When Attacks Come from our Purported Friends
The only complaint that can be made about organic food is that it cannot be produced at prices and quantities such that it can be affordable for a world population soon to hit 10 billion people. Yet people don’t have an issue with those who only eat organic, as they are entitled to their own beliefs, even if those beliefs, at least as they apply to GMOs, are scientifically unfounded.
We’re now doing in a laboratory (quickly) what we’ve been doing in our fields (slowly) for the last 10,000 years. In the absence of all “genetic engineering,” our apples today would look like ping pong balls and would taste like kimchi; that’s really all you need to know about GMOs in the human diet.
But the anti-GMO people have gone full-on military, e.g., with their denunciation of Impossible Foods for its “deceptive” advertisement, suggesting that heme, the protein from which it’s made, is “natural.” For more than a billion years, heme has been one of the most ubiquitous and important molecules in nature. Heme is an important part of every cell in every animal and plant.
OK, I suppose someone could order us to “define ‘natural'” and we could go on a long and fruitless argument with all forms of mickey-mouse rhetorical devices.
Or, how about this? We could simply recognize that there is literally nothing we could possibly learn about the ill-effects of heme that would make it remotely close to the damage we’re inflicting on ourselves and our planet with our raising of cows, pigs, etc.
Do you know that, as I write this, there are well-meaning people all over the world, most abundant in the U.S., who are rabidly anti-nuclear? Do they know anything whatsoever about how nuclear energy works? Are they aware that nuclear is by far the safest energy resource available for humankind at this moment? Have they honestly looked at the math associated with mitigating climate disruption in the absence of nuclear? Of course not.
Our should-be friends can be our own worst enemies.
Craig,
It’s a clever, but dishonest, debating tactic to attach a dubious issue to an irrelevant, but less dubious proposition.
The issue most critics have with “Impossible Burger”, has little to do with the legitimacy of ‘heme’ production
The ingredient you call “heme”, actually constitutes only 2% of the Impossible Burger.
In itself, chemically produced “heme’ is probably fairly harmless being simply a product created in a laboratory by technicians who take genes that code soy leghemoglobin protein and insert them into a species of mold called Pichia pastoris.
The modified yeast is then fed sugar and minerals to grow, replicate and manufacture “heme”
“Heme” is what adds flavour and a blood-like appearance to the burger.
It’s what the other 98% of the ingredients in an “Impossible Burger”, that should be of greater concern.
Y’know, stuff like yeast extract, salt, soy protein isolate, konjac gum, xanthan gum and a long list of other ingredients with side effect links ranging from allergies to increased cancer risk, insomnia, long term brain cell damage.
Seems a lot of risk, just for a laboratory engineered, factory produced, chemically engineered, “Natural” product.