Frankenfood

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FRANKENPIG

As anyone living around a corporate hog factory knows, hog stuff stinks. Mightily.

Should the corporations have to clean up their act and drastically cut the massive number of hogs it jams into each factory? No need, because here comes: The Biotech Stink Busters!

By splicing some genes from mice and E.coli bacteria into pig genes, a less stinky critter has been created, which is now trademarked under the sweet name of "Enviropig." It still contaminates the air and water with its excretions, but you don't notice as much. No report on what happens to those of us who might eat ham with mice genes and E.coli bacteria in it.

The industry and our so-called "regulators" keep saying that they have these GMOs -- genetically modified organisms -- under tight control so the altered plants won't spread (through their pollen or through mixing of seed) into the fields of unaltered crops. This is what you might call "IMPORTANT" -- since no one knows the longterm impact of Monsanto's lab creations on human health and on the earth's ecology. It would be beyond stupid, Biblical-level stupidity, to let this stuff escape and taint our entire food supply.

In the last few years, however, there have been unsettling "incidents": a shipment of organic corn from Texas was rejected by France (GMO foods are banned in Europe, Japan, Brazil, and other nations) because it contained the altered genes, apparently the result of pollen drifting from farms growing altered corn onto the fields of the organic farmers; a load of GMO corn not approved for human consumption ended up unannounced in Taco Bell's corn products; scientists found that Monarch butterflies were sickened and dying from exposure in the Midwest to GMO grain; Mexico, which does not allow GMO corn it its country, has found native varieties deep in the country's interior to be tainted by Monsanto's corn pollen, which had drifted hundreds of miles, much farther and in a much quicker time than the industry and our government thought possible.

Knowing this is why the small article in the Times caught my eye. It reported on new findings by the widely-respected Union of Concerned Scientists, which had just run a series of systematic tests on 36 batches of corn, canola, and soybean seeds. All of the seeds supposedly were nature's own, free of any genetic manipulation. Yet, UCS found that more than two-thirds of the batches had traces of GMOs in their DNA.

This means that Monsanto's engineered demon is loose on the land. As one of the scientists put it "The door to seed contamination is wide open."

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