by Karl Haro von Mogel on 31 October 2009 During the Changemakers contest, several parallels came up between the people who have extreme anti-genetic engineering views, and several other flavors of antiscience. Comments on PZ Myers’ blog compared the often religious-like responses of certain groups to the technology, and indeed the ludicrous reaction of GM Watch in particular, to creationist tactics against evolutionary biology. On the other hand, on Orac’s medical blog, he made the comparison between those groups and the Alternative Medicine crowd, including and especially the Anti-vaccination groups. It is fascinating to note that politically, the creationist version of antiscience is conservative, and the anti-vax version is generally liberal. But they share a commonality in that science is rejected as the best means of obtaining knowledge, and something else, be it political or religious ideology takes its place and dictates the facts.
I thought it would be a good idea to write a post detailing several of them, and then Steve Savage at Sustainablog went and did it for me. Check out The Bizarre, Modern Coalition of Anti-Science Forces. He didn’t cover every kind, but he delves into several of them including anti-GE forces, anti-global warming activities, and the antiscience-of-the-year, it seems, Anti-vaccination. In the comments section a reader confirms exactly what he is talking about.
In the blog discussions that ensued while the voting went on, a few fights broke out over one issue or another, but a very strong sentiment was expressed by several people – they had some reservations about one aspect of genetic engineering or another, and felt that the accusations of ‘antiscience’ were unfairly being applied to them. Perhaps there was a bit of miscommunication going on.
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by Anastasia B on 28 October 2009 The question of whether it is possible to create a sustainable production agriculture system has been passed around twitter (see #profood) quite a bit, which really got me thinking. Coincidentally, I also had to write a midterm essay in Foundations of Sustainable Agriculture, and one of the options for essays actually asked us to defend whether or not it was possible to have sustinability in a production system. I’ve made an effort to define both sustainability and productionism in thier strictest sense and then attempted to find one way that the ideals have been combined in the past and another way that they could be combined in the future. The writing style was a bit uncomfortable to me, I’m used to the conversational style of blog posts or the strict style required in scientific writing, but here I’m talking about philosophy, economics, and policy. I hope you’ll put up with my stilted style and let me know what you think!
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by Frank N. Foode on 28 October 2009 Hi everyone, Frank N. Foode here. I have just received word that the Ashoka Changemakers GMO Risk or Rescue contest has been closed. No more votes will be collected. It has been an exciting week for all of us, our supporters, and also our competitors. During the last few days of the final voting week, we gathered an enormous number of votes, and I want to thank all the bloggers out there who supported us by linking to our entry and asking their readers to vote for us.
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 28 October 2009 Overnight, Biofortified gained a few more votes, strolling up to 824 votes so far. Our competitor, the Non-GMO Project has 346 votes, and has been gaining faster than we have in the last day. And I just discovered last night that a stealth competitor that no one noticed has rapidly gained votes. On Monday it was at 2 votes, last night when I saw it it was at 218 votes. Right now it has passed the Non-GMO Project and is sporting 368 total votes!
This entry is the Orwellian-named Campaign for Healthier Eating in America, an initiative started by dance instructor and author Jeffrey Smith. Orwellian? Oh yes, it isn’t about getting people to eat more vegetables and cut down on saturated fat – it is about getting people to eat blue corn instead of yellow corn to avoid GE crops. In fact, on their website, Smith explains how manufacturers can advertise in his ‘shopping guide,’ for a nominal fee of course. What does the money go to?
Interestingly, Smith is on the Communications Committee of the Non-GMO Project.
Anyway, for my final reason why I think Biofortified deserves your vote, I will briefly discuss the grant that comes with the grand prize. When we entered, there was no such grant being awarded. Consequently after it was added, we have thought about what we would want to do with that money. Here are some of the ideas that we have come up with.
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 28 October 2009 Today, Biofortified gained another 120 votes in the Ashoka Changemakers contest, coming in at 812 at the time of this writing. It would be great if in the last day of voting, if we could top 1,000. To help to that end, I will present the fourth reason why I think we deserve a little of your time: Michael Pollan.
When I first heard about the contest, the grand prize was a ‘social media training’ session and a conversation with Michael Pollan. As I noted on my personal blog, I have been waiting to do an interview with him for almost three years. Back in 2006, I participated in a panel discussion (available here on UCTV) with him and others on Food, Farming, and Genetics, as part of the Community Book Project at UC Davis, which focused on The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pam Ronald was also the moderator of the discussion. Our group conversation left more questions than answer in my head, so I asked him if I could interview him sometime on my radio show and he agreed. A combination of timidity, lack of radio show after moving to Madison for grad school, and the sheer amount of demand on Pollan’s time, it hasn’t yet happened.
In the interim, more questions have piled up. Not just about genetics, but even about the philosophy of science, the future of agriculture, and whether he thinks that health food stores like Whole Foods have the highest concentration of contradictory food philosophies or if he didn’t notice the food supplement aisles. I could write several pages of questions, always thinking that I will have to jettison most of them to make for a radio/podcast interview someday that will will have continuity and make sense. Over time, questions related to The Omnivore’s Dilemma slid away to be replaced by questions related to In Defense of Food. A few questions about plant genetics held steady in the heirarchy of importance.
I initially entered the contest so that I could win the conversation with him and see if he wouldn’t mind adding a microphone to it as a podcast interview. I assumed that it would be a conversation over the phone as well. The other part of the prize, the social media training, didn’t have much appeal considering I’ve been doing social media for years! You could pretty much say I entered us in the changemakers contest to talk to Pollan. But then after I entered, the contest deadline was extended and a $1,500 grant was added to the grand prize. This was going to change the dynamics of the contest dramatically, and it did.
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About Biofortified Biofortified's volunteer authors are devoted to providing factual information and fostering discussion about agriculture, especially plant genetics and genetic engineering. The site is written by grad students, professors, and guest experts. Meet our authors on the Authors page.
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