GMO phobia is pseudoscience

Slate published an excellent piece by Keith Kloor today comparing the American left's fear of genetically modified foods to the right's denial of climate change science. He does not pull any punches.

I’ve found that fears are stoked by prominent environmental groups, supposed food-safety watchdogs, and influential food columnists; that dodgy science is laundered by well-respected scholars and propaganda is treated credulously by legendary journalists; and that progressive media outlets, which often decry the scurrilous rhetoric that warps the climate debate, serve up a comparable agitprop when it comes to GMOs.

In short, I’ve learned that the emotionally charged, politicized discourse on GMOs is mired in the kind of fever swamps that have polluted climate science beyond recognition.

This GMO denial makes little sense if you believe that the Democratic party is the party of science. It makes perfect sense if you believe that people in general tend to ignore science the moment is threatens their world view.

Evolution science is troublesome if you're a Bible literalist. If you want to fight the creation of new taxes, it's an awful sock in the jaw to hear that climate change is a negative externality of civilization and government interference may be needed. Conservatives who deny science are resisting new ideas, but that doesn't mean liberals deserve credit for accepting science that compliments their world view. In the case of climate change, the science supports the position liberals naturally hold.

The anti-vaccine movement is perceived as a left-wing anti-science movement. It's not as neat a divide as climate change, but it is closer to evolution denial, while 60 percent of Republicans reject it, a full 29 percent of Democrats deny evolution as well. The anti-vaccine activists includes people on the left who hate pharmaceutical companies with people on the right who fear government control of their children.

What we are seeing with this movement against using science to improve food is members of the left are the ones having their views challenged by science, and instead of listening they are responding like zealots. It doesn't matter what the experts say, they already have their minds made up.

The way this anti-GMO narrative perpetuates falls neatly in line with the life cycle of social activists. People in these political circles are turning to each other to learn about science on the subject, which includes big-name organizations, pseudointellectual documentaries, and fellow activists.

As I've said before, science-denial on the left does not excuse conservatives for their science denial and talking about the issue does not give the right a pass. Scientific findings should guide our politics, but we should never let our politics determine scientific findings.
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Can food ever be sustainable?

It's been more than two years since historian James McWilliams inspired a post here. This time McWilliams has declared that not only is factory farming unsustainable, but all the small-scale locally-produced meat production niches are unsustainable too:

Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows. Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming. It requires 2 to 20 acres to raise a cow on grass. If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about this is sustainable...

He also thwarts the claim that these systems are more natural because the animal breeds farmers raise are either far removed from nature or their animal urges and life cycles require interference.

...Rotational grazing works better in theory than in practice. Consider Joel Salatin, the guru of nutrient cycling, who employs chickens to enrich his cows’ grazing lands with nutrients. His plan appears to be impressively eco-correct, until we learn that he feeds his chickens with tens of thousands of pounds a year of imported corn and soy feed. This common practice is an economic necessity. Still, if a farmer isn’t growing his own feed, the nutrients going into the soil have been purloined from another, most likely industrial, farm, thereby undermining the benefits of nutrient cycling.

Still, I disagree with his thesis. He takes the position that our current "factory farming" system is unsustainable and the small-scale alternatives are unsustainable, therefore eating meat and animal products is unsustainable.

By that logic, he might as well say that food production can never be sustainable.

The critics of "factory farming" have a history of exaggerations, but suppose they are accurate and we shouldn't produce food on a large scale the way we do now. That's simple enough to fix; we follow agricultural economist William A. Masters suggestion and revamp large-scale food production.

There's nothing preventing us from producing an industrial system for food production that deals with the legitimate problems raised by critics, like run-off and animal welfare. If sustainability is a legitimate hurdle to overcome, then we have to make smart changes. Inefficient, wasteful and expensive small farms are not the solution.
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