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By Root 1188 0

against food biotechnology takes many forms, nearly all of which mix safety with other issues to evoke distrust, dismay, contempt, or outrage. To begin with, advocates write books—lots of them. My personal collection includes two or three dozen, of which at least ten were written for a popular audience just from 1998 to 2002.50 Books on the ethics of food biotechnology form an additional publishing genre. I am not the only person who collects such volumes. The geneticist Richard Lewontin reviewed his own collection of books and found that most opposed genetically modified foods for reasons that he judged muddled. He said, “whatever fears [one] might have of possible allergic reactions to food produced from genetically modified organisms, they are not more unsettling than the allergies induced . . . by the quality of the arguments about them. . . . Even the most judicious and seemingly dispassionate examinations of the scientific questions turn out, in the end, to be manifestoes.”51 By this, he seemed to mean that critics do not clearly distinguish scientific concerns about safety from concerns about social issues.

FIGURE 27. Greenpeace uses cards like this one to generate support for campaigns to stop sales of genetically modified foods. Text on the back of the card explains why companies should stop selling genetically engineered food and what consumers can do to encourage that action. (Courtesy of Greenpeace, 2000.)

The books have a political effect, but not always the one intended. Among the most recent, only one favors food biotechnology: Pandora’s Picnic Basket.52 Although written by a scientist who claims to be objective, this book also can be viewed as a manifesto. An instructor in my New York University department assigned it to a graduate class on contemporary food issues. He said the class found the science parts useful but also found the book infuriatingly patronizing, biased in coverage, and lacking in coherent social analysis. Informing the public about science is valuable, but that alone is not nearly enough to help people understand how scientific and social issues interact in matters of public policy.

Greenpeace is especially adept at producing materials that use scientific concerns about safety to score points about distrust. Figure 27 gives my favorite example: using the “horror” of transgenic foods to emphasize the lack of transparency in marketing. Another example: at the time of the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle, a coalition of more than 60 nonprofit groups (The Turning Point Project) placed a series of full-page advertisements on food biotechnology and globalization in the New York Times. One, headlined “Unlabeled, Untested . . . and You’re Eating It” (October 18, 1999), listed common food products containing genetically modified ingredients and discussed the hazards of toxicity, allergic reactions, and antibiotic resistance. Subsequent advertisements provided lengthy and thought-provoking discussions of various health, environmental, or economic consequences of biotechnology or economic globalization, along with information about how to learn more about such issues. Figure 28 gives yet another example—this one, a painting—of the commingling of safety and social issues as they apply to transgenic foods.

FIGURE 28. In conjunction with an exhibition of artworks on the theme “artists picturing our genetic future,” Alexis Rockman’s The Farm appeared on a lower Manhattan billboard (Lafayette and Houston Streets) in fall 2000. (Courtesy of Alexis Rockman and Creative Time; photograph by Charlie Samuels.)

This commingling of safety with other issues is most visible in street demonstrations. The 1999 FDA labeling hearings, for example, attracted protests in all three cities where they were held (figure 18, page 190). The Oakland, California, hearing attracted 500 antibiotechnology demonstrators and received much attention from the press, largely because it also drew a smaller group of counter-demonstrators. These were researchers and graduate students from the nearby University of California, Berkeley,