Look closely and you'll see that genetically engineered foods are everywhere. Their safety is at the center of a healthy debate.
By SUSAN ASCHOFF
Published December 9, 2003
Jeffrey M. Smith, author of Seeds of Deception
Jeffrey M. Smith wants people to look at what they are being fed not only on their dinner plates, but by the trumpeters of genetically engineered foods.
"We (are) tampering with a fundamental level of nature and very few people are aware of it," says Smith, author of a new book on the subject.
Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You're Eating (Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 2003; $17.95), asserts that genetically modified, or GM, food is unsafe, harmful to nature and intended to feed corporate profits, not the hungry.
Smith, who lives in Iowa, will be in the Tampa Bay area next week for lectures and book signings.
"You can do something very concrete to protect yourself" from GM foods, Smith says.
Don't buy them.
"And that same action puts pressure on the food industry" to stop using GM ingredients.
Genetically modified means genes in plants and animals are manipulated for new attributes. Scientists can introduce a gene from the same or another species or change the expression of one of the organism's own genes.
In fact, scientists have been manipulating the gene pool for more than a century through hybridization, in which plants or animals are crossbred to obtain the desired traits. Today scientists can do it much faster and more precisely by inserting a single gene, and typically two or three genes.
Genetically modified corn, for example, wards off the corn borer pest. Genetically engineered "golden rice," unlike standard rice, produces beta-carotene and could one day help prevent the 4-million annual cases of infant blindness and death in children with vitamin A deficiency, experts predict.
But no one is certain about the long-term effects of messing with Mother Nature's genetic codes.
While many farmers in the United States embraced the technology beginning in about the mid 1990s, Europeans still debate what the London newspapers call "Frankenfoods." Activists in Britain have trampled fields of experimental corn. In France, they've burned Ronald McDonald in effigy. European markets have been essentially closed to new biotechnology foods for four years, and an effort by President Bush this year to ease hunger in Africa with genetically modified grain was rebuffed.
"The media is much more open to the argument overseas," says Smith, a member of the genetic engineering committee of the Sierra Club and founder of the Institute for Responsible Technology. Coverage of engineered food is more extensive outside the United States.
"And the more people know about it, the less they want it."
Americans apparently know very little.
About 25 percent believe they eat GM foods but as many as 75 percent of processed foods on grocery store shelves are GM, from soy sauce to ice cream to soda. GM crops are planted on more than 102-million acres in the United States, mostly in corn, soybean, canola and cotton for cottonseed oil fields, the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology reports. The Washington, D.C.-based initiative (www.pewagbiotech.org) says it doesn't pick sides in the GM debate, calling itself a "technology agnostic."
Critics charge that GM crops, and animals given GM feed, damage nature's genetic pool. The Florida Alliance for Safe Foods objects to the "patenting of life" by biotechnology giants such as Monsanto and Novartis. Many farmers worry there will be cross-contamination of conventional and organic crops. Some speculate that the genetic changes, which make plants pest resistant, could make humans resistant to antibiotics. Studies, some since discounted, report allergic reactions and increased cancer risks from GM foods.
"Some bread has soy flour and some bread has soy lecithin" and both have a high probability of GM soy, Smith says. More than 80 percent of all soy planted in the United States is GM, the Pew Initiative reports. "Wheat bread is so far okay," Smith says. Most wheat farmers have resisted GM seed. "But if a single farmer takes it, it can contaminate huge quantities" of all wheat crops.
In 2000, a genetically modified corn called StarLink, which produces its own insect-controlling protein and is used only for animal feed, showed up in taco shells, sparking a nationwide recall and lawsuits alleging allergic reactions and contamination of nonmodified crops.
The mixup undermined public confidence. Most Americans say they'll eat GM foods but they want to know it.
The debate, say many, needs to focus not on whether GM foods should exist - they do - but on how to ensure safety and accurate labeling. In 1992 the FDA decided that genetically modified foods are "substantially equivalent" to natural foods and do not require FDA approval or labeling.
Consumers who want to avoid them should eat organic or do a little detective work, Smith says.
"There are only four major crops you'd want to eliminate: canola or vegetable oil, soy, corn products and cottonseed oil. A lot of the soy milk will say Not GM," he says.
"When I go out to eat, I ask what (entrees) they cook in olive oil and order that. It's not too difficult."
On the True Food Web site at truefood.geaction.org/shoppersguide/guide_printable.html, there is a shopping list of GM and non-GM brand names. For example, the list says Kellogg's Corn Flakes are GM but Nature's Path Corn Flakes are not.
Biotechnologists envision the day when genetically modified foods feed the world. There is already a bioengineered salmon which, with a gene from an eel, grows five times faster than its predecessor. In the future, vaccine may be delivered via a banana.
Smith warns against a headlong rush toward technology without thought of consequences.
"The genetic modification of food and crops is one of the biggest threats to our health. There is no scientific (proof) that these foods are safe," he says. "When you make changes to the DNA, there are changes that will not be apparent for generations."
Jeffrey M. Smith, author of Seeds of Deception, will give a free lecture on genetically modified foods at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Holiday Inn Select, 3535 Ulmerton Road, Clearwater. Call Nature's Food Patch at (727) 443-6703 for information. He will also speak at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 16 at South Gate Community Center, 3145 South Gate Circle, Sarasota. Call Jason Boehk at (941) 362-3869 for information.
