Food Fight

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Are GMOs really that bad?  A prominent environmental journalist takes a fresh look at what they actually mean for our food system and for us.

In the past two decades, GMOs have come to dominate the American diet. Advocates hail them as the future of food, an enhanced method of crop breeding that can help feed an ever-increasing global population and adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Critics, meanwhile, call for their banishment, insisting GMOs were designed by overeager scientists and greedy corporations to bolster an industrial food system that forces us to rely on cheap, unhealthy, processed food so they can turn an easy profit. In response, health-conscious brands such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods have started boasting that they are “GMO-free,” and companies like Monsanto have become villains in the eyes of average consumers.

Where can we turn for the truth? Are GMOs an astounding scientific breakthrough destined to end world hunger? Or are they simply a way for giant companies to control a problematic food system?

Environmental writer McKay Jenkins traveled across the country to answer these questions and discovered that the GMO controversy is more complicated than meets the eye. He interviewed dozens of people on all sides of the debate—scientists hoping to engineer new crops that could provide nutrients to people in the developing world, Hawaiian papaya farmers who credit GMOs with saving their livelihoods, and local farmers in Maryland who are redefining what it means to be “sustainable.” The result is a comprehensive, nuanced examination of the state of our food system and a much-needed guide for consumers to help them make more informed choices about what to eat for their next meal. ”Jenkins provides excellent context and analysis for a question we will grapple with for years to come.”
—Baltimore Magazine

“Impressive research into a complex situation presented in a highly readable form.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Highlighting the pros and cons of this contentious topic, Jenkins gives conscientious readers plenty to chew on.”
—Publishers Weekly

“McKay Jenkins has done the impossible.  He has produced a remarkably fair and balanced account of the contentious role of GMOs in the U.S. food supply, calling the shots as he sees them.  Pro- and anti-GMO proponents will find plenty to argue with, but anyone wanting to understand what the fights are really about and why they matter will find this book a big help.”
—Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety
 
“With crystalline writing and deep, detailed reporting, McKay Jenkins has given the world a view of our food supply—the role of GMO science to transform all we eat and how farmers produce it, and the work of smart people harnessing old traditions to bring good local food to the table.  Food Fight shows the abundance of danger and hope in the food we eat and the ways it comes to be.”
—Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone and The Wild Trees
 
“An insightful and unbiased deep dive into the complex issues that make up the ongoing GMO debate. Many books have been written about the rise of crop biotechnology, but Food Fight gives us a fresh look into both the risks and rewards of this dramatic reshaping of our industrial food system, and illuminates why – now more than ever – it is critical that we care.”
—Carey Gillam, investigative journalist formerly of Reuters, and author of a forthcoming book on the Roundup pesticide controversy. 
 
“McKay Jenkins digs beneath the surface of the GMO debate to uncover its root: a three-decade struggle over the future of food — and society as a whole.”
—Liz Carlisle, PhD, author of Lentil Underground
 
“In Food Fight, McKay Jenkins exposes the connection between GMO’s and the surging use of herbicides that compromise healthy soil. The only way to heal our water world is to make dirt live.  Living soil is a sponge and nature’s detox clinic for agricultural chemicals that otherwise run into rivers and create the ocean’s dead zones. After a long hard look at the alternatives, Jenkins makes the case that local food production is needed to combat our deteriorating quality of life—a must read for the conscious consumer.”
—Charles Moore, author of Plastic OceanMcKay Jenkins is the author of seven books, including ContamiNation, The Last Ridge, and Bloody Falls of the Coppermine. The Cornelius Tilghman Professor of English, journalism, and environmental humanities at the University of Delaware, Jenkins lives with his wife and two children in Baltimore.The road we have traveled to our current state of eating is actually a very long, interconnected highway. After World War II, American national security strategists decided that protecting the homeland required building a network of broad interstates that mirrored the German Autobahn. This monumental road-building project—now close to 47,000 miles long—was initially conceived as a way to efficiently move troops and military machinery, but it has also had dramatic peacetime consequences for the American landscape, and for the American diet.
 
Suddenly, big, safe interstates—and the millions of miles of ring roads, state roads, and town roads they encouraged—allowed people to live farther and farther from the cities where they worked. People moved out of cities in droves, looking for new places to live. Land prices outside cities skyrocketed, and small farmers occupying that land had a hard time resisting when real estate developers came to call.
 
Suburban development hit small American farms like a virus. In the 1950s alone, some 10 million people left family farms. Chances are, your grandparents (or even your parents) can tell you stories about all those farms in your area that over the last few decades have been turned into subdivisions and shopping malls. In Maryland, where I live, suburban development has replaced 900,000 acres of farmland (and 500,000 acres of forest) in just the last forty years.
 
All these new roads, and the suburbs and industries to which they gave birth, caused a second tectonic shift in American culture: in the way we came to eat. Car-friendly fast-food chains like Mc-Donald’s and Carl’s Jr. and Burger King started popping up along the new highways like weeds. By the early 1960s, Kentucky Fried Chicken was the largest restaurant chain in the United States.
 
These restaurants did not cook, exactly; what they did was heat up highly processed, prepackaged foods that tasted exactly the same, whether you were in Dallas or Des Moines. The ingredients didn’t need to be fresh, they needed to be uniform, and storable, and—most important, given skyrocketing demand—they needed to be provided in vast quantities.
 
Fast-food joints didn’t need local asparagus from New Jersey or collard greens from Georgia or one-of-a-kind apples grown in small orchards in New York. They needed commodity grains to sweeten their sodas, fry their fries, and feed the animals that could be turned into hamburgers and hot dogs and fried chicken. What these restaurants needed was corn, and wheat, and soybeans. And lots of them.
 
As small family farms near population centers went bankrupt or sold their land to developers, and as the American diet started demanding processed meals, food production flowed like beads of mercury to the control of larger and larger industrial farm operations in the Midwest. As food production became centralized, companies that controlled the grains, chemicals, and processing factories became bigger and much more politically powerful. Thanks to intensive lobbying, tens of billions of dollars in federal farm subsidies began flowing to giant agribusinesses that were driving the development of the industrial food system. As early as the 1970s, farmers around the country were being told (in the words of President Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary Rusty Butz) to “get big or get out.”
 
Most farmers got out. A little over a hundred years ago, there were 38 million people living in the United States, and 50 percent of them worked on a farm. Today, we have 300 million people. How many work on farms? Two percent.
 
Today, if you drive across the grain belt—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas—you will spend many, many hours crossing an ocean of just three crops: corn, wheat, and soybeans. They are being grown by farmers you will likely never meet, processed in factories you will likely never see, into packaged foods containing ingredients that look nothing like the crops from which they were made. You won’t see it, but your soda will be sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, which replaced sugar in the 1980s. Your fries will be dunked in boiling soybean oil. And your burgers and nuggets and sliced turkey breast will all be processed from animals fed corn or soybeans, or both.
 
What you most likely won’t see, out along on the great American road system, are regional food specialties, or the mom-and-pop diners and restaurants that used to serve them. New England clam chowder, New Orleans gumbo, Maryland crab bisque: all these foods require local ingredients, which (by definition) giant farms in Iowa or Kansas are unable to provide. Replacing them has been the food that these farms can provide: Fast food. Processed food. Soda. Pizza. Chicken nuggets. Cheap hamburgers. A vast culinary sameness, all essentially built out of two or three crops, controlled by a small handful of companies. All available twenty-four hours a day in any restaurant, dining hall, or gas station in the country.

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