It was after an encounter with the sharp end of an orthopedist’s scalpel that I developed strange primordial urgings. I would go wandering in the middle of the night – to the fridge. There I would seize upon the huge stockpile of individual processed ‘cheese food’ slices and attack them.
Despite the overpowering strength of my uncontrollable urges, such is my spirit of scientific enquiry that I could still pause to ponder as I ripped off the protective Trojan-like plastic around each yellow square, ‘Why bother? Is there any real difference between these two carbon-based man-made substances?’ Even after I had unwrapped them, I had to think whether I should bite the clear plastic or the orange plastic.
Hey, half the stuff we eat nowadays has come from some chemical vat with not a hint of chromosome even touching it! I remember my son spilling some cheesy puffy snack foods on the lawn one early winter’s day. By the spring, despite snow, frost, rain, not one starving bird or rodent had touched the stuff, which glowed as fluorescently orange as the day he’d dropped it.
The implication was clear: the very worms and insects, even the bacteria and molds scorned this stuff. And that is not too surprising. The ingredient chemicals itemized on the package sounded like the shopping list for a militia bomb factory. Shouldn’t food be biodegradable at least?
So I am bemused when I hear people’s atavistic fears of genetically modified food. Can people who eat these edible artifacts still worry about whether the soya sauce in their frozen TV dinner may just possibly include, way back down the production line, a hint of soy-bean that may just have had a scientist poking around inside its DNA?
Looking at what people will eat that is unashamedly organic, I wonder, ‘Why be so finicky?’ For example, our household is quite partial to haggis, which is either the national dish or the national joke of Scotland. This is made with the squishy insides of a sheep, boiled at some length, mixed with oatmeal and blood, and then stuffed into the sheep’s stomach. The recipe specifies that while boiling up the sheep’s entrails, as the lungs simmer, the windpipe should be left dangling over the edge of the pot with a dish there to catch the mucosal debris that will drip out. USDA regulations prohibit the importation of haggis into the States, which is either because an inspector read the recipe, or it’s a transparently protectionist attempt to foster the domestic haggis-rearing industry.
I myself discovered these refinements of haggis preparation when a friend who I’d invited to dinner looked mesmerized at his plate, his face a fine shade of green, rather reminiscent of a Cameron clan tartan. I discovered that he had made the mistake of reading up on haggis in the Larousse gastronomic encyclopedia the night before. We took mercy on him and fed him the fried chicken that we had in reserve for just such an eventuality.
Strangely enough, we discussed genetically modified food that evening. Whatever a genetic engineer may have done to his dinner apparently matched the horror he felt at the thought of the perfectly nutritious haggis, whose constituents could not even have been contributed by Dolly, at the time the world’s only cloned mammal, let alone sheep, and who is still, to the best of my knowledge, baaing her biologically Xeroxed life away somewhere in Scotland.
Personally, I blame all those old Frankenstein films for putting people off the GM idea. It’s a long stretch from Boris Karloff with a bolt in his neck to a corncob with tinkered DNA, but the connection is there: people seem to have visions of monster soy-beans marching on the nearest village with mayhem on their genes.
Should we be suspicious of major food companies and what they do? Dead right, as any examination of their products would show. But the fear of all genetic manipulation is a phobia, not a cause. Strangely enough, the highly controversial experiment in Britain which is alleged as vindication for banning GM crops involved feeding potatoes to rats. In fact, the skin of potatoes, certainly in the original Peruvian form, is pure poison. Spuds in the raw do not really truly deeply and sincerely think that their genetic destiny is to end up as slivers of fried carbohydrate accompanying a Big Mac. They churlishly lard their skins with poison precisely to dissuade the rest of nature’s rich pattern of flora and fauna from making a meal out of them.
Spuds don’t want to be us. It has taken generations of selective genetic manipulation, originally by Incan farmers, to develop the envenomed tuber to its present delectable form, central to the cuisine of so many northern nations. Just how crucial the potato is became apparent last year when I was in Prague, where I took the opportunity to continue my ongoing research into the world of rum. I saw some bottles of alleged rum on the shelf of the bar, and, since I had not noticed many fields of sugar cane waving in the frozen wastes of Bohemia and Moravia, I asked the bartender what they made it from. He looked at me with the contempt reserved for the utterly ignorant, and said, ‘Made from? Why, potatoes of course!’ Now tell me that’s not worth a blast of indignation!
The Speculator
