Here is a film you might want to see on genetically-modified food, entitled "A Life Out of Control."

http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/lroc.html

Unfortunately, it appears that instead of splicing together the best genes from within a species, genetically-modified, or GM, food introduces genes that essentially invade the cross-species barrier.

So, for example, human growth hormone genes introduced into a pig to increase the pig's size, creates a pig who cannot stand because his musculature overwhelms his bones.

Plants are not cross-bred from among the healthiest and best of their kind, but human genes or animal genes are injected into a strain of plant and, often, the resulting plants grow poorly or not at all.

GM foods have the potential for Island-of-Doctor-Moreau-like unintended consequences that are truly worth analyzing before proceeding.

It is not that we shouldn't have GM plants or animals, it is just that we need to follow the advice of the German philosopher, Karl Popper, and beware of the "law of unintended consequence."

Human beings, who are notoriously sloppy and cavalier, need to become more careful and thoughtful in this arena.

Thanks for the link to Stone's article. It is a good read. I haven't gotten through it all the way yet, but he seems to be making a very subtle point, one that is lost on 99.9% of the pro/anti-GM activists.

He side-steps the GM is good/bad argument and really focuses on the people and their deskilling. In fact, he says that he's not making a judgement at all on GM crops.

The really interesting is deskilling and its affect on all of us. Many of us in the industrialized world have been deskilled to the point (for example) that we can no longer fix our own car, or build our own house, or forage for food in the forest.

This deskilling is a trade-off. In return for letting someone else make some difficult decisions (choosing seeds and deciding where to plant them) or do some technical work for us (fixing cars, building houses), we get some benefits like more money, more free time, etc. But, then we start relying on others to make decisions for us.

Are the benefits worth the loss of skill? Sometimes, but not always.

--where exactly are these crazy Luddite environmental activists?

Really? Is that a question? How about "Europe"? Like, most of it.

It's not about biology.

Years ago Indian farmers grew FOOD. The Indian government convinced them to switch to cash crops. Mostly Cotton. The problem is that cotton is capital intensive. (One could argue the IMF promotes this kind of thing to insure debt payback) Now these farmers had to take out crop loans to pay for fertilizer, pesticides and equipment. But - cotton is a commodity so the cash the farmers earned was outside of their control. When the bottom fell out of the cotton market a number of years ago those farmers we left bankrupt AND they could even eat their crop to survive. So there was a huge upsurge in suicides. At least their families would have one less mouth to feed.

The research by Stone is fascinating and we need more of it. Thanks to your nuanced articles, we find our way to this kind of work.

It's good to see a more objective point of view (both from the anthropologist and from the columnist) on this kind of complex and ideologically burned issues.

Though I do not share Mr. Leonard's capital-skeptic point of view, his excellent reporting on such a broad range of others' intellectual work is truly valuable, independent of the accompanying commentary. It is by far the most intelligent regular feature in Salon. This sort of media-as-literal-mediation between the original sources and those of us who are not reliably up to speed on (for instance) Gujurat cotton scholarship is a model of what new media reporting ought to look like.

a good place to start is in some of Stone's papers, where he discusses examples of green rhetoric that matches corporate rhetoric pretty evenly. The Both Sides Now paper, for example.

in my own research, i have to say I've seen lots and lots of anti-gm activism that is pretty unnuanced and one-sided.

So the scientist in question (who is doing great work) is lauded for "rejecting simultaneously the corporate biotechnological Neo-Malthusianism that declares that any opposition to GM crops is equivalent to condoning the starvation of African children, and the Green-activism absolutism that holds all genetically modified crops to be inherently evil"--where exactly are these crazy Luddite environmental activists?

Can you point to them? Are they anything other than straw men?

The overwhelming, massive majority of people involved in GM-related political activist discuss the issue in terms of questions of biodiversity, who has intellectual property control over GM crops and seeds, and whether or not GM crops actually accomplish all that corporate PR claims they do.