[LINK] May have to eat my words ...

[Jim Birch]

The idea of producing a GM food that is "non-toxic" is crazy.  Every plant
we eat contains known toxins.  Plants expend a significant proportion of
their physiological resources producing toxins, a.k.a. secondary
metabolites, and storing them in their cells.  The purpose of this activity
is to prevent grazing, primarily by insects, and also by higher animals.
An arms race ensues, insects evolve the ability to handle the toxins of a
particular plant species so the plants develop new toxins.  I'm somewhat
leery of people who talk about insecticides in food because plants are
loaded with them, naturally.  A biochemist friend once told me that he
thought he could isolate a very nasty or lethal dose of something out of
20kg of almost any standard food.

Despite having an internal biochemistry that is reasonably similar to an
insect we have a powerful defence system that insects don't have, a liver.
The food we digest drains through the liver and most of the toxins in our
food are neutralised and eliminated.  The liver has generalised rather than
specific defences so can cope with new and unknown toxins but it isn't
perfect; a proportion of any toxin will leak through, some toxins are toxic
to the liver itself, and some plants are so toxic that they can kill us
despite being scrubbed.  Communities that rely on gathering seasonal plants
have a vast lore of plant toxicity.  For example, Australian aborigines
categorise some plants as "food for starvation times only.'

Living on a diet of farmed food we find that high toxicity foods aren't
farmed and varieties have been developed that have better "food to toxin"
ratios (and are as a result more prone to insect attack) but even so, a lot
of foods we eat - eg, potatoes, eggplant, tomato, peanuts, various grains,
etc -  wouldn't get clearance if they had been found today, or if they had
been created in a GM program.  GM actually has the potential to reduce the
toxicity in these plants, but then, we might not like the taste of the low
toxicity versions.

The idea of zero toxicity GM food is scientific nonsense (or wildly
futuristic) just as it is for non-GM plant food.  Ideally, these things
would be fed into a cost-benefit-risk-dosage-etc equation.  I'd in favour
of standards for GM, but the idea that GM food should or could has to be
whiter-that-white perfect should be tempered with a consideration of the
alternatives.  No doubt, GM product will have their problems.  Knowledge is
imperfect and any change involves risk but we can reasonably ask questions
like: Is it worse than a potato?

Jim