Yesterday’s NY Times had a very balanced discussion of the issue of glyphosphate, “RoundUp.”
I mention this because I have been responding to a thread on a “progressive” listserv. The author of the thread is campaigning for our state’s initiative “522” requiring that GMO food be labelled as such. Her stand led to several posts insisting that we know that GMO is toxic. When I asked her to provide any evidence that this is true, she got very angry.
I have been thinking abut Carol’s anger and have come to understand that she is not angry because of her laudable passion for a progressive cause, she is angry because I corrected her. Correcting people is one of my worst traits. It comes from a belief that our society is well served when we abhor those who make false statements about facts. Generally this makes me a liberals since it si the right wing that insists the laws of thermodynamics do not restrict the amount of heat humans can generate while teaching children that the founding fathers believed in Jesus and that Jesus rode around on dinosaurs.
Of course, liberals too can be passionate about false science t hat supports their beliefs. The marijuana community, in pursuit of the right to get h8igh on the harmless weed, has been amazingly successful in selling the fiction of “medical marijuana.” Carol’s paean that genetic engineering is toxic is similarly wrong.
If there is any sort of “toxicity” as Carol claims, the Times report did not find it. The most serious issue that the article does describe is that the effects of glyphosphate … … not of the transgenic engineering … may cause a decrease in the ability of micro organisms living in the soil to break up that soil. Of course this would be true with any herbicide that targeted these creatures, all that the gene does is permit the corn to be resistant. As for the hardness of the soil, it seems at best hyperbolic to equate that to any imminent danger to humans.
Carol’s reaction as anything but a progressive issue. She is being a Luddite, opposing anew technology because she does not understand it.
Put another way the REAL issue here is not that Monsanto has used restriction enzymes to modify the corn genome . . Corn itself does not exist in nature. The food was created by intentional breeding of ancient grasses. This breeding combines many genes into a single species. It is absurd to argue that Monsanto’s corn is somehow unsafe because they used more precise tools to splice one gene into the species,
None of this means Carol’s concerns are wrong. The much more pressing issue is that a single company now controls the fate of a huge part of our food supply. What the articled does raise is the issue of monoculture. Currenlty 90% of all corn is from the Monsanto seed.
Yesterday’s NY Times had a very balanced discussion of the issue of glyphosphate, “RoundUp.”