Questions, Concerns About Bioengineered Food Continue
Next time you’re at a party with a bunch of dietitians and things get a little dull, toss out this question: Should we genetically alter tomatoes to give them more cancer-fighting properties?
“Ask a dozen people and they’ll give you a dozen answers,” says Liz Applegate, professor of nutrition at the University of California at Davis.
“Right now, it’s chaos. No one can agree.”
As we round the corner of a new millennium, the public’s attitude about food couldn’t be more confused.
On one hand, we demand organic food and question whether pesticide use, irradiation and genetic alteration have gone too far.
On the other, we want our food to be scrubbed clean of illness-causing bacteria and have a seemingly insatiable appetite for fortified foods that promise to make us thinner, healthier and happier.
So which will win? The tomato that’s genetically altered to provide more cancer-fighting lycopene or the tomato grown without any chemicals or scientific tinkering?
Our buying habits reflect the paradox. The sale of organic food has grown by as much as 25 percent a year and hit $5 billion in 1998, according to agriculture and food industry sources. At the same time, the market for foods that have been supplemented with natural ingredients to make them more healthful continues to grow.
The Grocery Manufacturers of America estimates sales of functional food - the new industry buzzword for foods purporting to improve the body’s performance and ward off disease - have reached $17 billion and are expected to climb.
“At this point all that’s clear is that eating to prevent illness - the idea of food as medicine - has presented a whole new paradigm,” says professor Clare Hasler, executive director of the Functional Foods for Health program at the University of Illinois, the nation’s largest center for study on the issue.
“Surveys we’ve seen show people don’t like the general idea of inserting genes from one sort of plant into another, or from plants into animals,” Hasler says.
But other data shows that if it’s done for health purposes, people are more accepting, she says.
“Europe is totally against anything genetically modified,” says Hasler. “In this country, we aren’t as scared because we have been educated along the way by companies and researchers who say certain types of bioengineering are safe.”
Although food as medicine seems new, the concept predates the current millennium. Native American healers knew juniper needle tea relieved earaches. Chinese doctors have long understood the importance of ginger and gingko. And didn’t your mother feed you chicken soup when you were sick, and tell you to eat carrots to help you see better?
Besides, Americans have long been comfortable with scientifically enhanced food. We eat cereal with added vitamins, drink calcium-fortified orange juice, snack on tortilla chips made from genetically altered corn and eat pork bred to isolate certain desirable traits.
So what’s the harm with the latest movement toward functional and bioengineered food?
Among recent examples of genetically altered food gone bad is an experiment that introduced elements of Brazil nuts into soybeans to enhance animal feed. When scientists mixed the genes, they didn’t think the properties that make some people allergic to nuts would transfer to the new soybeans. It did, and the project was abandoned.
And scientists at Cornell University announced in May that when the pollen from genetically-altered corn was eaten by Monarch butterflies in their caterpillar stage, it killed nearly half and stunted the rest.
“It’s this feeling that we have moved ahead more rapidly than we should have,” says Joanne Ikeda, an instructor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. “People have already been burned by experience.”