What's on Your Mind?

You specify that the modification in question is simply the selective breeding of existing species. I think it's ambiguous whether or not you intended to include genetic engineering as an objectionable modification - it is distinct from the vanilla old-fashioned techniques of breeding, but I will assume you meant GM to include direct manipulation of genetic material and traditional (Mendel-style selection) breeding.

In biological engineering, the state of the art gives us the ability to very handily say exactly how much of which proteins we would like to be expressed in a resultant strain. The state of the art also allows us to enumerate and verify that we've gotten exactly what we hoped for in the genetic code. This is the (arguably, but for the sake of this discussion) easy part, and this growing field tackles work of this scale on a daily basis.

The hard part is to now drift in the wake of your alterations and observe precisely how your strain grows and develops. You can introduce GFP into a mouse and have an adorable glow-in-the-dark pet mouse, but this says little about how vulnerable it becomes to nocturnal predators. Nor does it say anything about the resulting biochemistry inside of the rodent - the presence of free radicals, its propensity to any number of rodent-borne diseases, what bacteria it may harbor, its evolutionarily-determined benchmark for homeostasis, and so on, let alone a care for its own health or comfort (that isn't an issue).

Now what does any of this matter to us if we're only interested in eating the damn thing. Well as I've already cautioned, when you alter a creature's biochemistry you put it at risk to new disease, new afflictions, new "corruptions" that if not properly accounted for by the existing health standards can slip through to the consumer unchecked. These standards are not merely invented by an epiphany of scientists or lawmakers, but are adapted as necessitated by changing health risks - to be blunt, in hindsight of a calamitous event (the bovinial spongiform scares in the UK are but one example I can point to).

Unfortunately, standards for food safety can only measure things on the opposite end from where they started: in a laboratory. The growing plant or animal throughout its life stages is the black box in this system and we're in an unnecessary hurry to get this food on our plates without taking a moment to appreciate just what's happening inside that box. Although tests can apply a rubric of diverse criteria to identify a number of things that interest us, its the things you're not testing for that we need to worry about. The fact of the matter is you're dealing with a fundamentally distinct organism than that from which you stenciled.

You must account for the long-term effects of altered genetic code. You must account for the new pests and bacteria for which you've created a host. You must account for any toxins that weren't present previously, or were only at tolerable levels. We've altered the dosage and it will take years, even decades, to identify the most significant effects - these tests could take place in a lab, but it's not in the market's interest to delay profit.

Let's talk about meat. Some people like it rare, they like it juicy, they like it tender - no one puts themselves at greater risk of food-borne illness than this person, and occasionally they pay the price for it because the beef was of poor grade, or the sushi bar served fish past its date, or the kitchen countertop wasn't respected from contact with raw food, or any number of everyday blunders. Obviously you can kill most of the bad things in your food just by cooking them but some people are nonetheless afflicted, whether by a slip-up at the farm, untidiness in the kitchen, or their own desire to consume raw food.

But not all mammals and certainly not all humans react identically to raw meat. Stomach acids, bacteria that have chosen you for a host, and even immune system all play a roll in determining just how safe food is to you individually. And this says very little about people with allergies but I think you'll see that this isn't a trivial matter worth writing off in legislation. In the U.S. I am proud to say that if you have an allergy (perhaps fatal) to certain nuts, you can expect to see in boldfaced font a warning on food labels that will alert you even if the food may have only come in contact with machinery that processed nuts. It's important to recognize that mistakes happen in the kitchen and it's a deathly serious matter.

The risk is there and slip-ups happen all the time. Fortunately our bodies have already adapted in some capacity and some of us (but not all of us) are able to consume many foods in their rawest form. Appreciate this, but only with the lemma that it comes from the long-term adaptation to a fixed set of plants and animals that practice has shown to be acceptable to our health. When culture tells you to eat this food but not that one, it is based on a wisdom of thousands of years of culinary experience - and I want you to imagine what frightful reaction struck the first discover of nightshade and what horrible discomfort it would have imparted on those people. It may look like food, it might even taste good, but fuck it all, this one was evolved to kill me.

Now we've got a grad student in the lab with a hot idea on how we can make a plumper, juicier, nutritious whatever. I trust their methodology and I trust their results - it will be plumper, juicier, sexier, and whatever people happen to want. But the lab work ends when the thesis is done or when the company goes to market. In the United States, needless to say a major player in the biotech industry, the FDA has already made up its mind on GM foods. To put it simply, they've been judged "materially indistinguishable" from natural species and therefore are not subject to any new investigations or restrictions.

I will have to do some further investigation to find out just how the FDA came to this decision, but by the standard I've given you a GM food cannot be indistinguishable from its unmodified counterpart unless it has identical biochemistry - and it's the biochemistry that interests me. To say that they're "materially indistinguishable" is contradictory to the purpose of making a modification in the first place. If I'm eating a plumper, juicier, more nutritious whatever then the answer is clearly sitting right in front of you on your plate.