Do you know what you ate for Thanksgiving?

By Ned Andrews

Like most Yale students, the high point of my fall break was Thanksgiving day. Gathering at my aunt and uncle's house, half of my father's side of the family spent two days preparing the traditional New England feast. True to a tradition 379 years in the making, we filled the house with the aroma of hormones, antibiotics, recombinant DNA, and ultraviolet radiation. Wait a minute. What's wrong with this picture? In some cases, nothing. In others, everything. Both the captains of agribusiness and diehard "natural food" advocates have their correct points about modern food production and processing. Let's look back on the dishes offered that night and see who gets the upper hand in each one.

First of all, there's the 26-pound turkey that I helped devour. In all likelihood, this bird was fed growth hormones. Traces of these hormones accumulate in the bird, especially its fat, and are not easily fluxed from the system. They outlast the cooking process and are absorbed by human digestion, just as the turkeys absorbed them in their food pellets. The process is a lot like that of DDT accumulation in the aquatic food chain: as the top-level consumer, I will retain the highest hormone concentrations in my system.

Because my body has probably shut off its sensitivity to growth hormones, I'm not in too much danger—but my 15- and ten-year-old cousins across the table do. Remember the Argentinan beef-cattle scandal? These chemicals can wreak havoc on every system from the skeletal to the reproductive, and because individual production of and sensitivity to hormones varies so widely, it's difficult to determine what dosage can be truly termed "safe." Unfortunately, in many countries that carry on import relations with the U.S., corruption or indifference renders enforcement of any standards next to impossible.

How about the milk that went into the mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie? It may have been irradiated—in other words, exposed to short-term bursts of ultraviolet rays to kill bacteria. Other meats are often treated by the same procedure. No problem here—in this area, food packagers deserve kudos. Irradiation is the ultraviolet equivalent of Maxwell's silver hammer, bopping the food to make sure it's dead. The UV rays themselves are harmless, not of the type that cause cancer in humans or any other animals. They disperse and decay within a few fractions of a second, leaving no trace at all for the consumer to ingest. As for the bacteria, they're unicellular organisms, and the UV rays are enough to disrupt not only their genetic material but the rest of their cellular matter, so there's no danger of mutation. If the rays reach a cell, the cell will be dead—genetically altered or not.

Similarly, those yummy yams at the other end of the table may have been modified by recombinant DNA technology in order to make them pest-resistant or even completely immune to an herbicide. Sequences removed from one organism, such as a soybean or a peanut, are transferred into the host using restriction enzymes and ligases. Picking the winner in this situation is not as easy, but on this judge's scorecard the farmers win on points. Under the vast majority of cases, genetic engineering of food is just a glorified form of breeding. Eating genetically engineered food is no different than eating beef cattle naturally bred to be stronger and healthier. The chemical bases are the same: DNA is DNA, and we eat it all the time.

The only problem arises is when a person harbors an allergy to the proteins or enzymes produced by the organism from which the recombinant gene was taken. The solution is obvious: if farmers use recombinant technology, they must disclose from what organisms the new genes were taken. It's just like placing the label,"may contain peanuts" on a candy bar where peanut and soybean oils are mixed in the factory. As long as food producers follow the procedure of full disclosure, and as long as people with allergies are as careful as they should be, there will be no problems here.

In a final tally, the nature advocates and the champions of agribusiness both score some points—but it isn't a tie. As long as Congress gives in to the meat industry and protects the commerce and use of food laden with hormones and antibiotics, and as long as the natural-food contingent spreads simplistic generalizations and myths about safe procedures, there will be a clear loser here: the consumers and families singing "We Gather Together."

Ned Andrews is a freshman in Saybrook.

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