A Consumer鈥檚 Guide to GM Food by Alan McHughen, Oxford University Press, 拢9.99, ISBN 0198507143
DID you know that grain certified for export by the US Department of Agriculture may contain small quantities of stones, pieces of glass, unknown foreign substances and 鈥�10 or more rodent pellets, bird droppings, or an equivalent quantity of other animal filth per 1000 grams鈥�?
Alan McHughen tells you this not to put you off your sandwich, nor to get you to boo the nasty Americans. His point is that this is a reputable standard in an imperfect world. This is where the trade-offs between cost and benefit, political judgement and market sensitivity leave our daily bread. The result? 鈥淎 daily intake of rat shit and insect parts with every mouthful鈥�.
Advertisement
As you may guess, he is also softening us up to accept that we should not hold new technologies to standards old ones do not have to meet. Genetically modified foods should be made as safe as anything else. But do not ask for them to be certified risk-free, because nothing ever will be. Acknowledging this would be one step towards what he sees as a rational debate about genetically modified organisms, which demands much better information so that people can make up their own minds with full access to the facts.
McHughen, a plant genetic engineer in Saskatchewan, Canada, offers A Consumer鈥檚 Guide to GM Food as a contribution to that rational discussion. Not really a consumer鈥檚 guide, it is more a general primer on genes, food and regulation (and nuts to whoever at Oxford University Press dumped the American title, Pandora鈥檚 Lunchbox).
And it鈥檚 a perfectly good primer. McHughen makes his own position clear: there may be things to worry about, but not, on the whole, the ones people have worried about so far. None of these popular bugbears is reason to abandon a technology that could have real benefits. And he is dispassionate as he reviews the technology, its applications, the way it compares with other methods of plant breeding, and how we might assess its risks.
He convincingly sets the record straight on scare stories beloved of media and activists alike. There never was a fish gene in a tomato. America鈥檚 monarch butterflies will not be wiped out by insecticidal GM pollen. And, yes, Dr Arpad Pusztai鈥檚 potatoes were not very good for rats, but not because they were genetically altered.
None of this is backed up with any references (though there is an excellent list of websites), so we have to take McHughen鈥檚 word for it. But he comes across as more interested in fairness than point scoring, at least most of the time. Even if you end up trusting him completely, however, you have to wonder what difference a book like this will make in the long run.
Read right through it, and you will undoubtedly have a better-tuned bullshit detector, but how many people are going to read all 277 pages? McHughen does his best, but dispassion is dull. The chapters on regulatory regimes and intellectual property are especially tedious. A Consumer鈥檚 Guide to GM Food would be fine in the classroom, but it is not going to walk off the shelves at Christmas.
Honest man that he is, McHughen includes all the elements of a story that undermines his premise. The British do not trust their food regulators after BSE. There is no obvious benefit to the consumer from existing GM products. When there is, they will probably get a much better press. Meantime, why is it irrational to avoid them? There might be risks. And conventional products are just as good.
In the end, I think McHughen is mistaken in his hope that science and politics, rational and 鈥渆motional鈥� considerations, can be cleanly separated. He should move on from his oft-repeated assertion that the debate is ill-informed and irrational, and consider that, just as no food will ever be completely safe, so no debate about what we eat will ever be, in a scientist鈥檚 eyes, completely rational. To believe otherwise is a variation of the scientific arrogance which he condemns, but cannot quite let go.