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All Food Is Genetically Modified. Now We’re Just Better at It. – Article by Chelsea Follett

All Food Is Genetically Modified. Now We’re Just Better at It. – Article by Chelsea Follett

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The New Renaissance Hat
Chelsea Follett
September 11, 2015
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There is huge potential for progress in biotech.

A recent article in Business Insider showing what the ancestors of modern fruits and vegetables looked like painted a bleak picture. A carrot was indistinguishable from any skinny brown root yanked up from the earth at random. Corn looked nearly as thin and insubstantial as a blade of grass. Peaches were once tiny berries with more pit than flesh. Bananas were the least recognizable of all, lacking the best features associated with their modern counterparts: the convenient peel and the seedless interior. How did these barely edible plants transform into the appetizing fruits and vegetables we know today? The answer is human ingenuity and millennia of genetic modification.

Carrot_Comparison(Photo Credit: Genetic Literacy Project and Shutterstock via Business Insider).

Humanity is continuously innovating to produce more food with less land, less water, and fewer emissions. As a result, food is not only more plentiful, but it is also coming down in price.

Tech_Food_Cheaper

The pace of technological advancement can be, if you will pardon the pun, difficult to digest. Lab-grown meat created without the need to kill an animal is already a reality. The first lab-grown burger debuted in 2013, costing over $300,000, but the price of a lab-grown burger patty has since plummeted, and the innovation’s creator “expects to be able to produce the patties on a large enough scale to sell them for under $10 a piece in a matter of five years.”

People who eschew meat are a growing demographic, and lab-grown meat is great news for those who avoid meat solely for ethical reasons. It currently takes more land, energy, and water to produce a pound of beef than it does to produce equivalent calories in the form of chickens, but also grains. So, cultured meat could also lead to huge gains in food production efficiency.

Another beautiful example of human progress in the realm of food is golden rice. The World Health Organization estimates that between 250,000 and 500,000 children become blind every year as a result of vitamin A deficiency, and about half of them die within a year of losing their sight. Golden rice, largely a brainchild of the private Rockefeller Foundation, is genetically engineered to produce beta carotene, which the human body can convert into vitamin A. Golden rice holds the potential to protect hundreds of thousands of children in the developing world from vitamin A deficiency, preserving their sight and, in many cases, saving their lives.

Humans have been modifying food for millennia, and today we’re modifying it in many exciting ways, from cultured meat to golden rice. Sadly, it has become fashionable to fear modern genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), even though scientists overwhelmingly agree that GMOs are safe.

Anti-GMO hysteria motivated the popular restaurant chain Chipotle to proclaim itself “GMO-free” earlier this year (a dubious claim), prompted a political movement calling for the labeling of GM foods (a needless regulation implying to consumers that GMOs are hazardous), and even fueled opposition to golden rice. HumanProgress.org advisory board member Matt Ridley summarized the problem in his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed:

After 20 years and billions of meals, there is still no evidence that [GMOs] harm human health, and ample evidence of their environmental and humanitarian benefits. Vitamin-enhanced GM “golden rice” has been ready to save lives for years, but opposed at every step by Greenpeace. Bangladeshi eggplant growers spray their crops with insecticides up to 140 times in a season, risking their own health, because the insect-resistant GMO version of the plant is fiercely opposed by environmentalists. Opposition to GMOs has certainly cost lives.

Besides, what did GMOs replace? Before transgenic crop improvement was invented, the main way to breed new varieties was “mutation breeding”: to scramble a plant’s DNA randomly, using gamma rays or chemical mutagens, in the hope that some of the monsters thus produced would have better yields or novel characteristics. Golden Promise barley, for example, a favorite of organic brewers, was produced this way. This method still faces no special regulation, whereas precise transfer of single well known genes, which could not possibly be less safe, does.

Fortunately, while regulations motivated by anti-GMO sentiment may slow down progress, they probably cannot do so indefinitely. For those who wish to avoid modern GM foods, the market will always provide more traditional alternatives, and for the rest of us, human ingenuity will likely continue to increase agricultural efficiency and improve food in ways we cannot even imagine. Learn more about the progress we have already made by visiting HumanProgress.org and selecting the “Food” category under “Browse Data.”

Chelsea Follett (Chelsea German) works at the Cato Institute as a Researcher and Managing Editor of HumanProgress.org.
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Organic Shmorganic – Article by Charles N. Steele

Organic Shmorganic – Article by Charles N. Steele

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The New Renaissance Hat
Charles N. Steele
October 6, 2012
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A study by researchers from Stanford University of “organic” food was unable to find any health benefits, prompting a rant from NYT’s Roger Cohen against organic food.  Finally, finally, finally!  Cohen on track, rather than off the rails!Many years ago I heard Bruce Ames, a cancer researcher and head of College of Public Health at Stanford give a lecture in which he discredited the health claims of the “organic” movement and warned that it would raise costs without returning corresponding benefits.  His main fear was that this would lead people to eat fewer vegetables rather than more.  The second most important thing people can do to avoid cancer is eat more vegetables, he explained (stopping smoking is  number 1).  He based this in part on his own research with with carcinogenic properties of manmade pesticides and naturally occurring ones; the naturally occurring ones were every bit as bad and as prevalent in vegetables, and neither posed a meaningful risk in his research.  (Obviously misuse of pesticides could be a different matter.)  The new Stanford study was unable to find the superior health benefits attributed to “organic” foods, corroborating Ames’ argument.

I’ve also heard agriculture experts discuss the alleged environmental harmfulness of “non-organic” agriculture, something not covered in the Stanford study.  Again, the alleged environmental benefits of “organic” are mostly hype, and in some cases it can be worse.  Chemical fertilizers in particular deserve none of the slander that’s directed at them.  (Again, use them incorrectly and you can poison things… but that’s also true with “organic”.)

I’ve been putting “organic” in quotation marks, because the word itself always meant something different: it refers to carbon-based compounds.  That is, that’s what it meant until the word was grabbed by – let’s be honest – hippie food faddists.  “Organic” was changed to mean “simple, healthful, close to ‘nature,'” (another doubtful word), all utterly unsubstantiated claims.  Next yuppies and similar types jumped on the bandwagon, because it made them feel good about themselves “saving the planet and eating healthier and sidestepping ‘corporate agriculture,’ etc.”

This is a great example of the fundamental role of subjective utility in economic value.  Belief in “organic” is essentially religious faith, unfounded in evidence.  What makes “organic” more valuable is consumer demand, based on perceived, imagined characteristics, not some physical measurable properties.  That’s why big food corporations got into the act. They were slow to enter, and when they did, they were entirely responding to demand.  They would prefer not to produce this way, because it is costlier, but so long as consumers demand it, you give them what they want, or you lose market share.  There’s quite an irony here. Anti-capitalists frequently accuse “big business” of manufacturing consumer preferences in order to manipulate people and reap profits, yet the whole “organic” movement was manufactured by a motley collection of  anticapitalist  mystics from both left and right.

I heard NPR cover this story, and the  reporter concluded that the whole “organic” thing must have been a conspiracy by “big agriculture” (another dubious concept) to hoodwink us and get our money… a completely backwards argument, as most farmers, big or little, would prefer less costly, easier, more productive modern agricultural methods.  It’s quite common to be producing “organic” crops, meat, etc. and have some small step go wrong and have the “organic” label be lost – and even though the stuff is perfectly good, it now can’t be sold for enough to cover costs.  I’ve had farmers tell me about this, and have read of many more examples.

“Organic shmorganic” indeed!

Dr. Charles N. Steele is the Herman and Suzanne Dettwiler Chair in Economics and Associate Professor at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. His research interests include economics of transition and institutional change, economics of uncertainty, and health economics.  He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 1997, and has subsequently taught economics at the graduate and undergraduate levels in China, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and the United States.  He has also worked as a private consultant in insurance design and review.

Dr. Steele also maintains a blog, Unforeseen Contingencies.