Profesor J. Westover
ENGL 1302.
December 3, 2016
Quality of Organisms
There was a time when the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 had a simple loophole and it was that the word “organic” was left undefined. It is in every high school scientific textbook that organic chemistry is dealing with organic material, meaning that which contains carbon. This was a very broad definition for the word organic. This is the key to how so many consumers have been fooled for so many years. According to surveys conducted by Gallup, 45% of Americans actively try to eat organic foods. Companies are aware of the favorable view so many people have of organic food. And they also know people will pay more for food with the organic label on it. When the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 first pass, most of the “organic” products were as bad as the customer’s intentions to eat healthy food were good. The quality of a food or the quality of the organism that it came from are things that can be objectively defined. Other considerations when we are talking about food are the method of creating and processing the food and the commercial interests of the company selling the food.
Where food and specifically organic food went wrong is in the misuse of the English language by the people selling the food. The language was used, specifically the word organic, to take advantage of a loophole and misrepresent potentially harmful genetic modifications to further the seller’s commercial interests. The worst misuse of language was to use the broad definition of organic as something containing carbon molecules. Even petroleum has carbon molecules so this is a cynical and flagrant abuse. The found the loopholes in the FDA and furthered their commercial interest using language to play off the lack of sophistication of consumers. They followed the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law. In the process they made a mockery of both English and Science. A key solution involves coming up with legitimate categories and qualitative difference among types of plants and types of animals. These categories can include methods to farm them, feed them, raise them and even reproduce them as a way of distinguishing categories and helping terms like organic.
Recent Britannica articles are written by politically motivated proponents of GMO’s. The arguments seem idiotic. Britannica’s explanation of GMO and its definition include Animal Husbandry, cloning, radioactive treatments and mechanical manipulations of the genes; this is in my opinion wrong. As Britannica puts it a GMO is an, “organism whose genome has been engineered in the laboratory in order to favor the expression of desired physiological traits or the production of desired biological products. In conventional livestock production, crop farming, and even pet breeding, it has long been the practice to breed select individuals of a species in order to produce offspring that have desirable traits.” The definition includes the “conventional livestock” and conventional “crop farming,”. However, Britannica is wrong to say things like pet breeding, especially with its qualifier. Laser surgery and massive radiation was not used to develop pet breeds like Cocker Spaniels or Siamese Cats. This new GMO technology is not a continuation of the methods that created our modern agricultural base. This stance that allows Britannica’s writers the fallacy of equivocation. The one who started the idea that pet breeding is just an old form of GMO had a commercial interest. His name was Professor Yang. The definition claims that even pet breeding is Genetic modification and it is, or as much as artificial selection is a sub branch of biotechnology. As the case was made in the “The Biology Book (Gerald 304)”.
Reading this makes me think Professor Yang was caught with his own silver tongue. Professor Yang developed viruses to inject into the cellular ribosome and modified genes via the virus. Scientific American Magazine Described Yang’s invention as simply a cheaper method of GMO and celebrated how it was a money making arsenal against the monopoly held by Monsanto in Genetic Engineering. The said, “Yang, a cheerfully polite professor of plant pathology at Pennsylvania State University, is not an expert in the field. (“The only thing I know about mushrooms is how to eat them,” he says.) But he edited the genome of Agaricus bisporus, the most popular dinner-table mushroom in the Western world, using a new tool called CRISPR. (Hall 58)” Scientific American. Yang is not an agriculture artist or a hands on experimenter. Most people in agriculture are either in agribusiness or bureaucrats. Yang created a more profitable method that did not violate existing patents and while this is admirable it may not be enough to justify its use. The way the use was justified was not through science but through language. Editing mushrooms, that is the title of the article, that dominate global markets shows as much the power of language as science. While, later it is written how this CRISPR, Yang’s invention, is gene-editing, not genetic modification. This play of words got past the FDA regulations and also allowed the buyers of CRISPR to sell the product as a non-GMO. As the article has it, the CRISPR mushrooms would remain white and dry, but still tasted rancid and even became harmful and rotten. Marketers work like this, they start with what everybody buys, and edit the organism as if it was a model of a machines, trying to create a cheaper, better product. The end result is a thing that is not remotely what the ideal thing looks like. Then the marketing tries to take something and make it the essence of that platonic ideal. However, the end product almost doesn’t even have the soul of a mushroom.
There is an affirmative philosophy behind selective breeding. People have distinct goals in quality of food. They pay for the actual quality of food and for the desirable genotypes. Costs are built into the time and effort to create the food. The old science of Animal husbandry produced the rich variety of pet breeds and their pedigree as well as domesticated animals. The pedigree is why one pays more as opposed to selling anything that is mixed breed. At Georgeson Botanical, research at the University of Alaska Fairbanks was conducted by Mike Salzman to develop a disease resistant and cold hardy rose bush. The rose bush is a pretty plant with plenty of other uses. The endeavor took several generations and experiments to first pick a hardy species, then develop effective methods of raising it, and finally selective breeding. The research is conducted by the University which includes Georgeson Botanical Garden and Matanuska Experiment (Sustainable agriculture in Fairbanks). “Here are other roses I have tried growing that I thought might be hardy but either did not survive very long, or they didn’t have a fair winter trial.” This is a scientist working with the whole rose. He starts with the species and goes from there. As opposed to using monoculture and editing the genes from a specific plant for a destination. Mike has what is more of an Uber organism, at least in Fair banks Alaska, as opposed to the cheap, lightening, Frankenstein rosebush of a laboratory. Methods that take more time to do things right are the ones with longevity.
Traditional GMO is a modification of an organism and there must be a definition as to how something can be modified. Currently, GMO includes treating seeds with Chemicals or radioactivity in the hope that one of them has a desirable mutation or useful malformation. Transgenesis is considered a GMO by the FDA, and it is using a virus to inject genes from a GMO plant into a wild plants cells. The next four are considered non GMO. Mutagenics is the activity of chemical or radioactive treated seeds with desirable traits that are collected for cross breeding with wild plants. Gene silencing is introducing RNA from one wild plant into a different species of wild plant that disrupts that plant’s DNA’s aging appearance or other unwanted phenotypes. Cisgenesis is using a virus to inject a desired plant gene into a cell and therefore into the plant’s DNA to produce a plant with that desired trait. Now CRISPR is adding a Cas-9 protein and a designed RNA that damages the DNA in a specific section and then provides the desired instruction for the cell to repair it. CRISPR is a cheaper knock off of previous inventions like Zinc Fingers (the original) and TALENS. These are the paraphrased categorization (Hall 60). Whatever President Obama’s administration or FDA may think, a profitable position now being taken is that all things are GMO, “Scientists such as Voytas and Yang reply that all forms of plant breeding, dating all the way back to the creation of bread wheat by Neolithic farmers 3,000 years ago, in evolve genetic modification and that the use of traditional breeding techniques is not a biologically benign process” All of these are working with the bare minimum, recombinant DNA, and creating language that allows them to get past regulations. However, these are basically the same radioactive or chemical plants common sense tells use were not produced by natural selective breeding.
Up to this point I sound like I am voicing public opinion. However, this is not just yet-another-reason-why corporations are evil and how bad GMO is. No doubt I eat GMO. The issue is a scientific term used for profit while gumming up peoples understanding of what is going on. So Britannica may saw that your dog is a GMO, companies say everything is a GMO, and now GMO is like the word “fascist” or “democracy.” As George Orwell points out the problem excellently “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind (George 10).” The solution is to abandon scientific terminology in the market, because the customers believe they are buying quality food when they are purchasing a non-GMO or Organic, and not that they are paying for organic even if it may be only 15% so. The power to distinguish a specific Quality in a food or animal has until now been the result of a lifetime of deliberate hybridizations. We now create mutations for niches of a species for marketing purposes. If the consumers are confused it is not because the science is confusing but because the language is misleading.
In Organon, Aristotle said that “all intelligence is based on the ability to distinguish between categories.” The categories of agricultural and animal products have both been intentionally muddled for money. The solution is to publish agreed upon definitions that can be created by a joint panel of Scientists and English Professors. This mixed panel could assure that the definitions are clear and not designed to manipulate, confuse or otherwise mislead the public. Once the public can sort out what each label means, they can get past the double talk and slogans and decide for themselves if they are willing to take the risk or not of eating scientifically manipulated food. Nothing will be cleared up until the language is cleared up.
Work cited
Diaz, Julia M., and Judith L. Fridrovich-kell. "Genetically Modified Organism (GMO)." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, 9 May 2016. Web. 15 Nov. 2016. <https://www.britannica.com/science/genetically-modified-organism>.
Gallup, Inc. "Forty-Five Percent of Americans Seek Out Organic Foods." Gallup.com. N.p., 07 Aug. 2014. Web. 23 Nov. 2016.\
Gerald, Michael C., Gerald, Glory E., “The Biology Book,” Sterling Publishing Company, 2015, New York, NY.
Hall, Stephen S. "Editing the Mushroom." Sci Am Scientific American 314.3 (2016): 56-63. Adsab. Harvard, Feb. 2016. Web. 23 Nov. 2016.
"Organic Foods Production Act of 1990." (n.d.): n. pag. Www.ams.usda.gov. Government, 10 Nov. 2005. Web. 3 Dec. 2016. https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Organic%20Foods%20Production%20Act%20of%201990%20(OFPA).pdf
Salzman, Mike. "Rose Testing in Fairbanks." Rose Testing in Fairbanks 88th ser. 8.3 (2000): n. pag. Greogeson Botanical Garden. University Fairbanks Of Alaska, 1999. Web. 23 Nov. 2016.
