There's a Lot You Don't Know About What's in Your Food

Nearly three quarters of all processed foods contain genetically engineered ingredients, but you'd never know it by reading the back of your kid's cereal box or that pint of ice cream you've been craving. Rather than being relegated to its own supermarket section, this food sits unlabeled on grocery store shelves, allowing a handful of transnational biotech companies to profit handsomely as consumers shop blindly.

In his new book, Your Right to Know: Genetic Engineering and the Secret Changes in Your Food, Andrew Kimbrell explores the risks of this technology and what genetic engineering means to our health, the environment and the future of agriculture.

Although Kimbrell's book aims primarily to educate, it is also an easy-to-use activist guide on how to identify -- and avoid -- genetically engineered foods.

Andrew Kimbrell is founder and executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Center for Food Safety and the International Center for Technology Assessment. As an author, lawyer, and activist for more than 20 years, Kimbrell has been at the forefront of legal and grassroots efforts to protect the environment and promote sustainable agricultural production methods. His written work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Harper's. He has testified at numerous congressional and regulatory hearings, and in 1994, Utne Reader named Kimbrell as one of the world's leading 100 visionaries.

AlterNet talked with Kimbrell via telephone.

Vanja Petrovic: How did you become interested in genetically engineered food?

Andrew Kimbrell: I became very interested in genetic engineering in general; it stemmed from my early work in appropriate technology. There was an E.F. Schumacher book, Small is Beautiful -- great book, everyone should read it. What Schumacher was saying is that we're going to have to devolve our technologies and change our economics to fit nature, otherwise we're going to destroy ourselves. And I thought that was inevitable and became part of that. And it wasn't until genetic engineering that I realized that some people were saying, "Listen, let's not change our technology or our economic system to fit nature, let's change nature -- including human nature -- so that it fits our technology and our economic system."

So, for example what we have with genetic engineering, if you spray herbicide on crops, it kills them, it kills everything green, it doesn't just kill the weeds, it kills the crops. So, the idea would be, as weeds become resistant to herbicides, to stop using them, and find other ways of weed and pest control. But that didn't fit the needs of ... the chemical companies. That would mean less of their product. So, instead of changing their technology and economics to fit nature, they said "let's change plants so they can withstand huge amounts of our chemicals" -- herbicides -- and four out of every five acres of genetically engineered plants in this country and in the world are planted solely because they can tolerate these herbicides.

Petrovic: Why did you choose to write this book now?

Kimbrell: Actually, I didn't choose to write this book right now. I wish I could have stopped my fingers three years ago.

But, there are a number of reasons I wrote this book. One, the industry has been very powerful in the media. It has been able to influence the traditional media. So, a huge number of Americans believe that genetically engineered food is feeding the world, that it's increasing nutrition, that it's making better flavored food, is creating drought resistant crops, it's curing kids in Africa. This is complete science fiction. ... It's a marginal technology at best -- it is not curing anything, it is not feeding anything.

As a matter of fact, as we've seen in corn and soy, we have seen actual yield decreases because of genetic engineering. Not an increase, no more vitamins. We've seen, actually, FDA studies that show that it actually decreases vitamin content in food. So, why is it popular? Why do farmers use it? Because it's very convenient. You don't have to spot spray your herbicide just on the weed, you can, for the first time, aerial spray your herbicides over your entire crop and it won't kill your crop, it'll just kill the weeds. Although, those weeds are becoming more and more resistant and now we're having to use more and more.