetic modifications allow the end of the need for spraying (Bt modified crops) and in the other they create a built-in immunity to a chemical spray (Roundup Ready crops). And reduced plowing? Win, win, and win. Of course anti-GMO people say GMO’s don’t in fact facilitate no-till farming, it's grown independently from them. They also note the problem of weeds developing a resistance to glyphosate similar to the way microbes mutate to develop immunities to antibiotics. They also say organic farming allows for more crop rotations vs. single crop monocultures and this is beneficial to the environment. So…..I don’t know. I’m not a scientist or a farmer. But I can write you a killer 5 page essay on Moby Dick.  

GMO’s have also been created for other purposes. The insulin that is provided to diabetics is a synthetic GMO whereas at one time it was pork insulin—obtained, you guessed it, only by slaughtering pigs and taking insulin from their stomach linings. (Why did Ozzy Osbourne never think to do that on his Bark At The Moon tour?). There is also something called golden rice which has been genetically modified to contain beta carotene—a precursor to Vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency is a big problem in developing countries; it kills an estimated 670,000 children under the age of 5 each year. This product is still in development. GMO sweet potatoes are also being developed that should resist a virus that destroys African crops—it may save countless lives. GMO’s are poison we are told, but boy do they sound like medicine to me--at least in some instances.

So…..I don’t know. I mean I’m supposed to view GMO as the most evil and scary acronym in the English language next to ISIS and GOP but I just don’t know if I’m seeing indisputable evidence for it. Couple this with another fact: GMO crops have much higher yields than organic crops. Higher yields mean, yes, bigger profits for greedy factory farmers, but they also reduce the need to carve up more land for farming to get the same production of food. Also, the world’s population is exploding. What if organic advocates got their wish and we reverted 100 percent back to the older, less efficient, lower yield (albeit more natural) methods? Would this actually make world hunger and starvation a bigger problem than it already is? Maybe we miss this factor because here in the first world we just don’t see real starvation. Is GMO fear…..dare I say it?.....a first world problem?

There is the remaining question of the toxicity of sprays. Yes, Roundup is toxic but it’s far from the most toxic spray. And one assumption I had before I started researching this was that organic food/farming was free of pesticides and herbicides. Chemical free food! Isn’t this what most organic marketing claims or at least implies? It’s not so. Both types of farming use chemicals. In a world with weeds and pests, there is just no way around it. Over 20 types of sprays are regularly used by organic farmers. And organic sprays are often less potent than synthetic ones so they have to actually spray crops more often. “But it’s natural, so it’s okay”. True….but cocaine is natural. Heroin is natural. Earthquakes are natural. Steve Bannon is natural. Maybe the poison is in the dosage, not whether it's natural or synthetic.

And remember that Chipotle E Coli outbreak? This happened shortly after they went (mostly) GMO free. Maybe not a coincidence. A study showed that diseases like E Coli and salmonella are actually more common on organic farms. Probable reason: bacteria is transmitted through fecal matter. Organic farmers only use manure as fertilizer. GMO farmers use manure as well but they add synthetic anti-microbial agents to fight against diseases like E coli. Organic farmers skip their flu shot, you might say.

And remember….organic food isn’t just a “movement”, it’s a business model. Yes, Monsanto, General Mills, and ShopRite are large for-profit corporations, but so is Whole Foods. And the organic industry is trying to do something that’s always tricky: offer the same products at a higher price. So they have to make the Mac vs. PC argument. They have been pretty successful at this since the organic industry is now a $52 billion global business. Sure, Big Food has lobbyists, but so does the organic food industry. Can we be sure that at least some of the anti-GMO arguments are anti-science fear mongering motivated by the pursuit of the almighty dollar? The flip side of anti-science greed driven practices by the likes of Exxon/Mobil? And if we believe GMO farming reduces the need for gas guzzling tractors, are Big Oil and organic food……..strange bedfellows?

Whatever the truth is, it’s understandable where this all comes from. We live in a very sick society. Obamacare premiums are going up because they underestimated just how sick people are. As a disability examiner for Social Security who reads medical records every day, I could have told them people are really, really, really sick. It’s only natural that people would look around and try to find the cause. And it’s reasonable to ask whether GMO foods are a major culprit. Especially since this is uncharted territory. The explosion has only happened in the last 20 years but already 88 percent of corn, 93 percent of soy, 90 percent of canola, 90 percent of sugar beets are GMO. The whole push to label GMO foods actually seems pointless at this point because unless it has that certified organic label, guess what? It’s GMO. (And maybe even with the organic label). And before you say, “Dude, I skip corn in my burrito bowl and I haven’t had a beet since Thanksgiving ‘93. I’m in the clear!”. No you’re not. A huge percentage of our food uses corn, soy, canola, beets, etc. as ingredients. So our food is overwhelmingly GMO. But….scientists just haven’t been able to find evidence that GMO’s are harmful. In some cases, they may have nutritional advantages. Could the future prove them wrong? Sure. Scientists once told us the earth was flat. They once took a stance on smoking that went something like, “Just don’t go too crazy and smoke a carton a day. But other than that, smoke up! In fact, I’ve seen three patients in a row and I think it’s about time for me to light up. I’m having a serious nic fit”.

But while we do have a sick society, does the GMO obsession help or hurt the problem? I read a really interesting article a few months ago in The Atlantic. The author argued that GMO fixation from food purists like Michael Pollard was possibly harmful. He noted that while the evidence is just not there that GMO’s are harmful, the evidence that obesity is harmful is overwhelming. Many believe it's worse than smoking. He also said that given the cheaper prices of fast food and processed food and the fact that basically all of our food is already GMO, the anti-GMO crusade does absolutely nothing to help the segment of the population most prone to obesity and poor health: poorer people. For better or for worse, they are going to eat GMO food. So maybe we shouldn’t sneer every time McDonald’s announces a new menu item that is lower in calories or fat. Maybe such adjustments may actually do more to improve our nation’s health than Whole Foods is ever gong to do even if it’s not our food. That’s a very pragmatic, unsexy argument. It appeals to none of our sense of food ideals. But maybe it’s correct.

Whether it’s GMO’s, or the anti-gluten movement, the anti-dairy movement, Paleo diets, vegan diets…. Sometimes I think we make this more complicated than it has to be. I think we all know how to be healthy—it’s just that it’s not the answer we want to hear. Ten years ago—motivated actually by the fact that I got on a scale and realized I was about 20 pounds heavier than I thought—I went on a diet. It had nothing to do with GMO’s or any fancy specialty diets involving demonizing entire food groups. I found a website called The World’s Healthiest Foods which lists….the world’s healthiest foods according to them. It follows a pretty traditional model: all the food groups are allowed. Some dairy is allowed—just not ice cream. Grains are allowed—just not white bread, etc. Oh and no mention of coffee or booze—just milk and water. For a few months I adhered pretty strictly to this. I lost about 20 pounds and felt great. But I didn’t stick with it….because it was hard! People know how to be healthy—just don’t eat chips, cookies, ice cream, pizza, etc. Don’t drink beer. But that’s no fun! Maybe more fun: make non-organic food the enemy. So just drink organic beer! Eat organic pop tarts! Or make gluten the creation of Satan himself. Gluten free brownies or pizza anyone? That’s a bit easier. Maybe when it comes to our diets we look for scapegoats because simply cutting out all the common sense bad stuff just seems to damn unbearable! What are we, Mormons?

So don’t worry about GMO’s….or do. Again, I don't actually know what the f%^k I'm talking about, but I have a keyboard.

If you will excuse I have to walk down to the grocery store. Anyone need anything at Whole Foods?