In a world without fear, genetic engineering may be a viable solution to our many issues
By Esther Tung
Photos by Tim Stockton
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Picture an heirloom summer squash at the Kitsilano farmer’s market. The vendor is an MBB grad student, genial, bespectacled, bearded. Once he catches your eye, he’s quick to dive into his spiel.
This is the latest project from a group of SFU hobbyist engineers, bio-enthusiasts that congregate in the biology labs after hours to tinker with plant genomes. The squash is a revival from 1850s France, previously limited in production due to fragility.
On the market table is the fruit of their latest project. With the certain genes for tolerance to soil acidity and overcrowding silenced, it’s become feasible to farm it throughout Pacific Northwest summers. These ones are grown right out of his own backyard. The group is now engineering a strain of maize that will drastically reduce fertilizer runoff.
This entirely hypothetical situation highlights the much-ignored flipside of genetic engineering. Food politics currently tout organic, biodynamic farming as the messiah that will redeem our world from cancer, resource exhaustion, climate change, and economic recession. Yet, as flavourful and nutritious as organic food is compared to conventional farming methods, it poses a problem that no lefty enviro wants to address — there is no way we can feed our projected nine billion-strong population on the principles of Alice Waters.
Locavorism and the organic farming trend won’t die out, but will become an increasing luxury, afforded only by the richest two to five per cent of the world’s population (that’s us). Conventional farming methods have placed all their shitty cards face up on the table. Approving GE food is currently an expensive and tedious process, and so only afforded to maximum-profit motive companies like Monsanto.
Yet stringent regulation on transgenic foods has not resulted in less of it on our shelves — 80 per cent of packaged foods contain GMO crops, while cattle feed is usually GMO corn. A piece of legislation passed in the US in the 80’s which allowed universities to hand over crop patents to food companies, has concentrated the intellectual property rights to the building blocks of life in the hands of very few.
But imagine if there were looser laws surrounding the creation and approval of engineered foods. Imagine if the technologies became accessible to interested amateurs, the way that computer coding is a skill that can be acquired by anyone with the interest to learn. Imagine if legislation was expected to evolve to meet the needs of a changing industry and their consumers, much like with technology. Imagine the GE equivalent of Web 2.0. Approved staple crops could be freely distributed; the seeds free to be propagated.
GMO foods are inherently a disturbing concept. But the creators of a mango spliced with deep-sea flounder genes don’t expect it to be sold at Safeway, much like the artist behind a provocative painting will not hope to be displayed on the walls of IKEA. There are scenarios in which genetic engineering can be logical — take the hypothetical summer squash, for instance. No genes were spliced into its variety, only turned off, thereby accelerating the conventional breeding process. Rice requiring minimal water to grow could be created in a matter of months instead of years, solving water shortage problems in countries that depend on it as a staple. In areas of malnutrition, the most readily available crop could be infused with vitamins and minerals as an effective Band-Aid solution.
Yet because of the fearful rhetoric that surrounds genetic engineering, we’ve lost the imagination for its possibilities, and the curiosity to question whether its potential is being severely stifled. As a lefty enviro, I simply took the “facts” of GMO at face value. But hypoallergenic tree nuts, never-browning lettuce, inbred resistance to pests — all can be made possible by genetic engineering. Yet only the interests of commercialized food giants are represented in this realm of food politics.
It’s a precarious utopia that requires careful management. And I’m eager, though not hopeful, that genetic engineering legislation will change within my lifetime. But the first step to changing public policy is changing public conversation — so here’s hoping to making the first dent at exorcizing the demonic image of GMO.
