(Genetically Modified) Food For Thought

Remember the opening scene in "Oliver" when the poor, starving kids sang "Food, glorious food", sarcastically, of course, about the awful gruel they were being served ("and such small portions," Woody Allen would add)?

As our special food issue demonstrates, today's consumers aren't that much better off than those poor orphans. True, most people don't eat gruel (although if you know a good recipe, feel free to share it here), but kids in Dickens' day didn't eat genetically modified (GM) corn and milk with bovine growth hormone or fast foods that have led to appalling obesity and diabetes rates among the working poor.

If our food issue leaves you hungry for more, check out the documentary Food, Inc. Much of the film focuses on Monsanto, with its private detectives stalking farmers accused of illegally saving seed (yes, thanks in part to Monsanto's former attorney, Clarence Thomas, seeds can be patented, and the company enforces its rights by sending out teams of investigators in the dark of night to intimidate growers -- even those who don't purchase the company's GM products but whose fields are found to have been contaminated by Monsanto seeds).

It's well worth seeing. Purchase a bag of popcorn and use the unpopped seeds to throw at the screen. Come to think of it, GM popcorn is probably not too far away -- if it isn't here already. Thanks to new DNA, unpopped seeds will be going the way of eight-track tapes and moderate Republicans. Until then, here's a wonderfully prescient piece about GM products written by Kirkpatrick Sale in 1999, "Monsanto: Playing God".

And who knows, maybe instead of GM crops, some benevolent corporation will create a GM God, who does only good things instead of making war and Windows Vista.

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