The Organic Fetish - Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives - Michael Specter

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives - Michael Specter (2009)

Chapter 3. The Organic Fetish

It would be hard to argue with Dostoyevsky’s assertion that a society’s level of civilization can best be judged from its prisons. If you want to talk about aspirations, however, a supermarket might be a better place to look—and in America today that supermarket would have to be Whole Foods. It is no longer necessary to hunt for a small co-op if you want to buy organic peanut butter or grass-fed beef, of course. Thousands of stores offer organic and “natural” products, and sales are growing at several times the rate of more conventional fare, even in the midst of a recession. In 2008, that amounted to nearly $23 billion in the United States alone. Even places like Wal-Mart and Costco have heard the message; they have become the biggest organic distributors of all. But as an emblem of the nation’s growing fixation on all that is natural, nothing quite compares to Whole Foods.

To saunter down its aisles is to wade into a world of butter lettuce, chard, black radish, winter squash, and several types of arugula. The origin of nearly every product is on display, the better to assess its carbon footprint, the burden it places on the environment, and the likelihood that the food is fresh. Signs at the meat counter promise animals raised without hormone injections or antibiotics and nourished only by vegetables. Whole Foods adheres to the “Organic Rule,” which, according to one of the store’s many informational brochures, Organics and you, is principally about integrity.

Traditional grocery stores rarely made much of a fuss about their philosophies, but Whole Foods isn’t just about food, it’s about living a particular kind of life, an approach the company sums up nicely in the Whole Foods Credo: “Eat seasonally grown food, reduce the distances from farm to plate, shrink one’s carbon footprint, promote sensitivity and a ‘shared fate.’ ” (Eating locally produced food has become such a phenomenon that in 2007 the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary selected “locavore” as their word of the year.) The credo is not unusual. Organic products nearly always come with claims of ethical superiority. Nature’s Path, for instance, points out on its cereal boxes that traditional desires for profit and brand leadership would never “amount to a hill of beans if we don’t choose sustainable, environmentally responsible processes that will leave the world better than we found it.”

Calls for sustainability are no longer sales pitches or countercultural affectations; they have become a governing mantra of the progressive mind. “If you are concerned about your welfare, or your children’s health, about the way animals are treated,” Peter Melchett, the policy director of the British Soil Association, said, “or if you are concerned about the welfare of farmers or the future of this planet, you should buy organic food.” Lord Melchett is one of the Western world’s best-known and most outspoken believers that organic food, deployed properly, could feed humanity.

I enjoy shopping at Whole Foods. The products, while so costly that the chain’s most frequently used nickname is “Whole Paycheck,” are good and usually fresh. The colors are pleasing, the aisles roomy, and customers you find there seem more animated than at any other grocery store. I once stood at the entrance to the store at New York’s Time Warner Center and asked fifty people why they were willing to spend extra cash—sometimes twice the cost of more traditional fare—to buy organic produce. Most said they thought organic food, which is grown without the use of synthetic pesticides or genetically engineered ingredients, tasted better, and many believed it would improve their health; still others hoped that a wider reliance on organic food might contribute to a better fate for the earth.

Americans seem to be thinking about their nutritional choices in a way that they never have before, and who can blame them? Our most significant health problems are diseases of indolence and obesity. We eat the wrong things. And we eat too much of them. America’s top food group, measured by caloric consumption, is “sweets,” and a dollar spent on junk food will buy many more calories than one spent on fruits or vegetables. Processed foods and mindless consumption have long been the twin pillars of our culinary experience.

“What kind of society kills itself by eating?” a woman asked me one day while shopping at Whole Foods. “We are not only ruining ourselves, we are ruining the land. How much of this planet do we have to plow under before we stop and realize we can live on the earth without destroying it? This is a moral issue as much as it is any other kind.” That is a noble sentiment, expressed frequently within the organic movement, and it reflects a clear mission: to cultivate and eat what is wholesome and natural and to cleanse the world of its heavy reliance on synthetic, genetically manipulated, and chemically treated foods. While nowhere near as rabid on the subject as Europeans, who continue to confront transgenic crops with animosity and even violence, surveys demonstrate repeatedly that Americans consider organic foods far healthier than any product of biotechnology.

There’s a lot to be said for buying locally grown produce: it can help sustain community farmers and focus attention on the quality of the environment. It tastes better, too. But is organic food healthier for you than food that contains genetically engineered ingredients or that has been harvested by robot-guided combines instead of human hands? Is it more likely to sustain the planet or the majority of its inhabitants? And are organic fertilizers and pesticides clearly a more virtuous and earth-friendly choice for the consumer than those made of synthetic chemicals? There are no short answers to those questions (at least none that are true). But there has certainly never been a study that would suggest the answer to any of them is a simple yes. There is no evidence, for example, that a single person has died or become seriously ill as a result of the accumulated residue of pesticides in their food. The same cannot be said of the toxins contained in “natural” food—as any number of salmonella outbreaks or raw milk poisonings in the United States continually demonstrate. In 2009, after salmonella and listeria contamination sent dozens of people to hospitals in six states, the Food and Drug Administration even warned Americans to avoid raw alfalfa sprouts—perhaps the signature food of a healthy, organic lifestyle.

“People buy many things when they buy organic food,” Marion Nestle told me one day as we poked around one of Whole Food’s newest and largest stores, the 69,000-square-foot colossus in the TriBeCa section of lower Manhattan. “One thing they believe they are buying is a nutritionally superior product. The entire organic industry is desperate to show that it has more nutrient content than conventional food. There may be more nutrients in some organic products, but so what? We get all the nutrients we need. In this country that is not our problem. Calories and diabetes and sugar. That’s our problem.”

Nestle, the author of Food Politics and What to Eat, and for many years a professor of nutrition at New York University, has been relentless in calling attention to false and confusing claims made by food companies (and permitted by the federal government). She is also a fan of organic food. “Buying what is grown with care is never wrong,” she said. “But we have to pay attention to the differences between health claims and marketing ploys, and a lot of those labels”—she waved vaguely at the supermarket shelves around us—“purposefully confuse the two.”

I had asked Nestle to join me in a quest to find one completely natural product for sale on the shelves of Whole Foods: something unaltered from what it would have been had we found it in its wild state. Americans often act as if the world around them was pristine until corporations began to defile it. Small-scale farming is an expression of that belief—an attempt to step away from the vast agricultural conglomerates that churn out Brussels sprouts and broccoli by the ton, as if they were auto parts or computer chips. There is, however, almost no such thing as natural food for sale in American grocery stores. Even spring water is processed (and, obviously, bottled). Salt is usually iodized. Fruit needs to be refrigerated or it will rot. Are organically grown carrots and celery, cut conveniently into snack-sized strips, wrapped in plastic and resting on a bed of Styrofoam, natural? “The first third of the store is fine,” Nestle said, referring to the fresh vegetables, meat, and fish. Most had been refrigerated and trucked in from great distances—often at environmental costs that are difficult to calculate. But still, these foods contained no additives. Then she cast her gaze across the long rows of potato chips, artisan sugars, and high-end crackers. “That, they should get rid of,” she said. “It’s junk food.”

Nestle reached for a box of organic instant oatmeal with Hemp Plus, which was fortified by omega-3 fatty acids. The consumer information on the back pointed out that the hemp contained neither marijuana nor any psychoactive drug. If the drug-free status of the cereal wasn’t enough to entice consumers, the label also noted that both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington farmed it extensively.

“And of course they are pushing the omega-3s,” Nestle said. “Omega-3 fatty acids are among the hottest ingredients right now.” When eaten in trout, salmon, and other fish, omega-3s have been shown to lower the risk of heart attacks. But not all fatty acids are created equal; in cereal it is hard to know which omegas, if any, you are getting and whether they will be digested and absorbed properly by the cells they are supposed to protect. “Cereal is not a fish,” she said. “And this is just another way to market a bunch of calories.”

Organics still only account for a sliver of American food products, less than 5 percent, but that sliver is growing rapidly. Most of the crops in the United States, however, including 90 percent of the enormous soybean crop and more than three-quarters of the corn, are products of biotechnology. In 2008, 62.5 million hectares of genetically engineered food were planted in the U.S. In the rest of the world, the figure is growing by about 10 percent a year. To many inhabitants of the rich countries of the West, this suggests that we have become too reliant on technology for our food, that somehow the cold and soulless hand of science has been placed in nature’s way. That’s where the Whole Foods Credo comes in. “A shared fate” would require a sensible effort to keep destructive growth in check, and to find harmony in a world that is rapidly becoming depleted.

It would be hard to question the judgment of people who have no desire to eat hormone-infused meat or foods that have been processed and glued together by little more than a variety of sugars and fat. One has to wonder though, about that idea, so commonly espoused by environmental organizations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Organic Consumers Association, of a shared sense of fate. Exactly whose fate do these people think we are sharing? If it is the other billion or so residents of the rich world—the relatively few who can afford to shop at greenmarkets, eat tomatoes that still cling to the vine, and would rather dine at a restaurant that has been cited by the local health department for rodent infestations than at one that serves food trucked in from an industrial farm—then sure, our fate is shared. I have seen how most American chickens spend their lives, and nobody should help inflict that kind of misery on any living creature by buying battery-raised poultry or eggs.

It doesn’t take a visionary, however, to understand that the other five billion or so residents of this world, more than half of whom live on less than two dollars a day, can’t afford organic products, and lack the land it would take to grow them. Farmers in developing countries often see their crops rot in the fields long before they can be eaten or rushed across rutted dirt roads to markets many hours away. To those people, the Western cult of organic food is nothing more than a glorious fetish of the rich world—one with the power to kill them.

IT’S HARD to find anything positive to say about Thomas Malthus. After all, his dour view of the world has consistently been proven wrong. In 1798, he argued that the earth’s population was rising exponentially and the food supply necessary to feed it was not. He famously promised “famine … the last, the most dreadful resource of nature.” It took another 125 years for the world’s population to double, but only fifty more for it to double again. Somehow, though, the food supply remained adequate. Mass starvation has often seemed inevitable, yet it has almost always been averted. Why is that? How could Malthus, not to mention the many apostles of doom who followed, have been so wrong? The answer is simple: science and technology have repeatedly saved humanity.

Over the past two hundred years there has been a progression of technological leaps that Malthus could never have imagined. The astonishing advances in human welfare, and in our ability to address poverty, have largely been the result of the discovery of effective antibiotics and vaccines for more than a dozen deadly diseases. But steam power, steel plows, and agricultural success were no less essential. We simply get far more out of every crop than seemed possible when Malthus was alive. The result has been one of the modern world’s greatest achievements: good food for billions of people at prices that got lower every year.

By 1940, however, that system was beginning to fail in many countries: Mexico, China, India, and Russia all seemed on the verge of famine. Even parts of Europe were threatened. Once again, experts braced themselves for the worst. “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” Paul Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb, which was published in 1968. “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971.” He also insisted that “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.” Once again, technology—and human imagination—interceded (as it has for hundreds of thousands of years, at least since some distant ancestor turned a stone into an ax). Between 1960 and 1985—during which time Erlich published his book and the Club of Rome issued The Limits to Growth, its modern echo of Malthus’s grim assessment—food production in most of the world’s poorest countries more than doubled.

The revolution began as a single experiment by one man, Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist, who while working in Mexico had spent years crossing the local wheat with Japanese dwarf varieties to produce plants that could respond better to irrigation and benefit more consistently from fertilizer. That approach was quickly applied to corn, beans, and rice, and the results could soon be seen planted across hundreds of millions of acres throughout Latin America and Asia. The impact is still hard to believe: despite a 300 percent increase in the population of the earth since the end of the Second World War, by far the fastest such growth spurt in human history, available calories per capita have risen by nearly 25 percent. India not only survived the 1960s (with help from the United States) but has since seen its population double, its wheat production triple, and its economy grow ninefold. India has also become one of the world’s biggest rice exporters. The lives of billions of people have been transformed.

All technological advances have costs. Many are painful and most are unanticipated. The Green Revolution was no exception. With little thought devoted to land management and driven by an almost limitless reliance on water, the environmental impact has been staggering. For decades, India and China have been digging wells and damming rivers from one end of Asia to the other. The dams have displaced millions. Wells have liberated a generation of farmers from their dependence on rain, but clean water doesn’t flow forever. As the population grows, particularly in the world’s two most populous countries, the freshwater dwindles, and that leaves people with just one choice: dig. Drill too deep, though, and saltwater and arsenic can begin to seep into the ground, and when that happens nothing will grow on that land again.

For the first time since 1960, we are in a race to see whether the planet can provide enough food to feed its inhabitants. There are really only two ways to increase the amount of food a country can produce. Either you coax greater yield out of land already devoted to farming, or you find extra space to grow more. Historically, agriculture has alternated between the two strategies; for the past century, however, there has been a lot of both. Today, crops are grown on nearly 40 percent of the earth’s land, and it takes 70 percent of our water to do it. Farming is, by its nature, an assault on the earth. Tilling, plowing, reaping, and sowing are not environmentally benign activities and they never were. Moreover, it has been estimated that pests, viruses, and fungi reduce agricultural productivity throughout the world by more than a third. You can’t turn a crop into edible food without killing pests. And you can’t kill them without poison—whether man-made or natural.

There is only so much war you can wage on your environment, however, and we have just about reached our limit. Physical expansion is no longer a meaningful option because we have run out of arable land. Three-fourths of the farmland in sub-Saharan Africa, where a third of the population suffers from chronic hunger, has become nutritionally useless, and more than 40 percent of the African continent suffers from desertification. “Globally, we’re losing soil at a rate twenty times faster than it is formed,” writes David R. Montgomery, a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington and author of the 2007 book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. Montgomery estimates that farming is responsible for eroding as much as 1 percent of the earth’s topsoil every year. If that doesn’t change we could literally run out of soil within a century.

By 2050, if not sooner, the earth will have half again as many people as it does today, more than nine billion. Long before that, though, possibly within the next twenty years, world food demand will have doubled. The Green Revolution largely bypassed Africa, and people in many countries there are actually getting poorer; but something surprising has happened throughout much of the rest of the developing world. Success itself has placed unbearable new burdens on the food supply. Agrarian societies have traditionally consumed little meat. But in China and other East Asian nations where income has been growing rapidly, that is no longer true. In India, 65 percent of the population still works on farms. Nonetheless, the country now has more than 280 million urban residents, and the shift to city life, which began more than a hundred years ago as rural residents fled famine and drought, continues.

Every day one hundred thousand Indians join the middle class; the trend in China is similar. As people get wealthier, and as they move away from the farm, their eating habits change. The biggest of those changes is that they start to eat meat. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) expects that global meat production will double by 2050 (which is more than twice the rate of human population growth). The supply of meat has already tripled since 1980: farm animals take up the vast majority of agricultural land and eat one-third of the world’s grain. In the rich nations we consume three times the meat and four times the milk per capita of people in poorer countries. But that is changing rapidly, and as it does we will have to find ways to grow more grain to feed those animals—and to do it all on less land, and with less available water, than we have today. It is this demographic reality, more than population growth alone, that most seriously threatens the global food system.

Climate change, environmental degradation, water scarcity, and agricultural productivity are all intertwined. It will not be possible to solve any of those problems unless we solve them all. Climate change is likely not only to bring warmer temperatures but also to alter patterns of rainfall, placing even more stress on agriculture. Livestock already consume 80 percent of the world’s soybeans and more than half the corn. Cattle require staggering amounts of fresh, potable water. It takes thirteen hundred gallons of water to produce a single hamburger; a steak requires double that amount.

Water scarcity may be the most visible problem caused by our addiction to meat, but it is not the only one: to make a pound of beef requires nearly a gallon of fuel. To put that into perspective, producing one kilogram of the grass-fed beef so revered by organic devotees and high-end restaurants causes the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as driving a small car 70.4 miles. Even for beef raised less luxuriously (fed by grain on industrial farms) the figure is nearly forty-five miles. Eating meat is ecologically ruinous: according to a 2008 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, if we all skipped meat and dairy just one day each week it would do more to lower our collective carbon footprint than if the entire population of the United States ate locally produced food every day of the year.

Malthus may have badly underestimated human ingenuity, but he did get one formula right: combine intense population pressure with high levels of poverty, reduce the opportunity for technological advances, and the guaranteed result will be famine and death. In 2005, an average hectare of land could feed four and a half people; by 2050 that same plot will need to support at least six people (and possibly closer to eight). The only way that will happen is by producing more food per hectare—more crop, as agronomists like to say, per drop. That is not the direction in which the world has been moving. Grain production began to decline in the 1990s for the first time since World War II. Africa, the continent that needs the most help, is the place that is faltering most profoundly. Total production on farms there, according to the World Resources Institute, is nearly 20 percent less than it was in 1970. Without another agricultural revolution, that trend will surely accelerate.

IF WE GENUINELY care about sharing our fate, and making food more readily available to everyone, there is only one question worth asking: how can we foment that next revolution? Certainly we need a better way to grow crops, one that sustains the earth but also makes the most efficient possible use of it. Breeding is the art of choosing beneficial traits and cultivating them over time. Farmers have done that for thousands of years by crossing plants that were sexually compatible and then selecting among the offspring for what seemed like desirable characteristics—large seeds, for example, or sturdy roots. That had always been a laborious and time-consuming process: mixing vast numbers of genes—sometimes whole genomes—almost entirely at random meant transferring many genes agronomists didn’t want in order to get the ones they were looking for.

These extra genes often had negative effects, and it could take years of testing new strains to remove them. It was a crude system, akin to panning for tiny amounts of gold in a rushing river filled with stones, but given enough time it usually worked. By conserving seeds and careful mating, farmers learned how to make better plants, as well as entirely new varieties. All the plants we eat (corn, wheat, peanuts, rice) and many that we don’t (orchids, roses, Christmas trees) have been genetically modified through breeding in an effort to make them last longer, look better, taste sweeter, or grow more vigorously in arid soil. So have most varieties of grapefruit, watermelon, lettuce, and hundreds of other fruits, vegetables, and grains that are for sale in any supermarket.

Evolution, which works on a different time scale and has no interest in easing the life of any particular species, does essentially the same thing: selects for desired traits. Humans have no choice but to try and hasten the process. Modern agriculture—and modern medicine—really didn’t begin until 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of the DNA molecule, which carries the information that cells need to build proteins and to live. Genetics and molecular biology are simply tools to help scientists choose with greater precision which genes to mix (and how to mix them).

Advocates of organic farming, almost always speaking from—if not for—the world’s richest countries, say the “natural” approach to breeding plants could solve food shortages and address issues of environmental sustainability at the same time. More importantly, they argue that genetic engineering has promised more than it can, or at least has, delivered (which is true, in part because opposition and bureaucratic meddling have made it true). The most vocal criticism of genetically engineered crops, and the easiest to dismiss, is based on willful ignorance, the driving force of denialism. The best-known representative of this group is Prince Charles, who summed his argument up nicely many years ago: “I happen to believe that this kind of genetic modification takes mankind into realms that belong to God, and to God alone.” Putting aside the fact that not all farmers believe in God, the prince’s assessment betrays his complete ignorance of the continuum of evolution and the unmistakable connection between “conventional” plant breeding and genetic engineering.

All the foods we eat have been modified, if not by genetic engineering then by plant breeders or by nature itself. After all, corn, in its present form, wouldn’t exist if humans had not cultivated the crop. The plant doesn’t grow in the wild and would never survive if we suddenly stopped eating it. Does God object to corn? The prince skipped over another, equally essential truth: genetic mutation occurs naturally in all living things. Genes are constantly jumping around and swapping positions without any laboratory assistance; in fact, evolution depends on it.

There are more legitimate reasons to worry about genetically engineered foods. The speed with which this technology has spread across the globe transformed agriculture before many people ever realized it. “So confident are the technicians of the safety of their products that each one is seen as no more than an arbitrary mix of independent lengths of DNA,” the popular British geneticist Steve Jones has written. “Their view takes no account of the notion of species as interacting groups of genes, the properties of one … depending upon the others with which it is placed.” Virus-resistant crops, for example, contain viral genes in all their cells. But viruses can introduce genetic material to their host cells, which means that these crops could, in theory, be able to create new diseases rather than defend against them.

The most vivid example of this kind of unintended consequence occurred in 1995, when scientists working at the seed company Pioneer Hi-Bred placed genes from a Brazil nut into a soybean, to help increase levels of two amino acids, methionine and cysteine, in order to make beans used as animal feed more nutritious. Technically, the experiment was a success, but the newly engineered bean also demonstrated how changing just a few molecules of DNA might affect the entire food chain. Many people are allergic to Brazil nuts, and they pay particular attention to labels. Yet labels cannot list every amino acid used to cultivate every crop that is then eaten by every animal, and which might ultimately find its way into a product. If somebody were unwittingly to eat a cake made with soy that contained the Brazil nut protein, the results could be deadly. (In this case, the Brazil nut soybean was never eaten. Pioneer took blood from nine people in a laboratory, and stopped the experiments when the serum tested positive. Still, with such research occurring in countries that lack strong regulatory systems, similar mistakes could have frightening consequences.)

There is an even darker and more abiding fear: that genetically engineered pollen will escape into the wild, altering plant ecosystems forever. That is both more likely and less dangerous that it seems. Pollen doesn’t simply plop onto any plant, have sex, and create new seeds; it would first have to blow across a field and land on a compatible mate. If not, there would be no new seeds and little environmental danger. Genetically engineered crops have been planted on more than one billion acres, yet there have been no examples of domesticated crops damaged by genetic promiscuity. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen—but it’s not surprising that it hasn’t. Most major crops have few relatives close enough to mate with, and wild species don’t mix easily with those that are domesticated.

Biotechnology is not without risks for people or the environment, nor is its potential unlimited. Nonetheless, that potential can never be expanded or explored as long as irrational fear and zealous denial prevent nearly every meaningful attempt to introduce genetically engineered crops in places like Africa. Agricultural investment and research there has withered even as the population continues to climb. European and American critics frequently state that the risks of genetically engineered crops outweigh their benefits. They have unrealistic expectations—as denialists so often do. If people in Geneva or Berkeley want to pretend that genetically engineered products pose a danger that scientists have been unable to discover, they should go right ahead. The risk and reward equation looks entirely different in sub-Saharan Africa, however, where starvation is common and arable land almost impossible to find.

No continent needs agricultural improvement more desperately than Africa; yet there is no place where fear and denialism are more pronounced. (Until recently South Africa was the only country that permitted the harvesting of genetically engineered crops for commercial uses; not long ago Kenya became the second.) Why the resistance? Some leaders simply reject Western products on principle, particularly those, like drugs and engineered crops, that are hyped as vehicles of salvation. Commerce, too, plays a role, and so does history. “The governments and citizens of Europe continue to exercise considerable postcolonial influence in Africa through a range of mechanisms,” Robert Paarlberg wrote in his 2008 book Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa. Paarlberg, who has long studied the impact of science and technology on farmers in the developing world, noted that European countries provide a great deal of technical assistance, financial aid, and nongovernmental advocacy to Africa. But nothing comes without strings attached, and African governments learned quickly that nobody in European countries had any intention of purchasing exports grown with modified seeds. “Through each of these channels today Europe is telling governments in Africa that it would be best to stay away from agricultural GMOs and African governments have responded accordingly,” Paarlberg wrote.

Total reliance on organic farming would force African countries to devote twice as much land per crop as we do in the United States. It would also put the profligate West in the position of telling the world’s poorest nations—as well as its fastest-growing economies—that they don’t deserve to reap benefits that we have for so long taken for granted (and abused). That is the central message agricultural denialists have for Africa, and not just for Africa. It may be possible to convince China and India that burning less coal in their factories will not only ease carbon emissions but also lower their considerable health care costs. Lecturing people who have just purchased their first car or apartment about how cheeseburgers are going to kill them or destroy the planet is a different task. Do as I say, not as I do doesn’t work with American teenagers; why should it work in Bangalore or Beijing? It should be no surprise that McDonald’s franchises are growing faster in India and in China than anywhere else in the world.

Growth and poverty have come together—often in the same countries—to threaten the future for us all. Nearly a billion people go to bed hungry every night. Lack of food is not the only reason, and some argue that it is not even the principal reason. Politics, war, greed, tribal hatred, and bad government also contribute significantly to the problem. Now, so does something else: the growing demand for agricultural feedstocks to use as biofuel. In 2008, that demand pushed food prices ever higher, despite the recession, and the number of starving people rose to 14 percent of the world’s population, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Three out of every four of those people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture to stay alive. As the world’s financial crisis deepens, the bleak international economy can only add to the suffering. (Even lower prices rarely help struggling farmers during a severe recession; they are simply left with fewer incentives to plant a new season’s crops. At the same time, poor people are finding it nearly impossible to obtain loans to buy seed and fertilizer.)

To cope, Africans will need better governments. The quality of farming doesn’t really matter to countries engaged in eternal civil war or riven by corruption. The continent will also have to acquire new technology and the skill to employ it aggressively. “We are going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and how we grow crops,” Nina Fedoroff said. Fedoroff, a molecular biologist who has worked on plant genetics for many years, is the science adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She believes people have become so hobbled by their fear of genetically engineered food that it threatens not only progress but peace. “People clearly are afraid and that is very hard to watch,” she said. “We accept exactly the same technology in medicine and yet in food we want to go back to the nineteenth century. We would never think of going to our doctors and saying, ‘Gee, treat me the way doctors treated people in the nineteenth century. Don’t use anything you learned in the twentieth century.’ Yet that is what we are demanding in food production for the world, and at the same time we are seeing the number of people who don’t have enough to eat grow and grow.

“We need to change the way we live and we clearly need scientifically sound ways of managing the resources that we have,” she continued. “We have treated our planet as an infinitely exploitable resource. That has to come to an end.”

ONE AFTERNOON in the beginning of February 2009, Louise Fresco stood on a stage in Long Beach, California, and held up two loaves of bread. “One is a supermarket standard white bread, prepackaged, which I am told is called a Wonder Bread,” said the Dutch agronomist, who is an expert on sustainable development and agricultural societies. She was speaking to seventeen hundred people at the annual TED conference. TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” and in the twenty-five years since its inception the meeting has attracted many of the most enlightened and progressive representatives in those fields and others. Organic food is a given at TED, and so increasingly is a focus on solving the health and hunger crises that have engulfed so much of the developing world.

“This one is more or less a wholemeal, handmade bread from a small bakery,” she continued, waving a brown, homey-looking loaf in front of her audience. “I want to see a show of hands—who prefers the wholemeal bread?” A forest of arms filled the air. “Okay, let me do this differently,” she said, laughing. “Does anybody prefer the Wonder Bread?”

Two people timidly raised their hands. “Okay. Now the question is really, Why is this so? Because, naturally, we feel this kind of bread”—she said, holding the rustic loaf aloft—“is about authenticity. It’s about a traditional way of living, a way that is perhaps more real, more honest.” At that point she showed a slide of a generically happy family sitting over a meal at a table in Tuscany. There, she said, people still feel that agriculture is about beauty. About home and hearth. “We have somehow in the last few decades started to cultivate an image of a mythical rural agricultural past,” she told the audience. “It is only two hundred years ago that we had the invention of industrial agriculture. What did that revolution do to us? It brought us power.” And freedom from a life spent kneeling in sodden rice paddies or struggling fourteen hours a day to collect cotton bolls or snap peas. Freedom, in short, from an existence governed by agony, injury, and pain—one that most farmers, and most humans, have always had to endure. (Agriculture is still among the most dangerous of American professions and is associated with one of the highest rates of early mortality.)

Fresco went on. “You may prefer this loaf of bread”—for reasons of taste alone it would be hard not to. “But actually, the relevant bread historically has been the Wonder loaf.” A knowing sigh spread across the room. “Don’t despise the white bread,” she said, “because it symbolizes the fact that bread and food have become plentiful and affordable to all. And that is a feat that we are not conscious of. But it has changed the world.”

Agricultural work has always been—and remains today—humanity’s principal occupation. In the United States we long ago ceased to know, or care, where most of our food comes from. We have managed to liberate ourselves so completely from that dangerous and demanding life that the Census Bureau no longer bothers to count in a separate category the number of people who live on farms. Never before has the responsibility to feed humanity been in the hands of so few, and never before have so many been oblivious of that fact.

Americans rarely think about wheat when they eat bread (let alone know how to bake it), and most have never seen a live pig or chicken, unless they have visited a zoo. Poultry and pork are not animals; they are standard parts of a meal—born and raised in a baggie. There has been an understandable reaction to this mechanized approach to our food. The organic movement—fueled by rural nostalgia and pastoral dreams—is one that shuns mass production, stresses tradition, and seeks to return to less complicated times when the land was tilled by simple farmers, not regulated by computers and planted under the care of the Global Positioning System. Call it the Old McDonald fantasy.

The desire may be genuine, but it is based on a dangerous fallacy: that the old days were better. We can think that as long as we don’t have to live it—because it is true nowhere. The old days were treacherous and painful. Nasty, brutish, and short was the rule, not the exception. Life expectancy two centuries ago in Europe and America was little more than half of what it is today. Science changed all that, helping to feed the poorest people on earth; it brought farmers throughout Asia and Latin America a new kind of prosperity.

Today the world, and particularly its poorest inhabitants, needs more science, not less. Much of the technology Africa requires has been available—to us—for decades. Without passable roads, products never make it to market. Modern irrigation systems are almost wholly absent from Africa, but they would permit farmers to grow larger crops with less water, as such systems have done nearly everywhere else in the world. More than anything, Africa needs soil that has an adequate supply of nitrogen. Without nitrogen fertilizers we would lose a third of our crops. Organic evangelists argue that the best way to get more nitrogen into Africa is to use more manure. Clearly, these are people who have never been to Tanzania or Tamil Nadu. Africans and Indians have plenty of manure. In fact, human and animal waste are often the only farming resources available to villagers. They have no other choices. In effect, that means organics have been imposed on them. Cuba is an interesting illustration; the country has often been portrayed as an organic utopia because it had no genetically engineered crops or synthetic fertilizers. Nobody could afford them. In 2009, however, the government announced that it was about to plant its first crop of engineered corn. With access to technology the ideological barriers vanished. The consequences of any other approach would be horrific. Feeding the world with organic food would require vast new tracts of farmland. Without ripping out the rain forests, there just isn’t enough of it left.

At the TED conference, Fresco was displaying pictures of African farmers, people for whom securing daily meals is no more certain than it was for our Paleolithic ancestors. “If we want small-scale farming we will relegate these farmers and their families to poverty,” she said. “What they need are implements to increase their production. Fertilize their soil. Something to protect their crops. Small-scale farming is a luxury.” She peered knowingly into the crowd. “A luxury for those of us who can afford it.”

I WAS ONCE invited to dinner by a friend who ate nothing but organic food. We picked up vegetables on the way to her house: broccoli, squash, and peppers. Then we bought swordfish. When we arrived at her house, my friend walked straight into the backyard, fired up her Weber grill, sliced the vegetables, and proceeded to cook them. “I just do it this way,” she said, “so they don’t lose their vitamins.”

Vitamins are good for you; but cancer isn’t. Charred food contains carcinogens; so does charcoal and the grease that often drips from a grill into the fire. The food we ate that night was far more likely to cause harm than any conventional product cooked another way. The genuine risks never occurred to her. Like many people, though, she buys organic food because it makes her feel safer. But there is no such thing as safer. There is only safer than something else. Skiing and driving cars are thousands of times more dangerous than walking or cycling. Yet we never refuse to enter a motor vehicle because it “may” cause death. In most parts of America, tap water is not at all dangerous, a fact that is well publicized. That hasn’t put a dent in the bottled water industry.

When people decide that science can’t solve their problems, they reject its principles. Denying the truth becomes a habit. First we say, oh, pesticide is causing illness, so I’ll eat only organic food. Or perhaps chemicals are the problem. The solution for that is simple: use only natural medicine. Lord Melchett, of the British Soil Association, put it this way: “It will be consumers, not scientists, who decide whether pesticide residues are safe to consume.” So much for the value of facts or the idea of objective standards. Why bother assessing the safety of foods or employing scientists at all? Nearly every day there seem to be new and contradictory directives about what to eat and how to eat it. For some people the most coherent response is to say, in one way or another, “Civilization causes cancer,” so they begin to turn their backs on civilization.

Many producers of organic food have seized on that fear and uncertainty, advertising their goods as natural and healthy alternatives to this intangible and remote system of corporate farms. Never mind that nearly all the organic crops in the United States are grown or sold by the same food conglomerates that grow and sell conventional produce. Giant corporations like Heinz, Cargill, Kellogg, and Kraft have gobbled up organic food companies throughout the nation. Why wouldn’t they? If customers are willing to pay twice as much for foods cultivated without synthetic pesticides or that lack genetically modified ingredients, Kellogg and General Mills will be only too happy to sell it to them.

Thoughtful proponents of precaution argue that at least with organic crops we know what is likely to happen. Genetically engineered products are so new that we can’t be sure. “No one person or group knows or understands enough about the complexity of living things or their intimate interactions or what affects them to declare that biotechnology and genetic engineering are risk-free,” Denise Caruso wrote in her book Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet. “In fact, the only thing we all share—scientists, citizens, regulators—is the profound uncertainty of this moment in history.”

She is completely right. But has there ever been a meaningful new technology that carried no risk, or that couldn’t be used for bad as well as for good? Francis Bacon recognized the answer to that question four hundred years ago. “It would be an unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be done except by means which have never yet been tried,” he wrote in The New Organon. I wonder what he would have made of the “precautionary principle,” which holds that potential risks, no matter how remote, must be given more weight than any possible benefit, no matter how great. Without accepting some risk we would never have had vaccines, X-rays, airplanes, or antibiotics. Caution is simply a different kind of risk, one that is even more likely to kill people.

In Europe, the caution industry suffocates innovation. In Rome, where I lived for several years in the 1990s, they refer to organic food as “biological” and look upon genetically engineered crops as unadulterated poison. No sane person would swallow it willingly. And the Italian government helps ensure that they won’t. To sell their seeds to farmers, companies must present a certificate stating that their products have not been genetically engineered. At harvest time, farmers are required to do that, too, as are food processors and supermarket chains. America may seem more tolerant, but actually the food system is just less heavily regulated. If Louise Fresco had held up two ears of corn at TED—one grown organically and the other engineered with a toxin to resist worms and fungus—I am certain the voting would have been no different than it was with the bread.

“Just the mention of genetic engineering, a process that has been used for thirty years and so far has not harmed a single person or animal, can cause alarm,” Pamela C. Ronald has pointed out in Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food, which she wrote with her husband, Raoul Adamchak. The two make an unusual couple: she is professor of plant pathology and chair of the Plant Genomics Program at the University of California at Davis. He is an organic farmer. Perhaps not surprisingly, they believe agriculture can—and must—accommodate both approaches. This makes them the agronomic equivalent of James Carville and Mary Matalin—a couple who represent camps defined by their mutual hostility.

Tomorrow’s Table is a brilliant, though perhaps futile, attempt to reconcile the warring sides. “The apocalyptic quality of the anti-GE advocacy seems wildly disproportionate to the potential risk, particularly in the context of benefits,” Ronald wrote in the book. “Unlike fluoride or some types of synthetic or organic pesticides such as rotenone”—an odorless organic chemical found in the roots and stems of many plants—“which are unquestionably lethal to animals at high concentrations, GE traits are composed of the same chemical building blocks (DNA and proteins) that we eat every day. Indeed, these are the same components that Buddha ate 2,500 years ago, and they are what we will be eating 2,500 years from now.”

The National Academy of Sciences and the United Kingdom’s Genetically Modified Science Review Panel, among many other scientific organizations, have concluded repeatedly that the process of adding genes to our food by genetic engineering is just as safe as conventional plant breeding. Each group, in turn, has concluded that there is no danger associated with replacing the combination of genes that has always occurred through breeding (or nature) with a process that allows scientists to insert snippets of DNA into the walls of cells with a gene gun.

If scientific consensus mattered, there would be little debate about whether to use our most promising technology to help feed billions of people who have no reasonable alternative. Nor would there be much question that genetically engineered crops, which require fewer and less-toxic chemicals, are at least as good for the environment as organic crops that guzzle more water per acre and require up to seven times as much herbicide. The amount of pesticides used on corn, soybeans, and cotton in the United States has declined by more than 2.5 million pounds since genetically engineered crops were introduced in 1996, according to one study funded by the Department of Agriculture. In addition, the herbicide glyphosate—more commonly know as Roundup—is less than one-third as toxic to humans than the herbicides it replaces. It is also far less likely to persist in the environment.

This type of manipulation has long been accepted in medicine, largely because the risks seem minor and the benefits easy to understand. Insulin produced since 1982, for example, has been made from a synthetic gene that is a replica of one found in humans. Nobody seems to have problems with cancer or heart drugs based on biotechnology either. Yet altering the molecular genetics of the food supply remains a boundary that many people are unwilling to cross.

The opposition is so uniform and reflexive that when in 2004 the FAO issued a carefully prepared and comprehensive report that dared to suggest that “agricultural biotechnology has real potential as a new tool in the war on hunger,” nongovernmental organizations throughout the world rose as one to object. Six hundred and fifty groups banded together, signing an open letter in which they said that the “FAO has broken its commitment to civil society and peasant organizations.” The letter went on to complain that groups representing the interests of farmers had not been consulted, that the FAO was siding with the biotechnology industry, and, consequently, that the report “raises serious questions about the independence and intellectual integrity of an important United Nations agency.”

This type of response was hardly an aberration. The attack on Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, Barack Obama’s agriculture secretary, began the day Obama announced his nomination. Vilsack’s crime, according to the Organic Consumers Association, was extreme. (The OCA describes itself as the “only organization in the US focused exclusively on promoting the views and interests of the nation’s estimated 50 million organic and socially responsible consumers.”) Vilsack believes in biotechnology at least as fully as the leaders of the OCA believe in organic food, and that automatically makes him suspect. Typically, organizations like the OCA denounce any official who supports genetic engineering, no matter what the reason. Most of Iowa’s farmers grow genetically engineered foods, and they wouldn’t have it any other way. Vilsack’s central transgression was that, as governor, he considered that a good idea.

Attacks on progress have become routine. Look at these comments from a group whose members refer to themselves as “independent scientists” at the Third Joint International GMO Opposition Day, April 8, 2006: “The current generation of genetically modified crops unnecessarily risks the health of the population and the environment. Present knowledge is not sufficient to safely and predictably modify the plant genome, and the risks of serious side-effects far outweigh the benefits. We urge you to stop feeding the products of this infant science to our population and ban the release of these crops into the environment where they can never be recalled.”

Not one fact in any of those sentences is true. While 70 percent of all processed food in the United States contains at least one ingredient from genetically modified corn, canola, or soybeans, beyond using the word “billions,” it is not possible to guess with any accuracy how many doses of such food Americans have actually consumed in the past thirty years. But it is possible to count the number of people who have become ill as a direct result of eating that food: zero. Not one. Nearly two thousand Americans died after taking aspirin in 2008 (out of twenty-nine billion pills swallowed), and another three hundred drowned in their bathtubs. Aspirin sales haven’t suffered, and people are still taking baths.

“NATURAL” DOES NOT mean good, or safe, or healthy, or wholesome. It never did. In fact, legally, it means nothing at all. Mercury, lead, and asbestos are natural, and so are viruses, E. coli, and salmonella. A salmonella outbreak in 2009 killed nine people, sickened hundreds, and triggered the largest food recall in the history of the United States, sending a chill through every parent who has ever made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Other than mosquitoes, the two substances responsible for more deaths on this planet than any other are water and “natural” food. Wine and beer were invented as ways to purify water and make it safer to drink; the fermentation process destroys many of the most dangerous pathogens. If the Chinese had not understood the importance of boiling water for tea, they would have been sipping cups full of deadly fungi and other dangerous pathogens for the last five thousand years.

Organic food almost always explicitly excludes the use of genetic engineering or synthetic chemicals. “Natural” chemicals and pesticides are far more common, and no safer, however, than chemicals made in any laboratory. As James E. McWilliams, author of American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT, has written, “One issue frequently overlooked in the rush to embrace organic agriculture is the prevalence of excess arsenic, lead, cadmium, nickel, mercury, copper, and zinc in organic soil. Soil ecologists and environmentalists—and, to some extent, the concerned public—have known for more than a century that the synthetic pesticides of conventional farming leave heavy metals in the ground. But the fact that you’ll find the same toxins in organic soil has been something of a dirty little secret.”

While the risks of genetically modified foods are constantly cited, the dangers of nature are rarely mentioned. As the Berkeley biochemist Bruce N. Ames has demonstrated, a single cup of coffee contains more natural chemicals than most people will consume in a month of eating three daily meals. That doesn’t mean coffee is dangerous. It just means nature makes lots of chemicals, and they are no less toxic than those made by man. When invoking studies of toxicity, organophiles often tell only one side of the story. (Which, of course, is a hallmark of denialism.) Any chemical, whether it comes from the root of a tree or the shelves of your medicine cabinet, can cause serious harm. It depends how much you take. That is why one of the fundamental tenets of medicine holds that “the dose makes the poison.”

For decades, plant breeders and farmers have routinely blasted crops with radiation. The practice, mutagenesis, is not organic, but has been widely—and quietly—accepted throughout the world as a way to hasten the breeding of plants. Even those who wouldn’t eat irradiated food rarely object publicly as they do with genetically engineered products. Mutagenesis produces new hybrids at remarkable speeds, but it also causes rapid mutations in their genetic structure. Seeds are typically collected, germinated, and surveyed for new traits.

In 2008, a team of plant geneticists based in Portugal published a report that compared the effects brought on by this type of radiation with those caused by genetic engineering. They examined the protein structure of four strains of rice, focusing on the nutrients, toxins, and allergens contained in thousands of their genes. Without exception, the changes induced by mutagenesis were more significant than any brought about using the tools of molecular biology. Again, that doesn’t mean mutagenesis is dangerous. It’s not. Surely, though, radiation—a process that effects the entire plant—ought to frighten people more than the manipulation of a single gene. Yet nobody has ever refused to let a ship dock at an African port because it was filled with irradiated wheat. (In 2002, 2.4 million Zambians faced starvation. Nevertheless the government rejected as “poison” tons of genetically engineered grain offered by the World Food Program.)

Does organic food carry a lower environmental footprint than food grown with the use of synthetic pesticides? The answer to that is complicated but it certainly isn’t yes. Locally grown food has environmental benefits that are easy to understand. Agricultural researchers at Iowa State University have reported that the food miles—the distance a product travels from farm to plate—attached to items that one buys in a grocery store are twenty-seven times higher than those for goods bought from local sources. American produce, every cauliflower or radish, travels an average of nearly fifteen hundred miles before it ends up at our dinner table. That doesn’t make for fresh, tasty food and it certainly doesn’t ease carbon emissions.

People assume that food grown locally is organic (and that organic food is grown locally). Either may be true, but often neither is the case. It’s terrific news that Michelle Obama has decided to grow vegetables at the White House; her family will eat better, not because the food is organic, but because it will be fresh. Go to a nearby farmers’ market and buy a tomato or apple that was grown by conventional means. It will taste good if it was recently picked. Then buy an apple from the organic section of your local supermarket. It will have been grown according to standards established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture: no synthetic pesticides, no genetic manipulation.

That doesn’t mean it was picked when it was ripe. If those organic apples aren’t local, they ripened while they were stored— usually after having been sprayed with ethylene gas to turn them red from green (ethylene is one of the many chemicals permitted under the USDA’s contradictory and mystifying organic guidelines). The British Soil Association rules permit the use of ethylene too, as a trigger for what it refers to as “degreening” bananas. The association says that it’s acceptable to use ethylene in the ripening process for organic bananas being imported into Europe, in part because “without a controlled release of ethylene bananas could potentially ripen in storage.” In other words, they would begin to undergo the organic process known as rotting.

Food grown organically is assumed to be better for human health than food grown in conventional ways. Recent studies don’t support that supposition, though. In 2008, for example, researchers funded by the Danish government’s International Center for Research in Organic Food Systems set out to look at the effect of three different approaches to cultivating nutrients in carrots, kale, peas, potatoes, and apples; they also investigated whether there were differences in the retention of nutrients from organically grown produce. The crops were grown in similar soil, on adjacent fields, and at the same time so that they experienced the same weather conditions. The organic food was grown on organic soil, but it was all harvested and treated in the same manner. The produce was fed to rats over a two-year period. Researchers, led by Susanne Bügel, an associate professor in the department of human nutrition at the University of Copenhagen, reported in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture that the research “does not support the belief that organically grown foodstuffs generally contain more major and trace elements.” Indeed, she and her team found no differences in the nutrients present in the crops after harvest, and no evidence that the rats retained different levels of nutrients depending on how the food was grown.

If organic food isn’t clearly better for the environment or our health, if it doesn’t necessarily carry lower carbon costs or cost less money, will people stop buying it? Probably not. Look at what’s happening with milk. Pasteurization has made dairy food safe enough to serve as one of the foundations of the American diet. Raw milk is legal in nearly half the states, however, and it is easy to buy in the others. There are raw milk clubs, furtive Web sites, and clandestine milk-drinking clubs all over America today. I spoke to a “dealer” at the Union Square farmers’ market in New York one morning. He didn’t actually have the “stuff ” with him, but he was willing to arrange a meet.

This would be funny if it wasn’t deadly. As the University of Iowa epidemiologist Tara Smith has reported on her blog, Aetiology, several deaths and more than a thousand illnesses have been linked to raw milk consumption between 1998 and 2005 in the United States—a tenfold increase from the previous decade. And the business is booming. “Raw milk is like a magic food for children,” said Sally Fallon, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, a group that supports the consumption of whole, natural foods. Its advocates claim that raw milk relieves allergies, asthma, autism, and digestive disorders. No data exists to support any of those assertions.

There is plenty of data associated with the consumption of raw milk, however. In 1938, for example, milk caused 25 percent of all outbreaks of food- and water-related sickness in the United States. Universal pasteurization brought that figure to 1 percent by 1993, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition advocacy group in Washington. “It’s stunning,” Marion Nestle said to me, “to think that so many people have decided to reject one of the most successful public health achievements we have had in the past century. It really makes you wonder what people want and who they trust.”

CANOLA—AN ACRONYM for Canadian oil, low acid—has been around for less than fifty years. A derivative of the ancient rapeseed plant, canola has some attractive properties, including a lower level of saturated fat than most oils, and a rich supply of omega-3 fatty acids. In 2009, the German chemical company BASF introduced a strain that is resistant to a particular class of herbicides called imidazolinones. Douse the crop and almost magically the weeds die while the canola remains unharmed. Engineering crops to do that has been the biggest priority for biotechnology firms.

When freed to use a single effective spray that kills weeds without harming their crops, farmers need less herbicide. That saves money and helps the environment. (In China, during 1997, the first year cotton resistant to the bollworm was introduced, nearly half a billion dollars was saved on pesticides. More importantly, cotton farmers there were able to eliminate 150 million pounds of insecticide in a single year. As Pamela Ronald has pointed out, that is nearly the same amount of insecticide as is used in California every year.)

Monsanto introduced the herbicide Roundup in 1996. Roundup Ready seeds, which were engineered to resist that herbicide, have dominated every market in which they are sold. Yet their very ability to tolerate chemicals has provoked controversy. When used excessively (and improperly), Roundup can linger in fields long after it has done its job. The same is true for organic herbicides, but there is at least one difference: genetically engineered crops are scrutinized in a way that no other food has ever been. That won’t happen to the new canola from BASF, though, because scientists bred the mutation it needs to resist herbicides without relying on the techniques of biotechnology. In other words, they did “naturally” what genetic engineering does in a lab. And to opponents of genetically engineered food that makes all the difference.

Nature hasn’t noticed. Despite its pedigree, the BASF canola seems to pose more of a threat to the environment than any crop from a test tube. “Some crops cannot be planted in the year after” the herbicides are sprayed on the new canola strain, according to University of Melbourne plant geneticist Richard Roush. In test sites, he found residues lingering in the soil at levels far greater than any caused by Roundup or similar herbicides. “From an agronomic standpoint,” he told the New Scientist, “it has all the issues of genetically modified canola seed, but it is arguably worse.”

A plant bred in a laboratory is no more or less “real” than a baby born through in vitro fertilization. The traits matter, not the process. A crop doesn’t know if it emerged after a week of molecular research or three thousand years of evolution. The new strain of canola is not yet available commercially; when it is, European farmers will be able to plant it anywhere they like. If it were the product of biotechnology, however, European regulations would prevent farmers from using it at all. Nobody should assume that a food is safe because it has been genetically engineered. But should we honestly accept assertions that organic food is more socially progressive than food made with chemical herbicides? Or that raw milk possesses healing powers?

Change is hard to accept, and change for no apparent reason is especially upsetting. Purple tomatoes and fluorescent fish seem freakishly unnatural. (Snapdragon genes placed in tomatoes cause their skin to turn dark purple. Glofish that have fluorescent genes come in “three stunningly beautiful colors,” according to the company that makes them: “Starfire Red®, Electric Green®, and Sun-burst Orange®.”) There is a difference between psychedelic fish and essential foods, however. After years of opposition, the French government declared in 2009 that a single strain of corn modified to resist the European corn borer, which has been harvested on millions of acres around the world without causing harm, was safe enough to plant and eat. Not everyone in the French government concurred, however. The environment minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, announced that he had no intention of lifting the ban because it would pose too great a threat.

Fear of genetically engineered foods has warped some of the very principles that environmentalists hold most sacred: that resources should be conserved, and the earth farmed wisely. Bt, for example, is an insecticide derived from the spores and toxic crystals of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis and even organic farmers spray it on their plants. Place the gene inside the plant, however, and it becomes unacceptable (taking us, as Prince Charles would have it, into “God’s realm”). One recent study in northern China, though, demonstrated that genetically engineered cotton, altered to express the insecticide Bt, not only reduced pest populations among those crops, but also among others nearby that had not been modified with Bt. It can’t destroy every pest, but no herbicide comes closer.

For many people the scariest thing about genetically modified crops has nothing to do with science. It’s about their seeds. In enormous swaths of the world, seeds are heritage. People are often paid with them, and they conserve them more carefully than almost any other asset. Often there are no other assets. When a company like Monsanto comes along selling one type of corn seed, which can only be controlled with one particular insecticide that Monsanto also happens to make—well, who can compete with that? When they sell seeds that cannot reproduce, people become even more alarmed, fearing that they might be forced every year to buy their crop again (at prices over which they have no control).

“This is an argument I have never understood,” Robert Shapiro said. Shapiro, who is retired as Monsanto’s chairman, became the Johnny Appleseed of genetically modified foods. He was also the embodiment of his company’s failed efforts to market those products to Europe (and beyond). To environmentalists, Shapiro has long been seen as Satan, which is ironic, because until they started threatening his life Shapiro was a card-carrying member of Greenpeace. “We weren’t eliminating any choice that was already available,” he said, explaining his approach to transgenic crops. “If people didn’t want to buy the stuff, they could keep doing exactly what they’re doing, no one was taking anything away from anybody. It was just, if you want to use the new technology, then you have to use it on a set of conditions. And if you don’t think that’s a good deal, keep on doing what you’re doing. It didn’t make you any worse off.” Shapiro saw seeds in much the same way that Bill Gates thought about software: as a form of intellectual property.

Food isn’t software, however, and farmers throughout the developing world became genuinely terrified of losing their livelihoods, particularly when so much of the world’s engineered seed is controlled by a few giant corporations. Nevertheless: what happened with software has increasingly become true in agriculture as well. If you don’t want to use Windows or Word or Excel (or can’t afford them), there are excellent alternatives. Some are cheaper and many are free. That’s the power of the open-source approach to intellectual goods. Even if Monsanto had wanted to control the world’s grain, the company could never have succeeded: farmers save and share seeds, and in countries like Bangladesh and India national seed-breeding programs have been instituted to make sure people can get seed they can afford. There are open-source grains and cheap public seed banks in many developing countries. Over half the rice planted in China now is hybrid, and farmers buy it every year—usually from local seed companies.

Genetic engineering is what many environmentalists refer to as a “corporate technology” because it has mostly been used by industrial agricultural conglomerates to provide benefits to farmers and residents of rich countries. That has been true. People in the Loire Valley or Cambridge, Massachusetts, don’t need a tomato that resists frost or ripens only after a week. Products like that are not going to save the world, maybe not even help the world. As the British economist Michael Lipton put it to me years ago, “I always say that electricity is a fantastic invention, but if the first two products had been the electric chair and the cattle prod, I doubt that most consumers would have seen the point.”

It has taken years—even decades—to develop genetically engineered organisms that serve the poor. A store full of beneficial foods, such as cancer-fighting carrots and rot-resistant fruits, does not exist. Neither does an AIDS vaccine; should we give up on that? It is not an idle comparison, because the people who have the most to gain from medical and agricultural biotechnology are Africans. Neither Monsanto nor Syngenta has invested heavily in improving the yields of cassava, yams, rice, or bananas. But honestly, why should they? What incentive could they possibly have? In 1986, pharmaceutical companies abdicated much of the American vaccine market, because lawsuits made it impossible for them to profit. They don’t spend much money trying to cure visceral leishmaniasis either. It’s a parasite we don’t get in Manhattan, and the millions in the Third World who do suffer from it can’t pay for the treatment.

The market doesn’t solve every problem. That is one reason why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent billions of dollars to vaccinate children who could never otherwise see a doctor. As it happens, the foundation (and others) has now embarked on a similar program that focuses solely on cassava, which is the primary source of calories for nearly a billion people—250 million of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa. The crop has many deficiencies: it is almost entirely made of carbohydrates so it cannot provide balanced nutrition to people who subsist on it; once harvested the plant must be processed quickly or it will generate poisonous cyanide within days. The roots deteriorate rapidly, which limits the food’s shelf life; and Gemini virus, a common plant disease, destroys up to half of every harvest.

An international team led by Richard Sayre, a professor of plant cellular and molecular biology at the Ohio State University, has been working feverishly to overcome every one of those problems. Sayre calls it the most ambitious plant genetic engineering project ever attempted. The team has already succeeded with individual traits, though in separate plants. The researchers introduced genes that can facilitate mineral transport and help the roots draw more iron and zinc from the soil. They have also reported a thirtyfold increase in the levels of vitamin A, which is critical for vision. Soon they will attempt to create a single plant that expresses all the traits. Sayre said he hopes to have the fortified cassava tested in Africa by 2010.

That’s one example. There are many others. Scientists are working on plants that resist drought and salt and others that can shrug off the most common but deadly viruses. After years of scientific struggles and bureaucratic interference, golden rice, which carries genes that make it possible to produce beta-carotene, which is then broken down into vitamin A, is about to enter the food chain. The World Bank estimates that in India alone, golden rice could save as much as the equivalent of 1.5 million years of life every year. Critics of the product have tried to block it for years (so far with great success), arguing that the rice isn’t needed and won’t work. According to a report released in 2008 by the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements, an adult would have to eat nine kilograms of cooked golden rice a day to absorb the minimum daily requirement of vitamin A. That was true a decade ago, but science has moved forward. The new generation of golden rice is more efficient and nine kilograms have been reduced to 150 grams, which is not too much to digest and well within the economic reach of even the poorest people.

The earth isn’t utopia and never will be—but insisting that we can feed nine billion people with organic food is nothing more than utopian extremism, and the most distressing and pernicious kind of denialism. An organic universe sounds delightful, but it would consign millions of people in Africa and throughout much of Asia to malnutrition and death. That is a risk everyone should be able to understand.

“Even if the worst thing anyone imagines about genetically modified organisms were true, they would be worth it,” said William C. Clark, a professor of international science, public policy, and human development at Harvard University. Clark has spent much of his career trying to figure out the most environmentally benign way to feed the world. “If you look at what people are dying of in Africa and what these plants could do to produce food, we would have to be absolutely out of our mind not to use them. You could triple the risks. Make them the worst risks imaginable. Even then, it wouldn’t be a contest.”