Not-Monsters Adding Not-Poison to Sugar
Aaron Golas posted the following entry in his blog Synapostasy criticizing Andrew Kimbrell for speaking out against genetically modified sugar beets. Golas points out that, despite Kimbrell’s claims, GM sugar beets do not produce glyphosate, they merely are resistant to it.
C.S. Prakash
Not-Monsters Adding Not-Poison to Sugar
Synapostasy blog
May 08, 2008
Andrew Kimbrell is a goddamn bio-Luddite, one of many.
It embarrasses me that certain liberals can be so staunchly and irrationally opposed to technology, based upon paranoia over corporate interest, a weirdly conservative adherence to the simple purity of "Nature," and their own naked ignorance. One of the major victims of bio-Luddite oppression is genetically modified (GM) foods, sometimes referred to as "Frankenfoods" (but not by me).
In a column today in the Huffington Post, Kimbrell sows paranoia over a specific GM crop, the Roundup Ready sugar beet developed by Monsanto. These sugar beets are genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weed killer Roundup.
GM opponents often have a hard time explaining just what makes GM food so dangerous. Sometimes it's argued that the introduced genes themselves are somehow pollutive, despite the fact that it's all the same adenine guanine cytosine thymine, baby. Kimbrell makes a particularly poor argument here, based on glyphosate:
At the request of Monsanto, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency increased the allowable amount of glyphosate residues on sugar beetroots by a whopping 5,000% -- glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup. Sugar is extracted from the beet's root and the inevitable result is more glyphosate in our sugar. This is not good news for those who want to enjoy their chocolate morsels without the threat of ingesting toxic weed killer.
He then goes on about how seed farmers could start making seeds from Roundup Ready sugar beets so the GM crop spreads, and how sugar from GM beets gets mixed in with regular beets, and how GM beet pollen could contaminate other crops' genetics, and how there could be a huge consumer backlash, and how Big Science is putting poison in your dear mother's chocolates OMG!!!
