All food is genetically modified.
Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration. There are still wild fruit, vegetables and animals some populations of humans consume that have not been "sullied" by human intervention. But for most of us, the vast majority of what we eat is not what it was at the dawn of agriculture or even a century ago.
From the time of our very first forays into domestication, we have been genetically modifying plants and livestock. For more than 10,000 years we have selected for improved yield, disease resistance and other advantageous traits that make plants and animals behave in a way that makes them easier to farm and more nutritious to eat.
Charles Darwin's greatest accomplishment was demonstrating how this process of "artificial" selection conducted by humans over the short term, related to the same process in nature over the long term. Without this evidence, it would have been very difficult (though probably not impossible) for him to write convincingly about evolution in his seminal 1859 book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
Personally, I don't like the terms 'natural' and 'artificial.' They imply that, in some way, human activity is not of this universe. Everything in the universe is natural.
Our giant brains are the outcome of natural selection. We have always used those giant brains to manipulate our environment. How is it not natural that we should use them to splice genes now that we know that genes are the mechanism by which selection works?
Somehow, though, as soon as you attach a scary word such as "engineering" to food, it becomes anathema to some folk.
I'm not entirely sure how engineering got to be a scary word. Without engineering we wouldn't have houses or heat or roads or sewers. We also wouldn't have global climate change, so you can argue whether it is good or bad, but you can't argue that it is unnatural.
Does it really matter how an orange became orange, how a watermelon became seedless or why tomatoes don't rot as quickly as they used to?
To a lot of people it does. Genetically Modified (GM) foods have been widely vilified to the point some countries (Japan, Switzerland) and lesser jurisdictions (some counties in California, one province in Australia) have banned them outright.
Last week, though, voters in California rejected a statewide proposition that would have required food producers to label products that contain GM ingredients. Good for them.
I am not saying we should give scientists, carte blanche to genetically manipulate our food, and we certainly should not give that power to corporations. At the same time, to consider there is something intrinsically wrong with GM food is to deny the very thing that makes us human.
Nevertheless, we should be cautious. There are legitimate concerns about the potential impact farming GM crops could have on biodiversity and sustainability.
We only need to go back 80 years or so for an example of how technology combined with unsustainable agricultural practices exacerbated by some bad luck courtesy of Mother Nature can have disastrous effects for humans.
In the late 1920s, mechanized farming techniques exploded across the North American prairie. In the U.S., famers converted five million acres of native grassland to cultivated cropland. Deep plowing combined with a lack of soil retention methods such as crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops, soil terracing and wind-breaking trees left the land dangerously vulnerable should a period of drought occur.
It came in 1931. Lack of rain and elevated temperatures turned the soil to dust, which simply blew away in unusually high winds. The legendary "Dust Bowl" of the "Dirty Thirties" still lives on in our collective psyche.
Sometimes we are our own worst enemy, but a blanket dismissal of the potential benefits of GM food is at best shortsighted.
