Monday brain stretch: More on GMO rethinking

I raised a small ruckus in November with a column on a different point of view on GMOs: After the defeat of Proposition 37 in California, which would have required labeling of products that included ingredients from genetically modified organisms, I questioned whether that labeling was the right issue. I quoted from a panel at a recent James Beard Foundation food conference that looked at the positive sides of GMOs as a tool for creating enough food for the planet.

Not surprisingly, I took some heat from adamantly anti-GMO opponents. I expected that I would, but I also wanted to open the subject up to more than one point of view.

That view is continuing. At a conference in Oxford, England, Mark Lynas, one of the environmentalists who originally was vehemently anti-GMO recanted his earlier stance and suggested that there may be significant environmental benefit to this research. Here's a piece on Slate summing up what Lynas had to say.

 And here's another piece worth considering: A piece from Russ Parsons of the L.A. Times that not only also looks at what Lynas had to say, but also offering some other changing points on GMO research.

On the morning after that James Beard Foundation panel in October, I ended up sharing a very early morning car to the airport with panelist Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Federation. As we rolled through Queens and fretted about making our flights, I asked Clay about his talk the day before, in which he had repeated his claim (originally made at a TED conference) that we'll need to produce more food in the next 40 years than we produced in the previous 8,000, or roughly the amount of time we've had organized agriculture.

I mused that it was the first time I'd heard someone so publicly challenge the conventional wisdom that GMOs are all bad.

Clay nodded. And he asked this: If you know you have a big problem to solve, why would you take any tool off the table before you figure out how to use it? It would be like knowing you have to build a house but removing the hammer before you start because someone once used it to hit your thumb.

Maybe the problem isn't the hammer. It's keeping the hammer out of the hands of the person who would only use it to hurt you, without considering that the hammer may be of use.