Shibboleths or Grains of Truth?

From William Hill giving me absurd odds on political and cultural events to updates from Glasgow Rangers' administrators or invitations to Shoreditch art installations and City investment breakfasts, the Croppy's inbox can be quite a treasure trove. 

Change.org is one of the many organisations that send emails and updates to The Rusty Wire Service every day. For those of you who’ve not heard of them, Change.org is (in their own words) “a social action platform that empowers anyone, anywhere to start, join, and win campaigns for social change.” 

Formed in 2006 by two former classmates from Stanford University Ben Rattray and Mark Dimas, they  have offices in San Francisco and Washington DC, with organisers around the world. 

This morning, I was being asked to sign a petition against sweet stem broccoli grown from trademarked Monsanto seeds being sold in Sainsbury’s and Waitrose; the word ‘Shibboleth’ just popped into my head unbidden. Not in a condemnatory, judgmental or even evaluative way mind you; just unbidden, the sound of it rolling around my head like a half-remembered melody  as I looked into the ideological schism that opened up around this particular strain of delicious-sounding and clearly curative Calabrian cabbage. (A shibboleth is a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important. The term originates from the Hebrew word "shibólet" (שִׁבֹּלֶת); the part of a plant containing grains, such as an ear of corn or a stalk of grain. ) 


The petition in question was launched by Ciaran, “a father of two from Portsmouth who, after seeing a friend post a photo of the Bellaverde Broccoli on their Facebook page, was shocked that well-respected British supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s and Waitrose were selling Monsanto products under their own brands.”   


Ciaran is “concerned that by stocking a flagship Monsanto product our supermarkets are giving Monsanto the foothold they need to infiltrate the UK food market with other GMO products.”  

Ciaran’s own petition literature is nevertheless forced to acknowledge that the offending vegetable “isn’t a genetically modified (GMO) product”. He wastes no time however reminding us that it “is ‘conventionally-bred’ by the biotech company that co-created Agent Orange and just last year won Natural Society’s award for ‘Worst Company in the World’”.

Often, the debates that run through the comments sections of online news coverage on issues like this can be just as enlightening as the reportage itself. In The Grocer for example, they went with this headline on 09 February: ‘Waitrose hit by Facebook fury over broccoli link to biotech giant’.

One poster had this to say: “There is zero scientific evidence that GM food is harmful. Zero. The Non-GM folks (The Organic Food Industry) keep looking for something (anything) to support their cause and since there is none, they continue to use boogieman scare tactics to keep folks buying over priced Non-GM food.”

So I got to thinking about that particular point of view. Humans have altered the genomes of species for thousands of years through artificial selection and more recently through mutagenesis. Genetic engineering as the direct manipulation of DNA by humans outside breeding and mutations has only existed since the 1970s.

From wheat and barley to cats and dogs, we’ve always used whatever tools came to hand to modify and transform the organic world around us. The switch from hunter-gatherer society to farming could only have happened through 'GM' foods. What after all is wheat if not an over-bred or genetically modified grass? Agriculture and urban life are based on this fundamental truth.

That being the case; I may have very valid emotional and political misgivings about a company like Monsanto. The charged terminology of phrases like ‘Franken-foods’ is certainly designed to  unsettle but in the end, one must ask oneself just how rational these concerns are.

As far as I can ascertain (and I’d never rule out being wrong), the modification of a species, whether through artificial selection, mutagenesis or by direct DNA manipulation is ultimately the same in philosophical terms. The objective in all cases is the efficient modification of a plant or animal. The methodology used to arrive at this conclusion frankly matters little in most cases.

Or to take a less high-falutin’ approach; there’s more than one way to skin a cat. If you want to know where the decision-making process might have had an ethical dimension, you’ve got to go back and ask why you wanted to skin the cat in the first place; debating which way it’s executed is just so ex post facto. 

There are of course legion other, more scientifically compelling arguments against the propagation of GM crops. The gist of one; posed by another news-site comment contributor is certainly awkward: “What will happen if we are all using Monsanto seeds and they are found to be non resistant to a strain of bacteria?”

But many of these arguments could also be levelled (absurdly, if not unreasonably) against any number of crop and animal husbandry innovations since the dawn of human civilisation so it would probably be disingenuous to apply them solely to the GM situation without being aware of that truth.

The management of how we feed the planet and act as custodians to our environment are not necessarily competing interests. But following an unthinking line, whether it’s left-wing or free-market orthodoxy is always dangerous.

As for the petition? Sign it, don’t sign it, whatever. Just think about it one way or the other.