There I was, wandering and wondering through the Manhattan supermarket with a friend, studying the labels. ‘Cholesterol-free,’ declared the plastic bag of potatoes. ‘Do you think they’re genetically engineered?’ my friend asked. ‘Not likely,’ I replied, dredging up memories of my high school biology. ‘Potatoes don’t normally have cholesterol unless you fry them first.’ So the label, while strictly true, was intentionally misleading, which raises the question of what consumers make of labeling.
There is growing pressure to tag food products that have been ‘genetically engineered’ but the devil, as always, is in the details. What will the consumer make of a statement that an xyz gene has been transposed into the nucleus of a product. ‘Xyz genes – are they stone-washed like Levis?’ is likely to be the most germane comment.
Genetic engineering can have really bad effects. You just have to look at the Hapsburg lip, the Windsor ears, or the Kennedys’ propensity for scandal. The list is almost endless: bulldogs that can’t breathe, tiny lapdogs that you could tread on and crush underfoot if they weren’t so neurotically yappy, and wheat that cannot disseminate its own seeds without human intervention. All of these are consequences of experiments with genetic engineering – the old way, with sex.
That is to say, humans bred plants and animals to get the characteristics that they wanted. Sometimes there were side effects, like dearly doted-on dogs that mistook the household infant as dog food on the hoof; or crops like maize that were vitamin deficient for centuries before we knew there were vitamins to go short of. Chicken Little types run around saying the sky will fall in when engineered varieties escape into the wild. Well, belay that clucking, chicks. It’s already happened. Anyone hit by a squishy piece of falling sky from one of the ubiquitous pigeons of our great cities is benefiting from the domestication and breeding of edible rock doves, whose escaped progeny cannot tell the difference between their ancestral Asian cliffs and your eaves, nor between your head and a convenient guano-clad boulder.
Of course these generations of breeders did not know about genes, chromosomes or DNA, any more than smiths knew crystallography. But no-one is going to call either a sword or a plowshare a natural product just because its makers didn’t have a degree in metallurgy.
Humans themselves tend to choose their partners because of characteristics that they like, real or imaginary, which is a form of genetic engineering. Being human, of course, they often err, which is why inbreeding so often afflicts those keen to keep unsullied the blue blood of nobility or royalty. In the short term, such are human foibles. Castilian dons would lithp along to emulate the royal lipth of the Hapthburgth; or the tabloids would swoon over the attractiveness of Prince Charles’ protruding ears. Queen Victoria inadvertently did more service than the guillotine to republicanism by prolifically passing on the gene for hemophilia to most of the royal families of Europe. Despite the cultural urges to grovel to blue blood, in the long term history deals harshly with pea-brained dynasts unless they import some mongrel hardihood through intruding adventurers or philanderers.
One can argue this is different from genetic engineering because it’s a natural process. But some of the most active opponents of genetic engineering at the test-tube level are known for their abhorrence of the natural process itself, which they see as sinful and dirty. They should logically join WC Fields in his abhorrence of water, which he claimed, was because ‘fish f- in it’ not because of its dilutive effects on his martini diet.
Such puritan fundamentalists should welcome artificial insemination, since it is the fun of the deed that is supposed to be sinful, not the holy act of procreation itself. Admittedly, I haven’t heard opponents of genetic engineering complaining about wrapping their jaws around a steak or a chop from animals bred by artificial insemination, but then I have never really heard a holy-roller celebrate it with the fervor such a holy, joyless and uncomfortable procedure deserves. Presumably the process of extraction of the vital bodily fluids evades proscriptions against onanism on the grounds that its purpose is to send forth and multiply rather than mere Animal House enjoyments.
However, I digress, perhaps overtaken by the novelty of writing about sex without invoking the White House. Inserting a gene with a micropipette is no more or less dangerous than doing so with a penis. In each case the results need careful scrutiny, and suspicion of technological fixes means there is a higher threshold of proof on a modern biochemist than the Mesopotamian domesticator of Manhattan pigeons’ ancestors.
People clearly have a right to know if their food products contain genetically engineered material, but it’s up to all those biotech start-ups to persuade both the informed and the (much larger) scientifically illiterate body of consumers that their products are good for you: that it’s better to have tomatoes genetically pest-resistant than doused with dubious chemicals. And if they can grow potatoes with the cholesterol already in them, think of the energy savings for fast-food joints.
