FRANKENFOODS

Those ever-present nihilistic radicals who love to and perhaps live to whip up social controversy have found another cause celebre to frighten consumers around the developed world. And they have tagged it with a very clever, angst-producing word – “frankenfood,” that is, consumables that contain genetically altered plants and/or animals. The idea that is conveyed by this moniker is that one who eats any such food will be ingesting nutrients that are taboo (e.g., human genes in meat) or that have never before existed in nature (e.g., constructed, insect-resisting genes in wheat) … and therefore, may poison such consumers with unimagined and draconian consequences, ala Frankenstein.

I suppose that it is conceivable that the addition of certain genes might cause plants or animals to produce proteins that are toxic or even carcinogenic. However, it seems that such dangers would be easily caught in animal testing long before such products enter the human food-chain. Certainly, toxicity would be quickly and easily recognized. Carcinogenic characteristics might be more problematic. But I take a certain solace from the fact that digestive juices are quite powerful and, except for well-known toxic chemicals, would quickly break down most foreign organic agents until they would behave very much like that which would emerge from digesting known benign organic agents.

Besides, don’t we put heart valves from pigs in humans, vaccinate ourselves with sera that have been incubated in chicken eggs or even Rhesus monkeys, and ingest a wide variety of exotic holistic herbs proscribed by the equivalent of witch doctors? (Watch some of those voodoo health claims made on late night cable TV.) I, myself, would prefer eating corn flakes that had been made from grain that had been genetically altered to resist rodents or insect infestations … rather than have microscopic parts of these vermin mixed in with my milk and bananas.