Updated below, Jan. 4, 4:57 p.m. |
Six months ago, Nathanael Johnson, the author of "All Natural" and food blogger for Grist, an unabashedly liberal website, took on the task of digging deep on the risks and rewards of genetic modified organisms in agriculture. Grist summarized the results this way:
Panic-Free GMOs. It's easy to get information about genetically modified food. There are the dubious anti-GM horror stories that recirculate through social networks. On the other side, there's the dismissive sighing, eye-rolling, and hand patting of pro-GM partisans. But if you just want a level-headed assessment of the evidence in plain English, that's in pretty short supply. Fortunately, you've found the trove.
And Johnson indeed produced a rich series of reports, which he summarized to end the year in a series of convenient linked bullet points:
It's prize-worthy journalism by a trusted guide for an important audience in the debate over how to feed 9 billion people around 2050 — or your own family tonight. And his conclusion is, with a small asterisk, that GMOs are not only safe (with a very small asterisk), but are reducing pesticide dangers (if not amounts of herbicide) and not necessarily hampering farmers' freedoms. Please click the links above to get the full depth and scope.
The latest news in this arena came just yesterday, when General Mills announced that it has added this label to its plain-Jane Cheerios cereal: "not made with genetically modified ingredients" — a task made easy because there are no genetically modified variants of the prime ingredient, oats. The company's blog post stressed that this is about consumer interest, not safety.
But will Johnson's reporting matter to entrenched foes of this technology?
Keith Kloor, who has dived deep on these questions in Slate and on his main blog at Discover, asked very important questions yesterday about the ramifications of Grist's great coverage, including this one:
What I wonder, though, is if [Johnson's] sober exploration of GMOs has made a difference with progressives and environmentalists (Grist's audience). Have these readers–many who are predisposed to believe that GMO = Frankenfoods–been moved to rethink their own assumptions and biases? Perhaps more importantly, has Johnson's dilligent work influenced anti-GMO thought leaders? Yes, I'm looking at you, Michael Pollan.
It helps that Johnson is a member of good standing in the same tribe as Pollan and Grist readers. That makes him trustworthy. Still, anyone familiar with the psychology of risk perception on the GMO issue knows that even a credible messenger bearing facts will make only so much headway.
He also cited a New Yorker piece on "The Psychology of Distrusting GMOs" that included this important context:
Psychologists have long observed that there is a continuum in what we perceive as natural or unnatural. As the psychologist Robert Sternberg wrote in 1982, the natural is what we find more familiar, while what we consider unnatural tends to be more novel—perceptually and experientially unfamiliar—and complex, meaning that more cognitive effort is required to understand it. The natural is seen as inherently positive; the unnatural is not. And anything that involves human manipulation is considered highly unnatural—like, say, G.M.O.s, even though genetically modified food already lines the shelves at grocery stores.
One can only hope that more folks follow Kloor's advice and try to get comfortable with the facts about their feelings on technology and food instead of just continuing to debate the science from positions shaped by their feelings.
There's a broader point to ponder here. The interplay of Johnson's reporting and that of other writers, including Kloor, is more illuminating than any single voice.
That, to me, is evidence of the power of collective knowledge-building. I won't use the term "collective intelligence" because intelligence is only one factor — and often not the dominant factor – shaping how we consider, embrace or reject information on sources of risk. The word knowledge feels better, to me.
This line of writing on food and genetics also reinforces the value of blogs and Twitter, which facilitate interlaced inquiry and discourse in a way that static, standalone pieces can't.
Postscript, Jan. 4 5 p.m.| I also urge you to ready Amy Harmon's superb feature on a Hawaiian legislator's lonely search for reality in the face of a campaign to ban genetically modified crops in the state.
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