The Book of Yields: Accuracy in Food Costing and Purchasing Book

I think about agricultural ecology and human nutrition and health pretty much all the time these days, and I rarely think about genetically engineered crops. On one hand, the problems, it's not even on the radar. Simply doing agriculture is about the worst aspect of agriculture - destroying habitat for most native organisms and perpetuating that destruction every year by killing colonizing perennials and maintaining disturbance levels that exclude anybody adapted to a stable perennial ecosystem. Soil erosion, fertilizer runoff, depletion of aquifers for irrigation, and toxic pesticide use are the other big problems exported from farm fields.

And the yield sucks, too - low dietary diversity, highly vulnerable to flooding, drought, and pests, and nutrient poor foods. Whether the crops are GE varieties owned by Monsanto or just hybrid varieties owned by Monsanto is immaterial. In some situations important variables could be altered one way or another by a engineered gene - Bt corn probably did reduce insecticide use, and herbicide resistant crops probably increased herbicide use but decreased tillage. A mixed bag, not really solving the core problems with the system, but not making it appreciably worse.

On the other hand, GE seemed to offer no solutions. Crops were designed for an awful system using the shortsighted logic of the chemical arms race logic. The techniques were rarely aimed at perennial crops, and more rarely at nuts. The traits that can be expressed through genetic modification are limited and don't include complex things like increased drought resistance or adaptation to low-input, biodiverse organic systems. And how practical is it to expect the relatively few qualified labs to develop locally adapted strains of every crop for every climatic and soil zone?

A lot of that changed when I learned about the American Chestnut. The chestnut was once the staple crop of the whole eastern north American forest, feeding squirrels, passenger pigeons, native Americans, settlers, and many other species. They were essentially wiped out by an invasive fungus from China. Enough germplasm survives in a few remaining trees to supply a three-pronged effort to create blight-resistant trees. Among these is William Powell's GE program at SUNY Syracuse. The goal of all three methods is to produce a tree that is American in every respect but vulnerability to blight. Powell's current tack is to insert wheat genes that code for an enzyme that defuses the fungus' acid attack. And his method has thus far yielded better results than the other two programs. If the American Chestnut could be revived, it would be the perfect centerpiece of a forest-based restoration agriculture program. Despite the fact that its GMO status would prevent it from being certified organic, it would be by far the most environmentally beneficial food production system in use in the country.

So now I had a reason to think the techniques of GE had a role to play in restoration agriculture, and in the beautiful synchronicity of ideas and learning, my friend Alex put this book in front of me when I was most interested and open to it. I was excited to think about other ways in which GE could aid my goals, making it the ally of organic farming instead of its opposite.

Unfortunately, the book doesn't even try to go in that direction. It's actually kind of unclear what the goal of the book is. Its most salient aim seems to be using facts, stories, and the symbolically cheerful relationship between Raoul and Pamela to educate hidebound ideological readers who kneejerk-oppose GMOs in food (I once saw someone blame GMOs for the rise in gluten intolerance, despite the fact that there are no commercial GE varieties of wheat). They explain how GMOs work, how they are more precise but in most cases not qualitatively different than traditional breeding (moving genes from one variety of rice, chicken, tomato to another), and how the scientific evidence has shown no negative health impacts. Further, how there isn't really any logical speculative negative impact.

If the hopeful audience is rigidly anti-GMO organic consumers, then it's unclear why Raoul must spend so much time detailing why organic practices are important. As far as I could tell, it's because they need to show they're still on our side. Some of the facts in here might make you think they're Monsanto propaganda employees or something - "RoundUp is less toxic than table salt" - if that's the case, why doesn't Raoul use it? Or, conversely, why does he use table salt? The other reason for this section is to show that the problems organic agriculture addresses have little to do with GMOs.

I am sympathetic to their agenda - I find uninformed reactionaries of any stripe annoying, and even more so when they make me look bad - but since the book wasn't really meant for me, it was kind of disappointing. I did get some interesting perspective shifts out of it, including a better sense of just exactly how safe GE crops have been proven to be, how much difference it makes who is setting agendas for the technology's uses (ie, private v. public sector), how GE can accomplish the goals of traditional breeding with much greater precision, efficiency, and speed, and how much the patent debate also applies to organic and open-pollinated seed (I actually had no idea these were patent-protected at all, naively). All of these things were valuable.

I did wish that some other things had been explored, though, living up to what I imagined the book to be before I read it.

1. What potential is there to actually integrate GE crops into organic agriculture, solving its unique problems? What would that synthesis actually look like? Give some creative examples, other than just "resistance to this one disease."

2. If there are practical problems in this effort, discuss them. Is it, for instance, impractical to expect GE labs to help develop or even modify locally adapted genotypes of many crop plants in many production areas?

3. Discuss what would have to take place for that to happen, since at the moment GMOs are banned in organic production and consumers are becoming much more resistant to the concept.

4. What about animals? A GMO chicken appears in an anecdote at the end of the book, but otherwise they aren't mentioned at all.

5. What of modifying pest and disease organisms, like the Florida mosquito proposal?

5. Damn Monsanto et al. more. There was some light mention of how GMOs are made to look bad by evil corporations, but a lot of this was put into other peoples' mouths and tempered.