In some ways India mirrors the world as a whole, with growing urban populations and high tech industries co-existing with poor farmers working small parcels of land. In other was it doesn’t. In the United States, a tiny fraction of our population feeds every one of us*. I assume most of them enjoy their work, since many will even take second jobs so they can afford to keep their farms going.

In India:

But this is not easy in a country where inflation is always an election issue and a state government was voted out because onion prices soared.

From before the election.

In the US food prices used to be a political issue. That’s where the idea that a politician should know the price of milk came from. Being able to pay for food used to be something a lot more Americans worried about. Our current agricultural policies in part are the result of the decision to eliminate food prices as a political issue (and in the process remove the specter of famine from millions of American homes.) Admittedly both systems have their disadvantages.

Anyway, my point is, can we at least all agree that 1. people shouldn’t have to worry about the price their food spiking, or whether they’ll be able to afford to feed their families. 2. It’s preferable for a few million people who love farming to produce food than for hundreds of millions who’d rather be doing something else, but can’t 2. farming should be productive enough that those who love farming can feed everyone (thanks greg)?

Photo Dalboz17, Flickr

I can’t count the number of times I’ve run into someone either online or in person who is convinced genetic engineering makes food taste bad. “Just try an organically grown heirloom tomato,” they will say, “it’s so much juicier and tastier than those GM tomatoes you buy at the grocery store.” It is a great way to win support since many people listening to or reading those words will have had a similar experience tasting a oddly shapped and colored heirloom tomato and barely believing it to be the same fruit* as the perfectly shaped ones lining the aisles of every grocery store. Heck, even I agree they taste better, and I never grew out of not liking tomatoes in the first place. Score one for the opposition to genetic engineering. Or it would be if the tomatoes down at your local grocery store weren’t completely untouched by genetic engineering. GM Tomatoes don’t taste bad and you’ve probably never eaten one in your life

Unless you living in California in the 90s or are a grad student or corporate researcher who created them yourself, you (and I) have never tasted a genetically engineered tomato. If you lived in California there’s a small chance you were able to buy a flavr savr tomato, clearly advertised as such, before they went off the market, because of any health risk or consumer backlash (I’m told some stores had waiting lists for whenever a new shipment came in), but because they were costing four times as much to produce and distribute as they were selling for.

Similarly genetically engineered strawberries (another favorite target of anti-GMO activists) have never been sold to the public. The same for bananas** or apples, or pretty much any fruit of vegetable. Exceptions: any papaya grown in Hawaii probably carries a transgene giving it resistance to papaya ringspot virus. A couple of kinds of squash also were engineered with virus resistance traits, but I don’t know if they’re still sold. If you consider a potato to be a vegetable, for a few years there was a chance you might have eaten a herbicide resistant potato, however they’re not longer available***. And to the best of my knowledge that’s it for transgenic produce.

If the tomatoes down at your local grocery store are not as tasty as heirloom tomatoes (and they probably aren’t), please address your concerns to the plant breeders who created them using conventional breeding. They’ll tell you, correctly, that they breed for the traits farmers request. Those farmers get paid better for tomatoes that travel best over long distances than tomatoes that taste best, so those are the tomatoes they grow. Heirloom tomatoes don’t taste better because they’re old, or somehow more natural than modern breeds. They taste better because they were created by breeders, using the same tools and techniques as breeders today, at a time when flavor was valued over shelf life or appearance.

I’m sure I can speak for them when I say they’d love to create new tasty lines that also incorporate the best disease resistance and environmental stress traits, none of which, unlike self life and tavelling ability, are in conflict with flavor.<– Which means that those tomatoes would require less pesticides, meaning both more money for farmers and lowers prices to consumers(relative to heirlooms, not current grocery store tomatoes). But they can’t do that without two things: consumers who are willing to pay more for tastier tomatoes instead of prefering the prettier and/or cheaper tomatoes, and a new food distribution network that doesn’t require Oklahoma to import tomatoes from California. Because the same traits that make a tomato tasty mean it won’t be able to survive a journey across half a continent (at least without doing something clever with genetic engineering, and we all know how the public would react to that.)

Takeaway message. If you’re complaining about the taste of genetically engineered food, you should make sure it is actually genetically engineered first.

From the comments: For more on why breeding for flavor and breeding for storage and transportation ease don’t play well together, check out this great post over at the scientistgardener.

*A tomato is botanically a fruit, and since I’m a plant scientist I have to call it that, even though it definitely tastes like a vegetable.

**The change in the taste of bananas is actually because the bananas we eat today are an entirely different breed from those eaten in our grandparents childhood. As the bananas we’re used to are sterile, conventional breeding was able to do nothing when a fungal pathogen started wiping out the old tastier bananas. All they could do was find a different breed that looked and tasted sort of similar but was resistant to the fungus. The sad thing is if it happened today we could save the old bananas with genetic engineering, though I’m sure we would.

***This fact is misrepresented in “Supersize Me” when the girlfriend claims all the potatoes he’s eating are GMOs. In fact it was pressure by people like her on fast food restuarants, which in turn put pressure on farmers, that killed domand for gm potato seed, eventually leading to the end of production. Like wheat, potatoes were victims of still being in recognizable form when people sit down to eat it.