Michael Haggert
In 1667, New Amsterdam became
New York. The reasons why are many, but
most significant is that the Netherlands
retained control of the nutmeg trade.
We’ve had a global food system for
centuries.
I won’t bore you with a history lesson
on the spice wars. Let’s talk about GMO:
genetically modified or engineered
organisms and their influence on the
global food system.
Thanks to Darwin and the rest of the
scientific community, we know that changes
in the characteristics of living organisms
happen over time. Selective breeding can be
used to manipulate the outcome or choose
which characteristics are favoured. If you
want shorter wheat with more seed and less
plant, you wander into the field and pick the
seed from the harvest heads on the shorter
plants. The next year you grow only the
short wheat in a protected environment to
reduce the influence of outside pollen, and
you should end up with a field of shorter
wheat. Over the course of many years, you
will end up with wheat that is very different
from what was grown when your
grandparents were your age.
I have a lot of respect for the people
who carried out this sort of painstaking
work. Their efforts addressed many food
security problems and allowed for the rapid
growth in global population. I suspect they
prevented several wars along the way.
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, science found ways to
do in the laboratory in just a few months or
years what had previously taken
generations, or at least decades. The
Stay-Brite tomato came on the market in
1994. I don’t think it tastes very good but it
looks pretty and travels well.
If you grow a field of corn and weeds
grow in the field, you end up with less corn.
If you spray the field with something to
poison the weeds, you kill the corn too. That
is, until you go to the laboratory and create
corn that the poison won’t kill. Now you
spray the field and the weeds die but the
corn grows. The end result is more corn.
But then the weeds adapt to resist the
poison. What we have now is the food you
eat being sprayed with poison 3-5 times
while it is growing. Back to the lab we go to
create the corn that makes its own poison to
kill the weeds, or insects that threaten it.
Instead of making 4-5 times the amount of
poison in bigger factories and shipping it to
farms, each seed grows into a plant that is a
tiny, living poison factory.
I won’t go into a long discussion about
the questionable business practices of the
giant corporations profiting from these
technologies. But the modern equivalent of
the Dutch Trading Company doesn’t raise
an army or build a fleet of frigates. They pay
lawyers and lobbyists to fight their battles
on paper and in courtrooms. There is an
undeniable ethical conflict when there is a
revolving door for technically-skilled
employees between the government
regulators and the companies being
regulated.
To quote a long-dead veteran: It’s very
hard to kill someone when you’re looking
them in the eye.
I don’t think the person stocking the
shelves at the grocery store is out to kill me.
I think they are too far removed from the
source of the product they work with to
have any feelings one way or another about
how it came to be there.
But when I buy something from a
farmers’ market or roadside stand from the
people who have dirt under their nails and
can take me to the exact spot where it was
grown, I get to look them in the eye. Not
only do I get the sense that they don’t want
to harm me, but I feel instinctively that they
want me to be healthy and happy for years
to come.
And who knows? Supporting the growers in
my community who have also become my
friends just might prevent a future version
of the spice wars.
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June 2016 - The HUB 7