Science And GMOs Are Not The Bad Guys Here [View all]

[roseBudd]

http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

Humans do science, and because we bring our own personalized lenses and biases to whatever we do, science will involve error. But the wonderful thing about science is that it’s a self-correcting process that over time, disciplines itself. How did we discover the real effects of tobacco or DDT that ultimately were revealed? Science made those revelations, and science provided the data everyone needed to know the truth....

But let’s come full circle here and accept that other lenses are relevant and that science doesn’t need to answer all the problems related to feeding our exploding population. What does Hoffman offer up instead? Her core solution is

"Meanwhile, again and again, simple low-cost, low-tech solutions like “kitchen gardening,” improved agricultural methods, and cover cropping have been found to give outstanding nutritional and economic results quickly to farmers. If people can grow a carrot or yam for far less expense and trouble than developing a strange looking rice (it is bright yellow – and we think getting people to eat brown rice has been hard!) – why aren’t carrots or yams the first stop for solving the problem?"

Here’s where that whole issue of “different ways of describing the world” gets tricky for Hoffman. Why? Because what she’s talking about is upending entire cultural and dietary practices–such as replacing rice for the millions of people who rely so heavily on it–for the sake of having them consume carrots and yams instead. So it seems that it’s OK to take someone’s lens on their world, their culture, and replace it entirely with something utterly and culturally different–and in some cases, alien–to them as long as you’re not using science. Although, of course, science is what tells us whether or not her suggested solutions (also based in science) will work. For example, science could probably tell us how tenable “kitchen gardens” are for people who live in resource-poor, high-population-density areas with little access to what’s needed for a kitchen garden.

She argues that orange rice will be offputting because getting people to eat brown rice is difficult. The reason for the latter is that brown rice is viewed in many parts of the world as a “poor person’s rice” and white rice as a sort of mark of social status. It is also not as readily available or inexpensive as white rice because of low demand. Neither of these factors has anything to do with the success or not of Golden Rice, the very name of which implies otherwise. (It’s actually quite a lovely color, reminiscent of saffron rice.)

In her effort to offer up a sweeping indictment of science because of a “trust issue,” Hoffman has instead offered up a top-down approach, insisting that entire cultures replace their customary diet with foods that themselves have undergone considerable human-directed engineering. That kind of short-sighted viewpoint on the world could benefit from a broader lens.