table talk / By Joseph Byrd

GMO, cloning and other controversies

Why is it automatic that genetic modification is not organic? Using “heirloom” seeds is in itself a form of genetic selection. And farmers have been selectively modifying food plants since before written history. There is not one single thing we eat that hasn’t been modified. You know how big tomatoes were before we started modifying them? About the size of a marble. Is a plant perfectly natural if its genes are formed over generations of selective breeding, but polluted and dangerous if those same genes are shot into the cell walls with a tungsten-coated gene gun?

“Organic” seems no longer to have the meaning of “grown without pesticides or inorganic chemicals,” but has become a buzzword. (If you read my column on artisan cheeses, you will recall that the Oregon dairy that provides milk for Rogue Creamery’s blue cheeses can’t get organic certification because they refuse to kill sick cows, instead removing them from the herd, treating them with antibiotics and only returning them when they are fully recovered.) What organic means to me is food not factory-farmed for volume yield, transportability and shelf life, but food grown with special attention. And it’s the special attention, and consequent flavor, that I care about. Is it “certified organic?” If the farmer used a sulfur solution in March to control mildew, he would no longer get the certification. I couldn’t care less. Hey, it’s food, not a religion!

Except it is, unfortunately, a religion. And those who practice it as a world-wide dogma often fail to keep in mind that we are privileged to live in the wealthiest nation in the world, where many of us can exercise free choice of what we eat. Organic food is an option for which we pay a premium. For most humans on Planet Earth, there is no such option, and never will be, in our lifetime.

If advances made by genetic scientists are great, the political opposition to such research in the developed countries has never been stronger. The current political climate - turning off the spigot for research by U.S. scientists and farmers, whose collaboration is so necessary precisely to avoid “Frankenfood” kinds of problems - is an abdication of our role in

the World Community. It is Luddite and it is smug and it is selfish.

“You have these two giants locked in a horrible battle,” says a New Yorker article. “The fight may destroy Monsanto, and it might even hurt Greenpeace in the long run. But the real casualties are truth and the poor.”

NEXT: Meat from cattle farms is inefficient and environmentally harmful. So are carnivores doomed?

McKinleyville foodie Joseph Byrdteaches music at College of the Redwoods.

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