by Jay Rayner
Just basing conclusions on one study is a little like flying into Britain on the one sunny, blue-skied day of the year, announcing that it’s always sunny here, and flying out again. To come up with a reliable assessment of the climate in a country like Britain you would have to spend years there recording the weather every day. And even then the climate would still manage to bowl curve balls at you – periods of unseasonable cold or heat or rain – which would force you to accept that your summary of the British climate is not universally reliable.
Which brings us to the hideously complex and viciously fought over question of genetically modified food (from here on in, to be called GM) and whether it is safe or not. Many, many books have been written on this subject, from both extremes of the argument. Rarely do people sit in the middle, attempting to weigh up the pros and cons. In 2008 I did try to do just that. In an early exercise in crowd-sourced journalism, I used the Word of Mouth food blog published by the Observer to solicit contributions from all sides of the debate before writing an article about the subject. I asked people to send me links to reputable academic papers and they took me at my word. Working with an assistant I printed out everything about GM that had been sent my way; it produced a pile of paper the height of which could be measured in feet. It was striking that both sides of the argument were represented equally, as they were in my final report. To my immense pride, readers on both sides accused me of being part of both the staunch pro- and staunch anti-GM lobby.
The negative aspects to modern GM are clearly pronounced. The most obvious of these is that, across America, strains of corn genetically modified to be herbicide resistant have led to an increase in the use of some herbicides, even though they were meant to do the opposite. That, in turn, has led to super-weeds that are resistant to the very chemicals the corn was modified to allow free use of in the first place. More generally some of the huge corporations responsible for developing these strains of seed, like Monsanto, have behaved at times in a staggeringly clumsy and bullying manner. It’s certainly the case that Monsanto’s practices have engendered a deep mistrust. The company has vigorously pursued through the courts farmers suspected of illegally planting their seeds without paying royalties. It and many other companies have created seed ‘technology packages’ that force farms into a dependence on the company. Equally many people do not like the notion of a multinational corporation owning plant life through patents, a move that only became possible as a result of a change in US patent law in 1980.
However, many of the other criticisms of GM foods don’t stack up. There is the allegation that their use has resulted in environmentally damaging monocultures in various parts of the world, for example Argentina. Monocultures – the over-planting of and reliance upon a single crop, in this case soya beans, across vast tracts of land – are a terrible thing. Poor water management, overuse of nitrogen-based fertilizers and the failure to rotate crops adequately are equally terrible, a dismal failure by farmers to take their role as custodians of the landscape seriously. But all of these things can and do happen in conventional farming too, as the dust bowls of the Midwest in the thirties proved. It is not a problem which has anything specifically to do with GM.
On another matter anti-GM campaigners argue that these crops have not delivered the increases in yield they promised. There is a good reason for that. Regardless of what Donna Jaeshke may say about the increased yield on her farm in Illinois, none of the GM strains developed so far has ever promised increased yields. They were designed to reduce costs by being resistant to certain pests, or by being adaptable to no-till technology. Increased yield may be possible in the future as a result of GM but no one has made any such claims for it yet.
Of course, the biggest charge against GM is that it’s dangerous to human health, and this is where it gets very complicated indeed. On the one side its supporters argue, very convincingly indeed, that with 90 per cent of soya beans grown in the US now being GM, people have been eating it for decades with no ill effects whatsoever. Europe has been exceptionally resistant to growing GM. For example, no GM crops are currently grown in the UK. However, GM animal feeds are constantly coming into the country, and again there is no evidence of any damage to human health as a result of people eating GM-fed meat. The response of the anti-campaigners is that lack of evidence is not proof of safety. In 2008, for that article on the ideological battles over the subject, I interviewed Dr Michael Antoniou of the Nuclear Biology Group at Guy’s Hospital. He was once a member of the British government’s advisory group on GM foods and knows an awful lot about genetic modification. ‘In our research into therapies for diseases such as multiple sclerosis and cystic fibrosis, we work with genetically modified organisms all the time,’ he told me. It is because of that experience that he believed – and continues to believe – that GM foods are potentially very dangerous.
The problem, Dr Antoniou explained, is the unintended consequences of genetic modification. ‘It’s a highly mutagenic process,’ he said. ‘It can cause changes in the genome that are not expected.’ So had this happened with the GM crops on the market? ‘These crops that have come along seem to be doing what they claimed they would be doing,’ he replied. ‘The question is what else has been done to the structure of that plant? You might inadvertently generate toxic effects.’ The answer, surely, is that the regulatory regime is there to catch these things. No, Dr Antoniou said, because it is not based on detailed genetic studies or even animal feeding tests. It is based on the doctrine of ‘substantial equivalence’, in which the original plant and its GM version are compared and, if found to be similar, passed as suitable for cultivation. He argued that it was like comparing a conventional and a nuclear weapon of the same yield and deciding they are substantially equivalent because of their explosive power. So what of all those Americans endlessly scoffing the stuff? Why haven’t they all started showing ill effects? ‘That,’ he responded, ‘is only because nobody is looking at what the effects might be.’ Later he sent me complex academic papers on unintended consequences of GM crops. They did appear to establish mutations along the genome, but, again, the researchers could not say for sure what the consequences of those mutations might be.
Vivian Moses, the man who grilled me on the notion of ‘natural’ human behaviour, was sure he knew. As both Visiting Professor of Biotechnology at King’s College London and a member of CropGen, a pro-GM lobby group, he was experienced in arguing about the science. Arguing with Dr Antonio was almost a part of his daily job description. ‘It’s simply not true that there are mutations all over the genome,’ he said. ‘There was a paper published recently which looked at this. They found that the changes were specifically where the researchers intended them to be.’ In any case, Professor Moses told me, resistance to GM is not merely about the science, but about perceptions of the science. He pointed out that, in the late nineties, GM and non-GM tomato purées were stocked side by side in British supermarkets for two years, and sold in similar amounts. ‘The consumer saw the product and they were not put off.’ Then the newspapers started filling up with headlines about ‘Frankenstein Foods’ and the market collapsed.
Professor Moses raged against the culture of what he called ‘catastrophism and protest. There is a cultural problem that some people have. If they don’t understand it they bash it.’ It does seem that the anti-GM side can be prone to misunderstandings or exaggerations. For example, I was sent a briefing paper by Britain’s certifying body for organics, the Soil Association, an organization which is avowedly anti-GM. It referred to the same research papers on unintended consequences in the genome sent to me by Dr Antoniou. The Soil Association briefing took an unproved thesis in the research papers – that unexpected mutations might cause toxic reactions – and turned it into fact. ‘This,’ it declared, with impressive assurance, ‘explains why [GMOs] have been associated with allergic reactions.’ And this despite the fact that the research papers didn’t explain anything of the sort. They simply raised questions aro
und the possible impact of changes to the plant genome that they could not answer.
More confusion swamped the subject in the autumn of 2012 when the most recent study (at the time of writing) was published. It appeared to show that ‘safe’ levels of GM maize and the world’s best-selling herbicide, Roundup, ‘can cause tumours, multiple organ damage and premature death in laboratory rats’. The study’s USP was that it followed the rats for their full lifespan of two years, rather than just for ninety days as is more usual in such research. It was a complex study, with the 200 animals – 100 of each gender – separated into a variety of groups, for a variety of different feeding regimes. The findings received major media coverage, with the Daily Mail – the British newspaper most responsible for ‘Frankenstein Foods’ headlines – running photographs of tumour-ridden rats alongside the headline ‘Cancer row over GM foods as study says it did THIS to rats’.
Which is when the arguments really started. First, critics of the new study said that the type of rat used was a species especially prone to tumours, a fact not discussed in the report. Second, they took issue with the size of the ‘control’ group, the rats which were not on any special feeding regime so that you could compare the results of the experiment with what had happened to the animals leading normal lives over the same period. The standard procedure is for the control group to be of an equal size to the subject group so you can compare like for like. If you have 200 rats on a feeding programme, you would have 200 as a control. In this study, of the 200 rats studied only twenty were the control. Anthony Trewavas, Professor of Cell Biology at Edinburgh University, took specific issue with the size of the control group and said it was too small to enable anybody to draw meaningful conclusions. ‘To be frank, it looks like a random variation to me in a rodent line likely to develop tumours anyway.’ The highly regarded ‘behind the headlines’ section of the National Health Service website, which does a forensic job of digging behind newspaper and television reporting of each new banner-headlined ‘scientific finding’, described the study as ‘poorly conducted’.
No matter. You can guarantee that when anti-GM campaigners want to make their point it is this study to which they will point, for years to come. It is the equivalent of that British weather report based on that one sunny day (though, to stretch the metaphor until it snaps, the study is so flawed that it’s actually a little more like the one sunny day where the researchers left the country before the clouds piled in, the skies darkened, and the rain came down. But they missed it because they weren’t there. Or something.)
In the past, as the response to that 2008 article of mine proves, I have genuinely sat on the fence with regard to GM, but it’s cards on the table time. I have read countless studies and reports and listened to countless arguments. Whatever legal, business and social issues are raised by GM, nothing I have seen has ever convinced me it is dangerous to human health.
At the heart of the arguments against it is the claim that in some way the science is fundamentally different to other sorts of gene mutation that humanity has used on its crops since we first started cross-breeding grasses for grain on the banks of the Nile thousands of years ago. As Professor Moses explained to me, what the oppositionists fail to recognize, indeed refuse to recognize, is that the process of genetic modification in our food crops is hardly unique. He was referring to the little-discussed mutagenesis breeding programme that took place in the early part of the twentieth century, when Marie Curie’s science of radioactivity was still in its relative infancy. ‘Around eighty years ago researchers began to irradiate seeds and treat them with carcinogenic chemicals in the expectation they would cause mutations, some of which might be useful,’ he said. Many of these experiments produced seedlings which were useless, but a significant number were successful. ‘About 70 per cent of our [conventional] current crop plants have such an event in their history.’
What troubles me most, though, is the attempt by many campaigners in the developed world to close down research into GM altogether, which has had a massive impact on policy in parts of the developing world which could most benefit from it. Proposals to conduct crop trials in Britain have been met with threats to invade the land and dig up the plants, alongside the vilification of the scientists involved. For the fact is that there really is immense potential in the science. Drought-resistant strains of wheat or corn, crops modified against site-specific diseases and pests, crops designed to grow on salinated land all offer immense hope to parts of Africa and Asia which need all the help they can get. Right now, for example, there is major work being done in Uganda to find a way to genetically modify bananas to make them resistant to Xanthomonas wilt, or BXW, which both kills the plant and contaminates the soil. On average Ugandans get 30 per cent or more of their daily calories from bananas and it is a vital cash crop. If BXW disease took hold globally it would be economically disastrous for countries like Uganda which depend upon the banana harvest, and a genetic modification is the quickest and most accurate way of sorting the problem. In turn an economically unstable Uganda could have massive ramifications for the whole of East Africa.
But work like that is being challenged by an ill-informed, technophobic fear among affluent consumers in parts of the developed world. The Ugandan government has allowed the research, but has not yet said whether it will allow the new strain of bananas onto the market. Let’s be honest: consumers in Europe, the US and elsewhere probably could manage fine without GM. But does that give them the right to stamp on technologies which could be a genuine life-saver in other, less blessed parts of the world? As Sir David King, the British government’s former Chief Science Officer, said in a speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 2008, a European resistance to GM, based purely on lifestyle choices, had ‘been adopted across Africa … with devastating consequences’. Sir David is now the director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University. I asked him if anything had changed in his views since he had made that speech, a period during which he had been heavily involved in development work across Africa. He said, ‘No. If anything my views have hardened.’ As he pointed out, between 2000 and 2011 the food price index had increased by a factor of three. ‘For countries in the West where food costs account for 5 per cent of GDP that’s manageable. But in parts of Africa it’s about 30 per cent of GDP and then it becomes very tough indeed. When food prices increase by a factor of three, people in those countries will be really struggling. In those circumstances we need whatever technologies we have available to us to improve efficiency and use of resources.’
Go stand in the aisles of your local supermarket. Or, if you still think they are too evil to be deserving of your business, go to your nearest deli or your nearest weekly farmers’ market. Go look at the abundance we are lucky enough to enjoy, at least for the moment. And ask yourself: are we entitled to crush a whole discipline of extraordinarily promising science which could bring hope to millions of people who have but a fraction of the food choices we have, because some of us think it’s just, y’know, a bit weird?
Sorry, but I really don’t.
The reality is that, in the next few years, many of our food choices will be made less as a result of heated debate and more out of financial imperative. With a rising global population will come those rising prices. It is no coincidence that in 2011, as the cost of meat continued to soar, the European Union announced it was making grants worth €3 million available to university departments which come up with proposals for research into utilizing insects and mealworms as a source of animal protein for humans. ‘While insects have not traditionally been used for food in the UK or elsewhere in the European Union,’ a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization spokesperson said at the time, ‘it is estimated that about 2.5 billion people across the world have diets that routinely include insects. While many insects are regarded as pests, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization is interested in promoting [them] as a highly sustainable source
of nutrition.’ From a purely nutritional point of view the announcement made a lot of sense. One study has found that small grasshoppers can be as much as 20 per cent protein and just 6 per cent fat, as against lean ground beef, which is 24 per cent protein and 18 per cent fat. Some insects can be as much as 60 per cent protein.
They are also gloriously eco-friendly. Being cold-blooded they have a very high food conversion rate. Crickets, for example, require six times less feed than cattle, and four times less than sheep, to produce the same amount of protein. They can be raised on organic waste and only a few of them produce any methane at all. Plus the meat yield is high. You get 55 per cent meat from each slaughtered head of cattle, and 35 per cent meat from each sheep. Those crickets give as much as 80 per cent.
Cue images of people deep-frying grasshoppers and muttering about how much like pork scratchings they taste, if only you season them properly. It’s the territory of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me out of Here. We send people once famous for being in a soap opera into the Australian rainforest and then point and laugh at them while they fill their gobs with live mealworms out of some mad, wet-knickered desperation to win the approval of the viewing public.
While they are still so much legs and wings and beady eyes, insects will never be more than a novelty food item in the developed world. But that’s not how they will be offered to the consumer. The key will be the development of a proprietary product, some form of a highly flexible protein powder, which quickly takes the flavour and texture of whatever is around it. It won’t be called Bug-U-Like™ or Insectelicious™. It will have some carefully manicured brand name like NaturesBounty™ or LushEarth™ and will be flogged to us with the classic advertising frottage of pastoral scenes. It will appear as an ingredient on the back of packs of burgers and sausages, which will cost a fraction of those utilizing the meat of pigs and cattle. And wanting to experience meat, but at a price we feel we can afford, we will go for it. (Although much was made of the cultural taboos in Britain around eating the meat of horses, when the horsemeat scandal broke in January of 2013, the real issue was secrecy and fraud. Because the presence of horsemeat had been hidden from consumers, there was anxiety over how the animals had been raised, which veterinary drugs they had been given during their lives, and the circumstances of their slaughter. If there had been complete transparency the debate would have been very different.)
