OPINION: Science says GMOs are safe. Their cultural impact is less studied

Editor's note: All opinions, columns and letters reflect the views of the individual writer and not necessarily those of the IDS or its staffers.   

Change has two speeds: fast and too fast.  

When genetically modified foods arrived on grocery shelves 30 years ago, many people felt the future arrived too fast.  

Over the last few years, that feeling has shifted. Farming unions have joined Nobel laureates and hundreds of scientific institutions worldwide to back tinkering with plants and animals’ genetic makeups. These groups argue GMOs are safe to consume. To their point, more than 3,000 studies show they are.   

Public opinion is slowly catching up with the industrial-scientific consensus. Those once-fearsome three letters are becoming much less scary to many. In an Indiana Daily Student column published Thursday, a colleague pointed out that, after all, GMOs simply take the next step forward in a long history of human manipulation of food. 

Indeed, many plate fillers that pass as Eden-plucked — watermelon, broccoli, corn, beef, chicken — actually result from thousands of years of careful breeding. This breeding, dubbed artificial selection, dates as far back as human civilization. Hoping for specific outcomes from random inputs, our ancestors turned roots, fruits and stems into tastier, juicier, higher-calorie super-versions of their once-meager, bland selves. Today, directly engineering food excludes chance from this process. 

Artificially altering genomes may be a more efficient method of achieving humans’ longstanding goal of churning out more desirable food. But proceed with caution. GMOs change our foods too fast. An unprecedented kind of fast. Too fast for nature to continue to surprise us. 

Take broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage, the products of selectively breeding wild mustard plants. As our ancestors selected plants for traits they favored over time, they did not wield total control over the way these attributes developed. This slowly unfolding process allowed nature to retain an element of surprise. Sometimes, a broccolo — the singular form of broccoli — sprouted; sometimes a cauliflower; sometimes a cabbage. The slowness of the process, combined with the role granted to nature to play, meant anything could emerge. Because anything could emerge, what did was nature’s gift. 

Now consider a world in which humans thousands of years ago directly engineered wild mustard plants. Would nature have granted us the diversity of vegetables we enjoy today? More likely, humans would have produced one species: a bigger, more calorie-packed mustard plant. No broccoli. No cauliflower. No cabbage. 

Efficient is not always better. Ballantine Hall is efficient, but the building is a big concrete box. It simply holds bodies inside of classes. Dunn’s Woods, on the other hand, is not efficient; its paths wind around, drawing out your arrival time. However, in its tranquil, unpredictable natural beauty, it is the greater gift to campus. 

It is true that GMOs offer great benefits. Through direct genetic engineering of crops, humans can achieve more nutritious, bountiful harvests. In this way, genetic editing technology offers a potential solution to world hunger. With the same quantity of plants using the same space, more people could be fed — and fed more fully. And we could arrive at this solution more quickly through genetic modification than selective breeding. Alternatively, we could produce life-saving medicines more cheaply through engineering bacteria to, say, manufacture insulin.  

At the same time, GMOs represent another way, besides artificial intelligence and highways, humans will tailor the world to our desires so nature will surprise us less. The likely result is a technology-caused freeze state, an end of culinary and cultural history. GM foods could advance so rapidly they displace local traditions and varieties with no time to prepare.