Giles Talks
On GM Food
Ironically, couldn't GM crops actually be quite good for the environment?
Well, one of the appalling things that we've done over the years is overuse pesticides. The thing that GM can do is create a strain of corn that is resistant to certain blights, so you don't have to use as much pesticide. And what you do use can be gentler, like a herbicide that doesn't kill everything in its path.
It's not just about GM though is it?
No. There are plenty of other aspects to it. For example, co-presenter Olivia, who has a scientific background, and I will be introduced to a cloned beef calf, and I'll go ‘Ooh, I'm not eating a clone!’ Then she'll explain that every apple you eat is a clone.
Every commercial apple tree in the world, even in the tiniest little apple orchard in Kent which has been organic for hundreds of years, is a clone. They're all just grafts. Every apple is genetically identical. So then I say ‘But an apple's not the same as a calf!’ and Olivia says ‘Why not?’ and I can't explain why it's not; I've only got O-Level chemistry.
So making this series has changed all of your ideas on the subject of farming and food
No! I would say I had the science of GM explained to me, which means that all of the decisions I now make about eating can be better informed.
I personally won't be eating GM food because it's only used by massive food corporations and I endeavour to use small shops that know where their food comes from. And I do that to provide the financial and moral support to that kind of farming industry, because if middle-class people like me don't, then who is going to?
The programme is not saying GM is good, and I'll be gutted if people watch it and then say ‘Oh Coren will eat anything. Coren will eat GM. He's a sell-out.’ But having had the science explained to me, I no longer think that beans are going to leap across fields and that transgenetic mutation is going to change all of our crops into hideous walking cabbages, which is what people think. It's just not going to happen.
Never mind people in Britain, this could have a more global significance couldn't it?
GM could be a viable way of feeding a starving planet. Admittedly, you meet up with these scientists who say they're going to feed the world, and you think ‘Yeah, but they're starving because of politics’. I gather that the world produced 2500 calories per capita last year. It's just that the Americans and Europeans ate more than their fair share, and also a lot of the food rotted.
But there are some amazing GM things, like GM cassava. Cassava is all they can really grow in much of sub-Saharan Africa in the dry soil, without much water and without fertiliser. But cassava has almost no nutritional value at all; it's just carbohydrate. It just about keeps them alive, and millions of kids go blind because of vitamin A deficiency.
What scientists at the University of Ohio have done is create a fortified cassava by planting a gene that creates vitamin A in it. And they can also put a gene into it that triggers the cassava to make protein. So suddenly they're getting vitamin A and protein that they never had before. And it's quite hard to argue against that.
