Unfounded fear is choking off the next Green Revolution.
Illustration by Scott Menchin|
I'm looking for a bratwurst to go with my beer at Anuga, the biggest food fair in the world. I wangled a press pass for this biennial event the instant I glimpsed this year's logo: a red-lipsticked female mouth swallowing the Earth. The catchy slogan: taste the future.
Wandering through the brightly lit Koelnmesse Convention Center in Cologne, Germany, I dodge stampeding throngs of grocers, 168,000 of them from 150 nations. These serious-minded movers and shakers of foodstuff have come to determine which delicacies will dominate tomorrow's store shelves. Skeptical experts sample such oddities as ostrich jerky, blazing Ukrainian honey-pepper vodka, and Austrian sparkling wine jeweled with flakes of real gold.
The food trade is globalizing, and Anuga is crucial to that process. Why Germany? Because anything that will please the ultrapicky, clean-freak Germans is a shoo-in for the huge, expanding markets in India and China.
The future trumpeted in Anuga's slogan – presumably far-out stuff designed to revolutionize global eating habits – turns out to be a low-key cluster of newfangled knickknacks such as alcoholic Jell-O shots packaged in comical hypodermic plungers. Elsewhere, though, the future of food is being packaged as something altogether less glossy: a culture war. Renate Kunast, Germany's minister of consumer protection, food, and agriculture (in Germany, these are all the same thing), opened the show with a rousing speech that called for labeling of genetically modified eats. She's leading a determined, meticulous, government-supported backlash against American corporate genetic imperialism.
Pamphlets distributed by Kunast's ministry litter a stern multistory fortress devoted to what the Germans call biological foods. The products here are slick attempts to pass off hippie chow as chic and sophisticated: microwavable organic handy snacks in individual portions, cocktails made with Juniper Green Organic London Dry Gin. This is simon-pure, low tech health food that's guaranteed to be free of fertilizers, pesticides, and, above all, anything genetically modified. And trade is booming.
The 139 fatalities from the human form of mad cow disease since 1995 have made Europeans fanatical about the purity of their comestibles. And who can blame them? Kunast's biological foods initiative is a tidy socialist alternative to brain-eating prions on the dinner table, not to mention any shadowy nightmares Monsanto and its ilk might be cooking up. It's trade war � la mode.
The potential benefits of GM food should be dead obvious to all. It's a miracle technology that – if properly handled by a mature, honest, insightful society – could make it possible to grow bountiful crops on marginal lands. Designer plants could make deserts bloom, detoxify ruined soils, return scarce rangeland to nature, eliminate malnutrition, and abolish hunger for a future population of 10 billion or so. They might even help us deal with climate change – an urgent problem, given that last summer's heat killed 15,000 people in France alone. German agriculture took a body blow in the searing drought of 2003, and there hasn't been a really good global harvest in four years. The World Trade Organization meeting in Canc�n, Mexico, crashed over agricultural issues. And to top it off, Americans are leading the developed world into a bloated new existence of life-threatening obesity. Biotech could change all that.
If the bustle at Anuga is any indication, the GM sector's logical counterstrategy would be to spin its products as luxury goods. If Frankenfood were top-of-the-line gourmet chow, if it were better for you than conventionally produced food, if Fortune 500 CEOs sought it out to feed their children, the world would follow. GM food would be the taste of the future.
But it's not, and everyone knows it. Instead, the fruits of our growing skill at genetic engineering have been irrevocably stigmatized. There's a universal loss of credibility on the subject; nobody trusts the experts, not even the experts themselves. Gene-spliced food has been mired in sordid side issues: underhanded sales tactics, aggressive patenting, corrupt oligarchies, national sovereignty issues, and superstition. Even the hungriest Mozambican regards the stuff as an unadulterated evil. As it stands, the only hope for marketing it is to keep it unlabeled and therefore invisible. There's something fishy going on here, and no one wants to be the sucker.
We have another Green Revolution poised at the end of our forks. Too bad we're choking on it.
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