The PR machine for genetically modified foods scored a big one in Slate. The case is artfully made in favor of frankenfoods: it produces less green house gases to have genetically modified cows, nitrogen is poisoning the soil if specially-tailored franken-vegetables are not created to use less nitrogen, and we have been using "hit or miss" breeding for centuries in developing the livestock we have now.
I have an idea. Let's use the methane gas produced by grass-fed cows to create electricity. Let's rotate crops to mitigate the gathering of nitrogen in soil. Let's allow nature to create animals in her own way instead of adding cucumber genes to chickens to get them to be more convenient to us.
What's interesting about the article, linked to the title of this post, is that it represents the PR efforts of Big Agribusiness to persuade the public that their weird combination of genes is just fine - and to stem the support of environmentalists for natural foods by dragging climate change into the debate. They are trying to sow divisions in the Green movement.
Reporters are lazy. If you hand them a press release with research that they can just reword, often they will use it. I'm not saying that's what happened here, I'm just saying that someone paid a lot of money to try to get this message into the mainstream media.
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1 comment:
It's easy to see where the author's priorities are when you note that the book cited for his credibility is titled "American Pests: Our Losing War on Insects From Colonial Times to DDT". Perhaps he has more of a vested interest in this topic than his "I was just reading the miso jar" story leads us to believe.
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