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 "Dear Dolly,
It seems that the US Food and Drug Administration, in all its wisdom, has decided that US citizens will be safe eating cloned animal products. Yes, Dolly, that means ewe, your lambs and even your immaculate lactation. Move over, Chicken McNuggets®, you pioneers of homogeneity. Henceforth, diversity, individuality and even evolution are out. You showed the way, Dolly, and genetic-uniformity is in! At Safeway, we can celebrate with simultaneous glee the supersized super-beef and the super-buxom boneless chickens of the future, pink and wiggly in the Styrofoam tray, copyright pending and no rooster required."
Monoculture Climax
Imagine thousands of identical twin piglets housed in giant blinkered warehouses, mini-trotters on sanitary cement, snuffling noses aloft in brotherly fervor under a haze of disinfectant. The industrial pig will be chosen well among the thousands of domestic porcine breeds—he’ll be the champion porker, the fastest growing, the most resilient to factory conditions, the size most desired by slaughterhouse engineers. A few labcoats-for-hire will splice in some special genes from a cactus for hardiness, a few genes from a porpoise for tenderness and a few synthetic genes for proprietary reasons. And then our piggie will be replicated, to the exclusion of his cousins, by the million-fold. (All other breeds will be kept as relic “proto-pig” specimens of cells on frozen Petri dishes. Perhaps in a facility managed by the federal government, perhaps in a vault buried under permafrost in Sweden. In any case, safely out of sight and for all practical purposes extinct. This is something that we call ex-situ conservation.)
Precautionary Principle
And what are the risks of such a system, you might well inquire? Asking that question is to exercise the precautionary principle, which warns us to look before leaping, and to consider the possible consequences and causalities of new technologies before signing ourselves (and our grandchildren) up to be guinea pigs for the technologist’s newest product. The product in this case is the proliferation of singular, one-dimensional production methodology. The trouble comes when an industrial model of production meets the ecological reality of dirt, water and photosynthesis.
Diversity Is Strength
The first, most basic, rule of ecology is this: Diversity is strength. A diverse system—composed of variably adapted parts—is resilient to disease, pestilence and associated crises. Even if you have never seen a bullock in action, and the associated barnyard romping, you probably bite into your burger with the assumption that birds, bees and a certain amount of native biology were involved in the manufacture of your nutrition. Consciously or not, we believe in biology’s way of generating the building blocks of our biological bodies. Transgeneticists hope to change this process into something much more clinical, and consequently much more sinister.
Transition to a Clone Nation
Let’s be clear. The push for approval of clone technology was certainly not fomented by a gangly rat-pack of forward-thinking farmer/scientists. No indeed, the brittle ecology of hegemony, factory efficiency and maximal profits is a brainchild of the meat industry. While we’re on the topic of piggies, the hog industry for a start is one of the most specialized agribusiness sectors, with an ever slimmer per-hog margin of about $5. Only Smithfield foods, its subsidiaries and subcontractors would be able to afford the genetics, efficiencies of scale and tremendous investment costs of a transition to a clone nation.
Their current best practice relies on tail-docking, hormones, antibiotics and rubber-mouthed legislators tolerant of swine-shit lagoon overspills. The corporate porkers raised today—far from their furry, free-ranging “heritage breed” friends out around Berkeley—are already practically identical to each other. And unlike the sloop-happy Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web, fed on farm residues and buttermilk, their diet is derived almost exclusively from subsidized, over-fertilized, genetically manipulated corn and their clone-poop is toxic waste. It’s really not a pretty picture.
If you mistrust the tone of my prophesy as the hyperbolic ranting of a querulous Luddite, let me refer you to a wonderful book that makes my words seem as tame as Betty Crocker’s. If the bioengineering issue intrigues you, please read Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Also, the intrepid future surfer’s ultimate techno-guide is the E.T.C. Group. They focus a lot on nanotechnology and the convergence of erosion, technology and control. Remember, the drug cartels of Columbia have managed to produce a Roundup®-ready coca plant.
Additional resources:
Down on the Farm: The Impact of Nano-Scale Technologies on Food and Agriculture
[This piece, provided courtesy of the Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology (SAFE), was written by SAFE’s founder, Severine Fleming. - Ed.]
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