Conscious Choice Seattle: Our Future in Apples and Potatoes

March 2005

Our Future in Apples and Potatoes

A new documentary takes a hard look at biotechnology and the ethics on our dinner plates

by Suzanne Boothby

Frankenfoods. Genetically modified crops. Genetically engineered food. Biotechnology. Many of us have heard the terms, but far fewer Americans realize that a technological revolution has been taking place for the past 10 years in the foods we eat. Most are not aware that about 60 percent of the processed foods on our grocery shelves today contain some genetically engineered food products.

“The Future of Food,” a new documentary produced, directed and written by Deborah Koons Garcia, provides an in-depth investigation of biotechnology and the ethical issues surrounding these foods. Garcia, the widow of the late Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, spent three years filming in Canada, Mexico and the United States. She spoke with farmers, legislators and scientists to show the controversial debate brewing about our world’s food production.

“I’ve always been interested in agriculture,” Garcia said in an interview with Evergreen Monthly. “I’ve thought for many years now that it would be a challenge to make a film about organic agriculture versus chemical agriculture.”

About 250 people came to a January screening of the movie at Seattle’s Kane Hall at the University of Washington cosponsored by The Campaign to Label G.E. Foods and PCC Natural Markets. The audience was a lively mix of old and young, men and women, parents and singles.

After the movie, a question-and-answer session with Garcia, Craig Winters of The Campaign and Goldie Caughlan from PCC produced many valuable viewpoints on the topic. One woman asked, “Do Monsanto employees eat their own corn?”

Nobody responded to the rhetorical question, but Garcia is clearly aiming for answers about how we approach food. Her film is rooted in a brief history of agriculture. Garcia says she thinks people need to understand this process in order to grasp the idea of manipulating it. The movie gives examples of our rich agricultural history: We used to enjoy 5,000 different types of potatoes and 3,000 varieties of apples.

“If agriculture goes, everything goes,” she said. “This is a radical technology that involves breaking down species barriers. Most of what we know now about genetics is only what we don’t know.”

In 2000, Joseph Mendelson of the Center for Food Safety wrote an article for The Economist addressing the safety of these foods. “Genetically engineered foods are inherently unstable,” he wrote. “Each insertion of a novel gene, and the accompanying ‘cassette’ of promoters, antibiotic marker systems, and vectors, is random.... As a result, each gene insertion into a food amounts to playing food safety ‘roulette,’ with the companies hoping that the new genetic material does not destabilize a safe food and make it hazardous.”

The crux of the movie is the issue of patenting seeds. For centuries, farmers have produced their own seeds or bought them, but huge corporations like Monsanto have been quietly acquiring the patents to many species, setting a new precedent to patent “life.” Monsanto now owns 11,000 patents for seeds, according to the movie.

“Patenting is a huge change in agriculture,” Garcia says. “How did this get through our regulatory system? The farmers don’t buy these seeds; they lease them. So, one of my main goals was to give empathy to the farmers.”

One of the most famous cases of this legal issue is the story of Percy Schmeiser, a canola farmer from Saskatchewan, Canada, who received a lawsuit from Monsanto in 1998 because his fields became contaminated with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola (see the January 2004 issue of EM). Even though Schmeiser never planted these seeds, Monsanto eventually won its case and has continued to sue small farmers throughout North America that have found these crops in their fields.

The movie is available for purchase at www.thefutureoffood.com and will be sold at Whole Foods Markets beginning this spring.

Suzanne Boothby writes about food for Evergreen Monthly. You can email her.

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