Genetically Modified Tomatoes: The Old-Fashioned Way
Concerned European shoppers have shunned genetically modified foods, but it’s useful to remember that growers have always fiddled with the genetic makeup of plants and animals, selecting for new traits and eventually creating new subspecies or species.
How does the UK’s new Healthy Living tomato, a lycopene-rich variety bred from other tomatoes, differ from a tomato spliced with fish genes that allow the fruit to survive in colder weather? Of course one takes genes from close relatives while the other takes genes from a different phylum. But in the end, DNA is DNA and it gets translated into proteins the same way.
This is a fundamental question to the GM debate: Why do we as a culture react viscerally to “artificial” genetic modification and not to the techniques that farmers have used for millennia? How long does a practice need to exist before it becomes traditional?
I don’t! And not only that, I don’t buy that any natural thing is inherently worse (or even more likely to be worse) than a natural thing.
It would be interesting to understand the source of the idea that what is natural, or made my nature, is good, whereas what is affected or created by man is bad.
It’s because of man’s tinkering that we have such good food. Many foods can’t even reproduce without the help of man anymore, yet they are bigger and have more nutrients and their nutrients are more easily absorbed by the body. Thank goodness for genetic modification in all its forms, I say.