Food Fight

by Mckay Jenkins

  Given the complexity of the crop and food distribution systems, this seemed absurd to Bohlen. “We were in conversations with farmers who were telling us that most farmers do not separate genetically engineered corn from conventional corn,” Bohlen said. “Given that very little of the corn is separated and there’s a type of corn not approved for human consumption, I thought there was a good chance that it had made it into our food.”

  Bohlen decided to check for himself. He went to his local Safeway and bought twenty-three different corn-based products: boxes of cornflakes and taco shells, tortilla chips, a corn muffin mix, some cornmeal, a couple of enchilada TV dinners. He shipped them to a laboratory with a simple question: Did any of the products contain the unapproved protein Cry9C? If any did, it meant that an entire stream of the country’s river of processed food might have been unintentionally contaminated by GM corn.

  The results, in one case, came back positive: the lab found StarLink corn in taco shells branded by Taco Bell. All taco shells containing StarLink corn were recalled.

  Inside the food industry, the revelation caused an explosion: this was the first GM food to be recalled nationally. Suddenly, food processors could no longer be sure the grain they were buying was free of unapproved GMOs. Although scientists had long assured them that GMOs were safe, the reaction was very much a fear of GM “contamination.” If consumers decided they wouldn’t eat foods with GM ingredients, it wouldn’t just be Monsanto (and the $20 billion biotech industry) that would suffer; it would be any company (in the $500 billion food industry) that made food from Monsanto’s grain. If these two industries diverged, Bohlen told me, “biotech would shift from being a growth industry to being a struggling commodity industry.”

  For consumers, the StarLink story offered a rare (and bewildering) look inside the mysterious system that delivers Americans processed food. The corn, it turned out, had come from farmers in six different states, who had shipped their grain to a miller in Texas, who had ordered conventional corn and (unwittingly) gotten GM corn instead. The cornmeal was then sent to Mexico, where it was processed into taco shells, then returned to the United States to be distributed everywhere by Kraft Foods.

  Once the news broke in September 2000, food that had been contaminated by StarLink corn started popping up all over the place—and not just in the United States. It was found in Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, and Denmark. Aventis officials said they had “difficulty imagining how our corn could end up in the human food supply.”

  To Larry Bohlen, it was entirely obvious. “Aventis made a big mistake by assuming that thousands of people making decisions every day on their farms would be able to separate the StarLink corn from conventional corn,” Bohlen said. “Harvest days last for fourteen hours. Farmers are driving late into the night. They’re under a lot of pressure. Farm prices are really low. There’s even pressure for some people to sell the StarLink into the food system to get a higher price. There are so many reasons that the StarLink corn can get into the food supply that it was a risk that wasn’t worth taking.”

  Bohlen also considered the StarLink debacle evidence of the gaping loophole in the food-testing process. “We’ve been saying for a long time that federal authorities should be doing this testing, but so far it’s been left to groups like us,” he said. Aventis ended up spending $500 million to withdraw StarLink from the corn market. But it proved much harder to undo the anxieties the contamination had caused—among food manufacturers as well as consumers. Where once the food industry had been in lockstep with the biotech industry, the StarLink affair proved just how precarious this marriage could be.

  Things have only gotten rockier with the development of GM “biopharm” crops, which pharmaceutical companies are developing to create drugs. Though the USDA has approved more than 300 biopharm plantings around the country since 1995, both states and traditional farmers—worried about StarLink-style contamination—have been more suspect. In 2005, Arkansas-based Riceland Food, the world’s largest rice miller, asked federal regulators to deny a permit to a company hoping to plant GM rice for the manufacture of an antidiarrheal drug. Anheuser-Busch, the country’s top buyer of rice (as well as its largest brewer), said it would no longer buy any of the $100 million worth of rice grown in Missouri if GM rice was allowed to be grown anywhere in the state.

  California recently rejected a company proposal to grow rice engineered with human genes after traditional rice growers said even the prospect of contamination would scare off international markets. In 2011, the German conglomerate Bayer (which now owns Aventis, the same company that made StarLink corn) agreed to pay $750 million in settlements to 10,000 farmers who claimed the company’s GM Liberty Link rice contaminated their domestic crops and drove prices down; global markets just weren’t buying it. “What has really alarmed the food industry was the idea that they might get corn in their cornflakes that had someone else’s prescription drugs in it—either by getting mixed up or through cross-pollination,” Bohlen told me.

  It was right in the middle of all this that Monsanto—despite spending a decade designing it, and despite FDA approval—decided not to release GM wheat. The company still maintained a handful of experimental wheat plots, though, and in 2013, something strange happened. A farmer in Oregon—trying to clear his field by spraying Roundup—found he couldn’t kill his own wheat. Some of Monsanto’s experimental GM wheat seeds had somehow made their way into his fields.

  Suddenly, it was StarLink all over again. As the news of this contamination spread, Japan and South Korea immediately suspended U.S. wheat imports. European officials urged greater screening of U.S. grain. Lawyers for American farmers threatened to sue the company. And—despite USDA assurances that American wheat remains GMO-free—the global prospects for GM wheat were once again put on hold.

  And for a team of world-renowned scientists working in the middle of Kansas wheat country, that was just fine.

  Reinventing the Plains

  Salina, Kansas, sits on the western edge of a thousand miles of corn and soy and wheat. Down at the end of Water Well Road, where the pavement runs out, a small group of plant researchers is leading the effort to overthrow the entire American agricultural system. The Land Institute looks nothing like the Danforth Center. There is no glass and steel here, no ornamental fountains, no multimillion-dollar laboratories. And there is no evidence of corporate agriculture.

  Inside the president’s office, a ramshackle affair with overstuffed wooden bookshelves and a small refrigerator filled with good beer, an eighty-year-old bull of a man named Wes Jackson is holding forth about GMOs, pesticides, and ridding the world of problems caused by “that outfit in St. Louis.”

  By which he means Monsanto.

  “The idea of Manifest Destiny—of wiping out the Indians and going to the moon and building a supercollider—it seems like humanity doesn’t have the capacity to practice restraint,” Jackson told me. “So you say you can feed 7 billion people, then you can feed 9 billion, then what? A woman recently said to me, ‘What about all these new planets?’ I said, ‘Good: buy one-way tickets, and pay for it yourself.’ People have these escape clauses, and that’s just being a dummy.”

  Jackson is one of the most influential thinkers on agriculture in the country, a renowned scientist with a vision for changing the face of American farming in dramatic, even radical ways. He is also a master of rhetorical flourish and pushes his vision with the stentorian voice (and the moral urgency) of a preacher. The way we grow our food is part of a much larger problem in the way we treat our land, our water, and our climate.

  “There are too many of us, but our consumption is rapacious,” he told students graduating from the University of Kansas in 2013. “It is legal to rip the tops off mountains, get the coal and burn it. It is legal to drill for oil and natural gas—from the Gulf to the Arctic—and burn it. It is legal to engage in fracking that threatens groundwater to get natural gas and burn
it. It is legal to have our soils erode and toxic chemicals applied, legal to allow our rural communities to decline and watch so much of our cultural seed stock disappear.”

  Jackson places much of the blame for this state of affairs on what he calls the “industrial hero,” the scientist (or more broadly, the corporation) claiming to have high-tech, silver bullet answers to highly complex problems.

  “These technology fundamentalists are far worse than religious fundamentalists,” Jackson told me. “The ultimate fundamentalist doesn’t even know he’s a fundamentalist. If your efforts are clouded by the desire for financial gain, or clouded by a desire to be famous, then you are not available for the pursuit of wisdom. Where does responsibility come from? ‘Feed the world’ is a very poor veil to put around the desire to get rich or famous. Rather than think hard about problems, the industrial hero says, ‘We must feed the world,’ which has an easy move to a profit agenda. Contrast that with the phrase ‘The world must be fed,’ which carries a social agenda that has to do with social justice. You have two different breeds of cat.”

  Mention publicity-generating moves like Monsanto’s recent announcement that it would contribute $4 million to study the decline of the monarch butterfly, and you can practically see Jackson’s blood start to rise. Sure, the money is nice, he says, “meanwhile 97 million acres of corn is going to be drenched with Roundup. That’s the problem we allow ourselves.”

  Jackson has been thinking about feeding the world for five decades. He has published highly influential books, built an internationally recognized research station on a shoestring budget, and been showered with honors (including a MacArthur “genius grant”) and recognition (he was named by both Life magazine and the Smithsonian as one of the twentieth century’s most influential people). All this for work he and his research team have been doing on a plant that has yet to reach the market. When it does, Jackson hopes, farmers may be able to grow vast amounts of food and begin repairing land that has been degraded for centuries.

  One of the first things Jackson likes to show visitors is a pair of vertical posters, hanging above a stairwell in the institute’s lab facility. To the left is a picture of a wheat plant, its thready roots extending just inches below the soil. To the right is a picture of a plant Jackson and his scientists have been developing for many years, something known as intermediate wheatgrass. Its roots drop down fully ten feet.

  “The picture to the left is the plant that started civilization,” Jackson told me. “The one on the right is the plant that’s going to save it.”

  The Problem with Annuals

  Although he is one of the country’s leading thinkers about agriculture, Wes Jackson is not particularly interested in what’s going on in the vegetable aisle. He wants to change the rest of the grocery store. Why? Because 70 percent of the calories we eat—and 70 percent of our farmland—is wrapped up not in fruits and vegetables but in grains. So are 70 percent of the soil erosion and 70 percent of the petrochemicals.

  “You have all these showy images of green, leafy healthy stuff, but humans are grass-seed eaters first and legume-seed eaters second, and the rest is water,” Jackson said.

  For a farmer and a plant scientist, Jackson is rather cantankerous about the way people plant the land. He doesn’t like to talk about problems in agriculture. He likes to talk about the problem of agriculture—a problem that has gotten more complex (and dangerous) since people first put plow to ground.

  This is the story he tells. People have been sowing, reaping, selecting, and trading seeds since they first started growing food 10,000 years ago. If a certain plant did well in a certain soil in a certain climate, the farmer would save the seeds and plant the cultivated variety, or cultivar, again the next year. If a plant did poorly, it was discarded. Human selection mirrored natural selection, but with a twist: the only plants that got to pass on their genes were those that proved useful for the human appetite.

  The trouble began when early farmers chose to breed plants that needed to be planted every year, rather than plants that remained in the ground for years at a time. Although the vast majority of plants on earth are perennials, annuals are far more easily manipulated by farmers (and later by genetic engineers). By choosing seeds from only the hardiest or most productive plants, Neolithic farmers (and many generations that followed) could develop crops that yielded more and more food with each passing year. Go to southern Mexico, the birthplace of corn, and you will see a vast variety of corn species: some are two feet high, some are fifteen. Some are blue, some are yellow. All of these crops were selected, over many generations, to achieve flavors and textures and hardiness unique to the specific places and cultures in which they are planted.

  As breeding science got more and more sophisticated, farmers learned to speed up this process by crossbreeding (or hybridizing) annuals. These crops have an obvious advantage for growers: because they live only a year, they can push a higher percentage of their energy into producing big, high-calorie seeds. (Genetic engineers are correct when they say they have simply taken this one step further, configuring annual corn and soy to resist herbicides, or drought, or insect infestations.) Because all our mountains of annual corn, wheat, and soy can be ground up and turned into everything from breakfast cereal to cattle feed to soda pop, the food industry has turned these crops (for better or worse) into the staples of our national food system.

  But all this efficiency, all this uniformity, has come at a significant cost.

  Jared Diamond, the scientist and bestselling author of books like Guns, Germs, and Steel, has called annual agriculture “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.” If all of human history is represented by a twenty-four-hour clock, Diamond writes, humans were hunter-gatherers from midnight until 11:54 p.m. We’ve been farmers—let alone genetic engineers—for only about six minutes. Not a long time, really, to get things right.

  Long before GMOs, farmers figured out how to grow lots of cheap calories. But this often came at the expense of poor nutrition, a fact that has become vastly exaggerated in our industrial food era. African Bushmen eat some seventy-five different wild plants, Diamond writes, and could never die of starvation in numbers like the Irish did during the potato famine because of the variety in their diets. The Irish were so dependent on this single crop that when, in 1845, a fungal blight knocked out 90 percent of the crop, a million people—fully one-eighth of the country’s population—starved to death. Another 1.3 million people left the country, followed by 5 million more over the next several decades.

  Indeed, it has been argued that far from relieving famine, farming actually contributes to it. When a culture’s food supply becomes centralized—dependent on a few crops, grown either by a few companies or by a central government—bad things tend to happen. In the late 1950s, during China’s Great Leap Forward, Mao dictated that both wheat and rice be planted at densities far beyond the soil’s capacity to support them. The result was disastrous crop loss, and some 80 million people died of starvation. In the Soviet Union, Stalin subdued Ukraine (and killed 7 million people) by controlling Europe’s breadbasket.

  So consider that the United States’ 320 million acres of farmland is planted with 80 percent annual, monoculture crops. (The other 20 percent is perennial—mostly hay and alfalfa for animal feed.) Although these plants are perfectly designed to fit the industrial economy that designed them—perfect for processed food; perfect for ethanol; perfect for feeding 10 billion cows, chickens, and pigs—they are also freighted with serious drawbacks. Annual plants have very shallow root systems that tap into only the top few inches of soil. Add to this annual plowing and spraying, and the ground quickly becomes nutritionally depleted, even barren. Tim Crews, a Land Institute scientist, considers the soil beneath traditional monoculture crops to be “just this side of a Walmart parking lot in terms of ecological health.”

  Depleted soils, of course, force farmers to use enormous quantities o
f synthetic fertilizers, which are derived from petrochemicals. But since only about half of these fertilizers actually gets absorbed by plants, the rest ends up elsewhere. Some gets converted into nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Some washes downstream where (if we’re talking about the Midwest) it eventually ends up in the Gulf of Mexico, where it creates algae blooms. When these massive pulses of aquatic plant growth die back and decompose, they suck so much oxygen from the water that they leave dead zones that can be seen from outer space.

  Because annual plants must be stripped out and replanted every year, the soil beneath them requires vast volumes of herbicides to control the weeds that sweep onto the bare soil. The bare ground is also terribly prone to soil erosion. Even though modern no-till farming has reduced soil loss by 40 percent since the 1980s, many farmers are still tilling extensively, and we are still losing some 1.7 billion tons of topsoil every year. This is a lot when you consider that, left to itself, soil replenishes itself at a rate of about a quarter inch per century. We’re running things down in a few decades that took millennia to create.

  It is for these reasons that Wes Jackson considers the GMO question to be something of a bait and switch. From the beginning, biotech companies have said they were developing technologies to “feed the world.” What they have in fact done is use the technology to ramp up an already destructive form of industrial farming.

  Stan Cox, a plant breeder at The Land Institute, likes to show people a sheet with two columns on it: problems caused by conventional farming in 1990, and problems caused by conventional farming in 2015. The lists are exactly the same: soil loss and degradation, toxic chemicals, water pollution, monoculture, factory farming, corporate control. Except for one thing: the 2015 list includes GMOs.

  In other words, even as we squeeze an incredible amount of food energy out of limited cropland, we are pushing plants, soil, and the environment as a whole to their ecological limits. And even if we get rid of GMOs, in other words, we would still have all the problems caused by large-scale farming. It’s not the technology that causes the real problems. It’s the system.