Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [8]
To illustrate the many ways in which food safety is as much a matter of politics as it is of science, I begin this book with a familiar example: the front-page disclosure late in 2000 that a prohibited variety of genetically engineered corn—StarLink—had turned up in supermarket taco shells. The StarLink example reveals many of the themes that recur throughout this book and sets the stage for the rest of our discussion.
THE STARLINK CORN AFFAIR
Our story opens on September 18, 2000, with a report from the Washington Post: a group called Genetically Engineered Food Alert discovered genetic traces of StarLink corn in taco shells made by Taco Bell. StarLink was not supposed to be in the human food supply. Two years earlier, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allowed Aventis CropScience, the owner of the genetic engineering technology for this corn, to grow StarLink—but only for animal feed. The EPA wanted Aventis to prove that StarLink corn would not cause allergic reactions before allowing it in the human food supply. If supermarket foods contained StarLink, something had gone wrong with the regulatory system.
As events unfolded, the StarLink affair displayed all the hallmarks of classic political scandals: new information dribbling out one fragment at a time, lies, cover-ups, and finger-pointing. During the next year or so, international trading partners refused to buy U.S. corn, farmers hesitated to plant genetically modified corn varieties, and Canada spent nearly a million dollars to keep StarLink out of its food supply. Aventis took StarLink off the market, sold off its agricultural division, and owed millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements. Anyone following these events could see that genetically modified corn not only pervaded the U.S. food supply but also grew in places where it was not supposed to be—in fields of conventional corn, organically grown corn, and native corn grown in remote regions of Mexico. The StarLink affair had political consequences.
The StarLink affair also had political causes. For reasons of politics, federal regulatory agencies operate under policies designed to promote the food biotechnology industry, not to obstruct it with demands for extensive safety testing before products get into the food supply or for labeling of these products. In a different regulatory environment, the fact that the key protein in StarLink corn appeared similar to other proteins known to cause allergic reactions (allergenic proteins, or allergens) might have forced Aventis to find out whether this corn caused allergic reactions before allowing it anywhere near the food supply. Instead, the EPA authorized StarLink corn to be grown as food for animals. EPA officials reasoned that animals would be likely to digest the protein and destroy its function; they did not think the intact protein would get into meat. In splitting its decision, however, the EPA assumed that corn grown for animal feed could be segregated—kept separate—from corn intended for human consumption. As later chapters explain, the EPA should have known better, and its decision to permit StarLink to be grown at all suggested that the agency was partial to the interests of Aventis. Because this history is complicated, table 1 provides a chronological outline of the more important events.1
To understand why the safety of a genetically engineered corn might be political, we must look back to the early 1990s, when federal agencies ruled that such