This has got to be the craziest, most contemptible, and potentially planet-changing decision ever made by a government bureaucracy: Approving a new genetically modified corn that digest itself to help our legislatively mandated addiction to ethanol.
From Andrew Pollack of the New York Times:
A type of corn that is genetically engineered to make it easier to convert into ethanol was approved for commercial growing by the Department of Agriculture.
The decision, announced Friday, came in the face of objections from corn millers and others in the food industry, who warned that if the industrial corn cross-pollinated with or were mixed with corn used for food, it could lead to crumbly corn chips, soggy cereal, loaves of bread with soupy centers and corn dogs with inadequate coatings.
“If this corn is comingled with other corn, it will have significant adverse impacts on food product quality and performance,” the North American Millers’ Association said in a statement on Friday.
The corn, developed by Syngenta, contains a microbial gene that causes it to produce an enzyme that breaks down corn starch into sugar, the first step toward making ethanol. Ethanol manufacturers now buy this enzyme, called alpha amylase, in liquid form and add it to the corn at the start of their production process.
The company says it’s all quite wonderful, and very green, don’t ya know?
By turning corn into its own preproduction plant [pun intended], you won’t have to use as much water, fossil fuel energy, and chemicals [the plant supplying them instead].
And don’t worry about the relevant gene escaping into the environment, we’re assured. Those crafty Swiss Syngenta folk will make sure that doesn’t happen.
To which we can only call Bullshit! As we’ve noted before, UC Berkeley’s Ignacio Chapela proved early on that genes Monsanto engineered into corn had escaped and contaminated the seedstock in the Mexican heartland where farmers over thousands of years had transformed a wild grass called teosinte into what would become modern maize.
The mechanism of that gene transfer are now being revealed by other scientists, so we can safely say that it’s a near certainty that the genes in Syngenta’s new Enogen brand corn will soon find their way into other, native plant species.
Self decomposing plants! Can you imagine a more powerful potential source of greenhouse gases?
So how did it get approved? Again from the Times:
The Agriculture Department said the corn met the statutory requirements for approval, in that it was not a pest that would harm plants. The Food and Drug Administration had previously found the corn safe to eat.
Here’s the take from one scientist, Tad Patzek [and if you haven’t seen his video, please watch]:
I just read that madmen inside a federal government agency are trying to usher a new era of self-decomposing food supply in the U.S. Can you imagine? Your cereal, bread, corn flakes, anything, will be self-digesting and liquefying on your table if you wait a little, regardless of how well you keep it? These madmen are attempting to introduce the U.S. public to a practical lesson in enzymatic chemistry: just 1 genetically modified corn grain with the alpha-amylase enzyme in it per 10,000 other grains will make corn flour and its products go soft and unappetizing. That’s 1/100 of 1%! One could hardly think up a better allegory for the intellectual rot and moral decay blowing from Washington.
What happens when these self-rotting plants start cross-breeding with normal corn? Corn pollen can travel for miles and cross-pollinate other corn plants. And this madness is unleashed on all of us to make it easier to produce something that would never exist if we were not paying for it with our hard-earned tax dollars to begin with. This something is large-scale production of ethanol from corn.
I am speechless. I hope that we will finally start to demonstrate our feelings and never, ever elect anyone, who panders to an Iowa caucus. I mean anyone!
And bear in mind that this is all to feed our passion for the automobile, and being carried out at the very moment the world stands poised on the brink of widespread revolution sparked by higher food prices!
eats shoots 'n leaves 