What’s controversial about fish?
Not much was, until AquaBounty brought biological sciences and genetic technology together to yield the first genetically altered animal for human consumption: a sterile, female salmon that will “grow market size in half the time of (a) conventional salmon.”
In any case, the purpose of this week’s column is not to encourage you to buy organic or to shop locally, but to explore the whys of genetically modified organisms. Why genetically modify food? Why are sunlight and water insufficient to grow our food? And lastly, why do we value the taste, smell and look of fish more than the fish itself?
To start, it’s because 2.5 billion people are hungry, according to the U.N. In August 2011, Nina Fedoroff of The New York Times said that science and technology have increased food growth 10 times per acre in the last 100 years. Natural mechanisms of food production – water, soil and sunlight – just aren’t enough.
But for those of us who oppose GMOs, there’s a vague yet overwhelming sense that something has gone terribly wrong. We’ve distorted nature on such a fundamental level that we’re bound to pay for our hubris. While sunlight and water provide life to all organisms indiscriminately, genetic engineers concentrate all efforts of life-giving to humans. To nature, the pest eating holes into a tomato has just as much of a right to live as the plant itself or the human growing it.
To the genetic scientist, the human’s right to survive negates the rights of all other living things because of our capacity to say so. It is with this same mental capacity that we begin to feel like we can right nature’s wrongs or worse, toy with nature to satisfy our curious whims. We may say: Nature wants us — not these insects — to eat these tomatoes and subsequently engineer a tomato crop to exterminate insects accordingly. Or, perhaps nature didn’t mean to make such a mealy apple, so we create a sweeter one.
The hubris of zealous proponents of GMOs is, then, twofold. On one hand, the hubris lies within our presumption of superiority over nature. On the other, it lies within the confidence that we don’t need other things to live. When all food become like AquaBounty’s salmon, the declaration of the joyous GMO engineer is that the human’s longstanding reliance on nature is over.
The scientist who designs the sweeter apple or crops resistant to herbicides must feel a sense of accomplishment. He has unlocked nature’s secret rhythms of food production. There is a curiosity that has been satiated, a voracious appetite fulfilled — another frontier reached. For the corporation that funds him, there is gratitude and global veneration for the company that backs the progress of food.
But then there’s us — not corporations or citizens of hungry countries, but individuals that value the taste, smell and look of fish more than the fish itself. Perhaps the answer is as simple as cost. Experiencing the taste, smell and look of fish is much cheaper than eating organic fish. Imagine how impressed Wal-Mart shoppers will be with the taste and smell of AquaBounty’s salmon in spite of its genetic oddity — all the looks and tastes you could need and on rollback for $7.99!
Reach the columnist at ctruong1@asu.edu
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