“Is it safe to eat genetically engineered foods?”
That’s the question GE food advocates love for us to ask. Why? Because if we look only at the narrow issue of food safety when deciding whether GE foods should be labeled, regulated or even banned, we will fail to ask questions about their other potential dangers.
Also, the food-safety question can’t be answered definitively at present – and perhaps it never will be. All we know is that people don’t drop dead a few hours after eating GE foods.
So if the public debate about GE foods is limited to the currently unanswerable question of whether they’re safe to eat, their advocates probably can defeat attempts to have them labeled or regulated. Why impose regulations when there’s no clear danger? Besides, wouldn’t labeling be unfair to the GE food industry, frightening its potential customers?
But what if we were to ask this question: “Are genetically modified organisms – the plant stock from which GE foods are derived – potentially harmful to your family, the economy or the environment?”
That’s the question GE food advocates would rather we don’t ask, because it leads to more questions – questions that could shed light on the risks of spreading GMOs throughout our environment.
For example, we might start by asking a question with an easy, unambiguous answer such as, “How many countries require labeling of GE foods?” The answer is 64 countries.
Learning that could lead us to ask, “Do these countries require GE food labeling because they think citizens have a right to choose which food industries they support, regardless of specific food safety issues?”
To answer that questions, we need to learn a little about genetic engineering, how GMOs interact with their environment and whether potential problems with those interactions have been or can be addressed.
Understanding what genetic engineering is not helps us understand what it is. Contrary to an often-repeated misconception, genetic engineering is not an extension or enhancement of traditional plant-breeding methods that farmers have practiced for thousands of years. Those methods allow plant breeders only to combine the genes of related organisms – two varieties of corn, for example – to produce a new organism that has some of the desirable traits of its parents such as drought resistance.
Genetic engineering, by contrast, enables us to combine genes from entirely unrelated organisms – insecticidal bacteria and corn, for example. This is done not by breeding the organisms – which is impossible because of natural biological barriers – but by splicing their genes together under laboratory conditions. However, once a GMO is produced by these methods, it is perfectly capable of breeding with related wild plants and non-GMO crops, randomly spreading its experimentally engineered genes.
The potential consequences of this uncontrolled “gene flow” is a primary concern of GMO regulators around the world. We’ll explore them in my next column. Meanwhile, as well as asking whether GE foods are safe to eat, you might ask if they are safe to grow at our ecological house.
Philip S. Wenz, lives in Corvallis, Oregon, where he teaches and writes about environmental issues. www.your-ecological-house.com.
