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The UK supermarket Waitrose announced that they are selling a brand new variety of strawberry, a pale white berry with red seeds dubbed the “Pineberry” so named because it tastes and smells like pineapple. The berries appear in the Daily Mail article Pineberries and cream? The new summer fruit which looks like a white strawberry… but tastes like a pineapple. Due to the timing of the press coverage at the end of March, people Anastasia and James look like they have had a fun and scientifically enlightening trip to Italy to attend the Maize Genetics Conference. Frank was also there, but appears to have parted ways with them – off on some other adventure, I imagine. When they mentioned last year at the MGC that this year’s conference would be in Italy, I salivated and dreamed of the reams of data I would pile up to earn a ticket on the lab’s dollar. But no, I did not go to this year’s conference, except in name. (We had an official Biofortified poster that Anastasia and I put together, hoping for some new phloem for these here inter-sieve-tubes.) I must say that I’m a bit jealous about missing out on all the science – conferences are great ways to cram your brain with the latest research and the directions the field is taking. The science is the same whether you are in Italy, or Illinois, Washington D.C., or even places as remote as… the capital of Wisconsin. I’m hoping to absorb half of what they retained by reading their excellent summaries. But then again, they went to Italy! I’ve never been to Europe before. Heck I haven’t been out of North America unless you count the Hawaiian Islands. So I would be forlorn about that, if I wasn’t getting on a plane this morning and flying to Thailand!
Continue reading… The first of my videos from my trip to the MOSES conference is up on Biofortifed’s new Vimeo account. This is the keynote speech that Margaret Mellon gave. ‘Mardi’ is the director of the Food & Agriculture Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and as you will see in the video, is a critic of genetic engineering in agriculture. She gave an argument comparing genetic engineering with organic agriculture, suggesting that the safety Not too long ago, a few of us participated in the twitterpated webcast put on by Croplife, BIO and CAST called Now Serving 9 Billion: Global Dialogue on Meeting Food Needs for the Next Generation. We watched a live webcast, sent in questions, and followed the conversation in twitter with the hashtag #agcast. It was a pretty fun two hours because not only were people discussing the webcast real-time, the discussion was leaking into the webcast itself in the form of comments and questions being read from it. Very cool and 2.0-ish. Alex Rinkus from Croplife has provided a link to the entire webcast on Vimeo, feel free to watch the whole thing. I will make a few several comments after the fold. |
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Organic consumers not very concerned about GE
(Hat tip to Elton Robinson at South East Farm Press)
The Consumers Union wanted to know what consumers felt about genetically engineered crops cross-pollinating with organic crops. So in early February, they conducted a poll. They called a thousand random people over the phone and asked them just two questions:
Sounds like a pretty simple exercise. However, I question the use of the term “contaminated.” This is a loaded term, and assumes one of the things that they want people to believe – that organic agriculture should not include genetic engineering. This introduces a bias into the poll. For instance, if you asked these two similar and benign questions, you would get two different results:
Of course, hybrids are allowed in organic agriculture, but I’ll bet my backyard garden harvest for this entire year that if you ask these two questions the word ‘contaminated’ will have a measurable effect and cause people to answer that they are more concerned than they would be otherwise.
Ok, that issue aside, it is good that the Consumers Union did a poll such as this, because there hasn’t been very much research investigating what people really think about genetic engineering and organic agriculture, and there’s been some talk about it in numerous channels. So how concerned are consumers about this “contamination?”
Continue reading…