Good Enough to Eat?

Next Generation GM Crops

Ian D Godwin

• Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
• Year: 2019
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788016810
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Biochemistry
• Index: Technology & Engineering

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.
So begins Good Enough to Eat?, which challenges Kafka's culinary sentiments and proceeds to unravel our complex and deeply personal relationship with food.

Including interviews from both sides of the (farmyard) fence; from biologists to farmers and nutritionists to activists, Good Enough to Eat? charts the history of GM foods from the laboratory to the global dinner plate. Equally informative and entertaining, Godwin chronicles the social, political and philosophical arguments for and against GM crops, and the science and knowledge behind the battle for global food security and sustainability.

CHAPTER 1

Food, Glorious Food

According to Franz Kafka:

“So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.”

Well, is that the case? I remain unconvinced. What if the food contains gluten? Or peanuts? Or horse? Or Brussels sprouts? Or what if it’s genetically modified? Is it good enough to eat?

Just reading this has conjured up all sorts of emotions for you. Some of you are saying, “Of course it’s good enough to eat”. My wife is saying, “Why did you bring me to a place that has horse on the menu?” Some of you are reaching for an EpiPen.

Food. It’s complicated. It’s not just for survival. It brings people together. It divides people. It’s for health (good or bad). It’s for ceremonies. It’s for bingeing. It’s for dieting. It’s for boasting about. It’s for complaining about. It’s delicious. It’s disgusting – how can you eat that? Here comes an aeroplane. No, don’t put it in your hair. And disturbingly, for many people it’s just not available in decent quantity or quality.

So, while this book is about how new genetics in the 20th and 21st centuries has revolutionised food production, it’s impossible to have a meaningful dialogue without acknowledging and exploring the complex relationship all of us have with food. Many of us have little or no personal experience or knowledge about where our food comes from. However, many others know exactly the where and how, because some people are subsistence farmers who have to grow, hunt or gather everything they eat. I’m betting you are not a subsistence farmer, because if you were you would be unlikely to have time to read this book. You’d be up at dawn fetching water and firewood, and getting the kids to milk the scrawny cow tethered outside while your husband went to look for the goat that disappeared overnight.

No, you most likely got your milk from a plastic bottle that was shipped from 100 to 2000 km away to have with your coffee that was grown in Africa or South America. I’m doing the same. So that’s OK.

So in this chapter, we are going to have a conversation about food and some of our complex and wonderful relationships with it. We need to start in this place, because many of our attitudes to new technologies in food are guided by our relationship with food. We all want to eat tasty, nutritious and sustainable food (and more about sustainability later), and once you get to be 50 something, you’ll probably have to eat less of it or end up buying a bigger pair of trousers. But that’s enough about me, let’s start the journey. And all good journeys require travel, so we’ll do a lot of that in this book. Let’s start in France. Not just because it’s a great place for food, but because some very important Australian history took place in France. We are not going to the sunny south where the miracle of the Mediterranean diet will keep you alive for 200 years without ever having to buy a larger dress size. No, we are going to the north, where it’s a bit colder, a bit greyer, and they serve cream and butter with almost everything. And a century ago it was full of 295 000 young Australian men.

We’re “on the Somme”, 2017. The soggy dawn of an early spring day is dreary and grey. Standing in a war cemetery in Dranoutre, looking at the grave of a great-uncle who was killed almost 100 years ago does little to improve the mood. Uncle Jack Bond, an Australian artillery man, was mortally wounded by shrapnel on 30 March 1918.

I was next to Bond when he was killed. He was hit in the head and only lived a few minutes. This was at Dranoutre, the 47th Battalion was resting at the time. Bond came from Sandgate Park, Queensland.

Witness statement from Gunner R.S. Colbourne, Glebe, Sydney, 1918

Unbeknownst to Gunner Bond, only about 10 km up the road was my grandfather Vincent George Flanagan, who after the war married Jack’s little sister, Olive Bond. Vince was a railwayman all his working life. In 1916 he joined up in Queensland, and disembarked from Melbourne as a trained artilleryman with the 3rd Field Artillery Brigade. Vince rarely talked about the war, but he did once tell me the artillery were called the “drop ‘em shorts” and it was not a term of endearment.

Vince never served as an artilleryman, because once in Britain, he was quickly redeployed into a new Engineer’s Unit, known originally as the Victorian Railway Unit, later the 15th Light Railway Operating Company, and “taken on strength” in Poperinghe, in October 1917, just before the Australian attack on Passchendaele with the Canadians. A month later, the Australians withdrew having suffered 38 093 casualties.

My grandfather then endured a winter with occasional shelling and bombing from what I can glean from the CO’s official diary. On 30 December 1917, he was recommended for a Military Medal, and apart from “on the Somme” nobody in the family was ever privy to the circumstances. Being an enlisted man there was no official citation. When I was 10, my granny died and Vince came to live with us. Being a boy, I was naturally curious about his war experience – asking insightful and sensitive questions that only a 10-year-old can ask, like “What did you do in the war?” or “Did you kill any Germans?” The only answer I ever received from my skilful line of questioning was, “I had to shoot a lot of poor bloody horses who got stuck in the mud”. He was a great horse lover, and did spend a significant proportion of his weekends (and wages) at the races.

By now, you the reader will be wondering whether this book has been bound in the wrong cover. Apologies if you found little of this particularly informative or relevant, but it does serve as a lengthy preamble to the only other thing I was ever able to find out about my grandfather’s war experience. One of those mornings at breakfast, being a helpful, polite young fellow schooled in perfect table manners by the steely determination of both mum (Vince’s daughter) and dad, I asked grandfather if he would like jam on his toast.

“What sort is it?”

“Plum….”

“I vowed if I ever survived the bloody war I would never eat bloody plum jam again in my life”.

Now I don’t think post-traumatic stress disorder had been invented in the early 1970s, and even if it was, this 10-year-old boy was blissfully unaware of its existence. With the benefit of hindsight and maturity, I suppose this was one of my grandfather’s few outward symptoms of PTSD. In my 10-year-old “Boys’ Own” excitement, I pictured Vince ensconced in a muddy shell hole with nothing to eat but a can of plum jam for days on end, until he was relieved with a can of Fray Bentos bully beef. Or I envisaged a scenario where he and his mates captured some Germany army issue “marmalade”. They toasted up some baguettes they had “foraged” from a local farmhouse, but on opening the cans found the dastardly Hun had played a filthy trick. No orange had been harmed in the making of this marmalade (generic German for jam), and all the tins contained plum jam! Crikey! But I’m pretty sure that never actually happened either and I most certainly appropriated that memory from an old episode of “Dad’s Army”.

Nevertheless, as Napoleon, or the Duke of Wellington, or maybe even Russell Crowe said in some movie, an army marches on its stomach. That’s not really the point – and the point is that food is not just something we eat to stay alive, it is a core part of our emotions, our physical and mental health and wellbeing, and indeed, our very identity.

Fortunately for my grandfather (and for my yet-to-be-conceived mother and, ultimately, me), the 15th Australian Light Railway Operating Company was involved in preparations to defend against the much-anticipated German “big push”. Doubtless he didn’t feel too fortunate at the time, and throughout early March 1918, they were shelled by day and bombed by night. A diary entry by Lance Corporal William Lycett of 8 March:

After dinner went down and started unloading 6-inch howitzer ramps used for carrying guns on light railway trucks, very heavy work, lot of our chaps getting sick leaving us short-handed.

Vince was one of the chaps who got “sick”. In his service record it simply states “9th March 1918 hernia – evacuated to Edgbaston, England”. He survived the operation, the convalescence and even a few days in the clink for “failing to salute a British Officer at the Changing of the Guard, Buckingham Palace” and returned to Australia to eventually marry Ollie and have a daughter, my wonderful mum, Joan.

So a hundred years after all this history, here I am living in the 21st century, and I am able to do something my children take for granted, but Vince never lived to experience – I Googled “plum jam WWI” and gained some insight into the plum jam story. Suffice to say that it is highly unlikely that Vince was the only Allied serviceman who swore off plum jam during that terrible time on the Somme, or anywhere else on the Western Front.

A company called Ticklers in Grimsby in the north of England had the government contract to supply plum jam to the British and Dominion troops at the front. And in case you didn’t know, Australia was a Dominion of the British Empire back then, along with Canada, New Zealand and South Africa (as well as Newfoundland and the Irish Free State). More about the jam itself later, but the tins themselves played a key role in trench warfare. Early in the war the Germans had a good supply of “stick bombs”, whereas the Allied troops suffered a critical shortage of the Mills bomb, what we would today call a grenade. So, in Gallipoli and later on the Western Front, the Aussie, Canadian and British troops improvised their own bombs by stuffing empty Tickler’s jam tins with nails, screws and gunpowder. The “Tickler’s Bomb” became a standard.

Tickler’s jam, Tickler’s jam
How I love Tom Tickler’s jam
Plum and apple in one pound pots
Sent from England in ten ton lots

Every night when I’m asleep
I dream that I am
Bombing the poor old German’s trench
With Tommy Tickler’s jam.

The tins were sought after, whereas the jam, sadly, was not. Indeed, there is ample evidence to suggest that the involvement of plums and apples was minimal when it came to the manufacture of Tickler’s Plum and Apple. Many contemporary witnesses reported that the factory in Grimsby received frequent shipments of turnips and swedes. One of Bruce Bairnsfather’s iconic WWI postcards depicts a down in the mouth soldier eliciting The Eternal Question “When the ‘ell is it going to be strawberry?”. Plum and apple jam became a symbol in the trenches of getting second best or “short shrift”.

Another song from the soldiers in the trenches was a lament on getting second best, with the suspicion that the good stuff was kept by the Army Service Corps (ASC):

Plum and apple
Apple and plum
Plum and apple
There’s always some

The ASC gets strawberry jam
And lashings of rum
But we poor blokes
We only get –
Apple and Plum

Perhaps now more than ever in human history, we identify (with all our other cultural mores of “belonging”) via what we eat – or sometimes more importantly, what we don’t. In the Western world my generation and those following have forgotten that only a couple of generations ago most of our antecedents had a great longing for a wider variety of food, and MORE OF IT.

My parents were born into 1930s Australia (the Great Depression) and 1940s, where wartime rationing continued right up until 1950 for tea and butter. My dear and funny dad, Doug, still talks about having bread and dripping (the fat that has melted and dripped from roasting meat) for Sunday dinner. Seeing the frequently unfettered consumption of our boys today, the fact that my dad and his mates survived at all is something to contemplate. We now live in a time of plenty, and with that plentiful bounty comes the ability to choose.

Although it wasn’t always like that in my family, we had to finish everything that was on our plate. Sometimes, like when we went to Aunty Ruby’s for Sunday lunch, we could have seconds. My strategy for survival was to “save the best for last”, invariably the meat, usually starting with the green or yellow vegetable (10-year-old boy shudders). The horror of being confronted with such things as the humble choko (Figure 1.1) leaves a strong childhood scar, not just in my mind, but for almost every kid in Australia growing up in the 1960s. To be fortunate enough to hate broccoli, or Brussels sprouts or turnip, was a luxury that only those of us not indelibly scarred by the ultimate food aversion therapy, the choko. Choko (even the name suggests a sense of foreboding doesn’t it?) is the Australian descriptor for chayote (Sechium edule). Edule gives it away really. It means edible. Not Sechium deliciosa or S. magnifica or S. epicure – well any of those would have been in contravention of all advertising conventions, and failed the morality test even among taxonomists. The New Zealand Maori people survived on “edible” ferns, yet those times are the worst of times in Maori folklore. And the same goes for the folklore of any kid from Queensland in the 1960s, it’s the choko. Well, that and the dreaded school milk. Every morning we had to drink our compulsory school milk, either at little lunch (morning break), or before the first lesson. In summer, after the milk had sat in the sun at around 28 °C for an hour or two, we were then faced with the indescribable joy of something formerly known as milk. It was an experience seared into the consciousness of every Queensland schoolkid until 1973. The Education Queensland website sums it up best:

The taste of the free school milk will remain vividly in the memory of school children from this era. The milk was never refrigerated and on a hot Queensland day, the taste it had acquired by “little lunch” could be sickening. Enjoyment was not improved if you forgot to shake the bottle before opening and got a mouthful of warm, sometimes lumpy cream.

Figure 1.1 Sechium edule (choko or chayote), a fruit deemed by some to be edible.
© Jiang Hongyan/Shutterstock.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

We all have food (not necessarily culinary) experiences that are linked strongly to memories of people and place. Some wonderful, some less so. A few years ago, my lovely wife, Milly, and I were walking along the north coast of Spain, and happened along the small fishing port of Getaria. Getaria was the birthplace of fashion designer, Cristobal Balenciaga. Yeah, OK, I’d never heard of him either. Travel is about learning. Above the port frontage is a bronze statue of a famous mariner, Juan Sebastien Elcano. Who? Being a product of mid-20th century British-centric education, I had it drummed into me that Captain James Cook “discovered” Australia. While that does ever so slightly overlook the claims that could be made by the indigenous population, who obviously sat around gazing out to sea for 60 000 years waiting for a white guy with a funny accent to “discover” the continent, there’s also the various Dutch and Portuguese and Melanesian and Indonesian seafarers who had well and truly put the place on the map, such that the world could rejoice at the discovery of one new food. The macadamia nut, Australia’s modest contribution to the world’s food plants.

But back to Juan Sebastien Elcano, the guy immortalised in bronze. Now if you learned at school that Ferdinand Magellan was the first person to circumnavigate the globe, you too have been misled. Magellan was killed in the Philippines, much in the same way that Cook was in the Hawaiian Islands, although I don’t think Magellan was turned into a menu item that night. So the truth is, Magellan didn’t even get much further than halfway. Perhaps we should have been taught that Magellan was the first person to semi-circumnavigate the world. It was Basque seafarer, Juan Sebastien Elcano, who led the only surviving boat with merely 18 crew back to Spain to be forgotten as a footnote by everyone, except the good people of Getaria. So there’s two “facts” I learned and successfully regurgitated at school during exams, both skewered by reality. Don’t believe everything on the curriculum kids. The post-truth world has existed for quite some time. But what made Getaria totally memorable wasn’t the bronze or the fashion. It was the smoky row of fish barbecues (Asador) along the waterfront. For me and Milly it was our first taste of monkfish and to this day, whenever I see the name Balenciaga, I think of barbecued monkfish. And whenever we have delicious fish, we ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1 Food, Glorious Food
• Chapter 2 A Kind of Magic
• Chapter 3 Revolution
• Chapter 4 Chemical Heart
• Chapter 5 Wide Open Spaces
• Chapter 6 Bad Moon Rising
• Chapter 7 Paint It Black
• Chapter 8 Not Ready to Make Nice
• Chapter 9 O Fortuna!
• Chapter 10 New Kid in Town
• Chapter 11 For a Better Day
• Subject Index