Food Inc

Food, Inc. - Mendel to Monsanto - The Promises and Perils of the Biotech Harvest

Amazon Book Description

For most people, the global war over genetically modified foods is a distant and confusing one. The battles are conducted in the mystifying language of genetics.

A handful of corporate "life science" giants, such as Monsanto, are pitted against a worldwide network of anticorporate ecowarriors like Greenpeace. And yet the possible benefits of biotech agriculture to our food supply are too vital to be left to either partisan.

The companies claim to be leading a new agricultural revolution that will save the world with crops modified to survive frost, drought, pests, and plague. The greens warn that "playing God" with plant genes is dangerous. It could create new allergies, upset ecosystems, destroy biodiversity, and produce uncontrollable mutations. Worst of all, the antibiotech forces say, a single food conglomerate could end up telling us what to eat.

In Food, Inc., acclaimed journalist Peter Pringle shows how both sides in this overheated conflict have made false promises, engaged in propaganda science, and indulged in fear-mongering. In this urgent dispatch, he suggests that a fertile partnership between consumers, corporations, scientists, and farmers could still allow the biotech harvest to reach its full potential in helping to overcome the problem of world hunger, providing nutritious food and keeping the environment healthy.

Excerpts

One of the most cherished dreams of plant breeders has been to find a way to transform corn and other cereal grains into super-plants able to reproduce themselves....The term for this type of vegetative miracle is "apomixis."
– U.S. Department of Agriculture Press Release, 1998

Alarms related to genetically modified (GM) foods:

Possible extinction of Monarch butterflies due to GM corn pollen

Promises of genetically modified foods:

Resist pests
Grow well even in a drought or a flood
Wonder fruits that can be used for medicine and food

Risks to the third world agriculture:

If caffeine bearing soybeans could be produced to make coffee, they could be grown anywhere and coffee workers in Brazil and Kenya could lose their jobs.
Some seeds are already produced that only produce one season of plants, forcing the farmer to go back to the producer for another batch of seed the following year.

Rachel Carson raised awarenes starting in 1962 of the horrible effects on nature from the powerful insecticides and artificial fertilizers. But mostly farmers and companies still cared only about increasing yields, leading to a vicious spiral of overproduction.

Factors leading to the loss of the family farm in rural America:

the average crop yields of wheat, corn, and rice doubled or tripled in the last 50 years
number of tractors in the world rose from 7,000,000 to 28,000,000
average annual yield of a milking cow in France increased from fewer than two thousand liters to more than five thousand
production increases drove down prices paid to farmers
farmers' costs increased

Poor third world farmers continued to us manual tools and natural varities of plants.

Biotech agricultural revolution introduced special seeds specially designed through genetic manipulation to resist new potent weed killers, forcing farmers to buy both seed and herbicide from the same company. Only the richest farmers could afford this.

The first genetically engineered whole food...
Tomatoes that don't rot on their way to market.

Opposition included scientists, doctors, environmentalists, ecologists, farmers, agronomists, sociologists, lawyers, economists, creationists, mystics, latter-day Pre-Raphaelites, and antiglobalists. They want to halt this new technology of agribusiness tampering with their food. The protest was against modification of food, not against the fact that these innovations weren't being provided to the third world. They focused on the scientific possibility that the new foods could be unsafe, that they were an unnecessary experiment perpetrated by scientists without a social conscience and wicked corporations intent only on profit.

Food scandals:

Contamination of pork with dioxin
Contamination of poultry with dioxin
mad cow epidemic
European ban on transgenic grains, unless used for animal feed
Japanese ban on imports of modified corn

Agriculture and rural life are part of a nation's cultural heritage, and form a basis or it's cuisine and art.

Farming is not just a job, it's a mission...
Bringing food to people's tables not only provides for others but also encourages the roots of self-sufficiency and community. The land is where any nation cares for its economic, social, and environmental health, the place where ecosystems, biodiversity, and water quality are nurtured.

Could blindness an defective immune systems be cured by a daily bowl of a miracle rice?
Two German researchers used three alien genes, two from a daffodil and one from a bacterium, to create in rice a substance known as beta-carotene. Under the right conditions, beta-carotene can be converted in the human body to vitamin A, which is missing in the diet of millions of poor people, causing blindness and defective immune systems. The new rice turned yellow, like a daffodil, and was instantly dubbed "golden rice."

Book Excerpt - Food Inc - Chapter One - Mendel's Little Secret

About the Author

Peter Pringle is the author and coauthor of several books, including the bestselling Those Are Real Bullets, Aren't They? He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Nation. He lives in New York City with his wife, Eleanor Randolph, a New York Times editorial writer, and their daughter, Victoria.

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Food, Inc. - Mendel to Monsanto - The Promises and Perils of the Biotech Harvest

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