The first step in this is to define a few things like good and evil, something that philosophers have been trying to do for humanity forever, but for food only. Evil food is not trying to kill good food and it is not trying to take over the world in a large world government. Words I write in humour but see parallels to them that are real. Evil food would be food that grows in a country in place of food that would feed the people who grow it. Confused? How about an example.
Coffee. Coffee, tea and chocolate is grown in third world countries for export to wealthy nations at a fraction of the end price. The poor people who grow these cash crops see very little of the money, indeed, many of these crops are grown on vast plantations with very little in the way of local employment and only a few wealthy individuals benefit. And the land that the cash crops are grown on typically is the best land and the food that would normally be grown on it would normally be used to feed the people of that country. And so the poor people might need to import food from elsewhere to survive. So in this case, amoral food would be the coffee, the tea and the chocolate. It could be made moral if the cost of the final product and the raw product were more closely related and the people of the country of export recieved a greater portion of the profit, so they could then feed the region.
That is one way to make a food that has an amoral history, more moral. And here is the rub, as I sit here drinking tea, we are all guilty of it, because we humans feel that luxury foods are important to our lives. They can't grow everywhere, so we want them to grow where they can and we should pay for the luxury food. We should export the staples that can't be grown where the luxury food is grown at a reduced price. But there are some foods that are more evil than those foods.
There are foods that will kill people. I know where you are going with your thoughts: GMO foods are dangerous and will kill and Organic foods are good. If you thought that, you would be wrong. And I can prove it with simple arguements. No hocuspocus. I am not a shill for big GMO, nor Monsanto. I am poor and don't own a car or a house. I rent and take transit places when I want to go places. I walk or ride my bike. I would happily be a shill for those GMO companies, because they do good work for humanity. Really.
Organic food is not evil. GMO food is not evil either. They are just food and they are not evil in themselves, they can't be, because they have no choice, but they can be used to cause harm, and so for the purposes of this argument, Organic Food is evil. Why evil? It is about numbers. The numbers are the people in the world, it is about climate change, and it is about the health of people.
Earlier this year, it was announced that Peak Child occurred. That was when e numbers of new children started to go down, which means that in subsequent generations there will be less people born each year than the year before and this will mean the population will naturally stabilize and decline. The problem is, that we won't see it stabilize for many years becuase the death rate has been declining for years and so the natural population increase and the natural population decrease remain out of sync, so the population will still continue to rise for many years to come. The World's population will rise from where it is now at between seven and seven and a half billion people to nine or ten billion people. That is the problem. There is another problem.
Years ago, back when the world's population was merely two or three billion people, scientists announced that we had reached Peak Food. They said that we would never produce more food than what we were producing at that time. They were wrong of course, because of the Green Revolution, which was not Green as we mean it in today's jargon, irronically it was very unGreen. The Green Revolution was when they discovered that artificial fertilizers and artificial pesticides could increase crop production by leaps and bounds. The practise poisoned the land and the earth, disrupting ecosystems and such, but it also allowed a short term gain in food production. Short term, because the practices are unsustainable.
In the late 1980s technology began to change in agriculture. The processes that were involved in creating new versions of plants and animals that allowed better food production began to change. We began to be able to make the changes in things directly instead of leaving the changes to chance. This meant that we, humanity, could tweak plants and animals to make them better in ways that would take much longer if left to chance. We could take successful mutations and genes from one plant and put them into plants of the same species. We could take genes from different species and put them into others, like from grass to tomatoes. We could even move move genes from completely different orders of life, because on the genetic level genomes are nearly identical. Moving a gene from a bacteria to a plant or an animal to a plant has no dangerous effect on anything of the animal that is destined to pay money and consume it. Theoretically, one could create a tomato that is poisonous for humans, but there are easier ways to do that, like poison or bullets.
He above is what people who are evil Organic Food proponents like to cite as to why GMOs are bad for you. Evil, that is a pretty strong statement. Let's unpack that. If someone kills someone they might be considered evil. If someone accidentally kills someone, then because ignorance is no excuse, they still killed someone, they did something bad. If they were told about it and they did it again, then they would be killing people through willful ignorance, they would be evil then. So, I would suggest that Organic Food proponents are killing people through willful ignorance and they would be therefore evil.
How are they willfully ignorant? The science has been around for over thirty years, and there has been no solid proof that GMOs are bad or dangerous and that many aspects of Organic farming techniques are harmful as well. The power of genetically modified plants is amazingly impressive in its scope. They are revolutionary. They have created a strain of rice that naturally include a higher vitamin-A content that would wipe out diseases caused by not having enough. They make plants that are resistant to non toxic herbicides so that those herbicides can be applied in places of much more toxic herbicides. They make plants that have naturally produced toxins that only affect insects that eat the plant and not the insects that live in or around the plants and not in the soil. These plants would improve the nutrition content of the food and make e land safer for everyone and everything.
There is more, some plants, like clover fix nitrogen from the air and put it into the soil, if that capability could be put into other plants, then those plants would not need to be fertilized too. Tomatoes with a great shelf life could be take the genes for great taste and we would have tomatoes that have a long self life and great taste too. The skin of a potato has a complete protein, which means that if you just ate potato skins it would provide all the protein you would require. If the genes that allowed that could be put into other foods, we would all be healthier for it.
That is the argument for the morality of GMO food as good. Organic food is completely natural and that means that to grow well it needs to be fertilized, and herbicides and pesticides need to be spread to allow it to grow. The fertilizers need to be spread, which means that they have to be spread everywhere and non selectively. Same with the pesticides and the herbicides. This means more of the poisons and fertilizers miss the crop and enter the food chain. We learned from the disaster of DDT exactly how far reaching a simple pesticide would go and cause damage. Non selective poisons affect everything it touches and kills indiscriminately. Also it requires multiple applications over the life of the crop. Which means more chemicals, more damage. The idea that organic means that the pesticides are organic too, is a distraction. Organic pesticides can be just as destructive as non-organic pesticides.
That is the argument that Organic food can be evil. People would suggest that that was the same way that people grew crops for generations and so that it must be a better way to do things. By that argument, we should all be using horse and buggies, sailing ships and in agriculture, no plows, we have after all been using plows for only a few centuries and not using them for thousands of years.
Organic food, also has lower yields than GMO crop yields. And this is another reason why organic food is evil. Right now there are over 7,000,000,000 people. Seven Billion. And we grow enough food for those people, just enough, well actually only almost enough. There are a lot of starving people. Some of those people are starving because we can't distribute all the food to the regions that have less from the ones that have too much, but even then there is a bit of shortfall. Much of the food is organic. Much of it is GMO. But the wealthy countries where there is more food, they are banning GMO food. And in the poor regions they are getting less food because of their choices. The poor starve so the wealthy can get enough food. And the wealthy tell the poor that they should not eat the more productive, more nutritious, less damaging food, because the weather people for no good reason say so. That, is the definition of evil food practices.
That is with only seven billion people. Imagine with an additional two to three billion people. Then it would be a billion people eating fine with the rest of the people a third less food, that is called starvation. The willful ignorant killing the poor. The amoral few.
No comments:
Post a Comment