From Book News, Inc.
According to this primer for non-scientists, there are three basic problems of biotech food: future uncertainties, owning food, or more exactly, seeds; and the globalization of monoculture. Topics include how genetic engineering works; who wins and who loses because of the biotech industry; risks to health, environment, and the economy; ethical aspects; genetic engineering's claim to end starvation; and finally, making "informed choices" (or better, informed refusals) regarding--what this book might whisper between its lines--"frankenfood." Teitel is president of the Council for Responsible Genetics, and Wilson works with the Greenpeace Genetic Engineering Campaign.Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


Ralph Nader
There is no escape other than to fight back and demand an open scientific process and a response to persistent questions.


PJ Birosik, Nexus, July/August 2002
Read and learn what genetic engineering is, how it works, and the ways in which it affects your cuisine choices.


Today's Librarian, December 2000
The book reinforces its research with extensive footnotes and indexes, along with a variety of advocacy and informational websites.


Anne Newkirk Niven, SageWoman, Winter '00 - 01
This book is a must-have, no matter which side of the GE food debate one is on. . . . Recommended.


Dr. Joseph Ray, Atlantis Rising, Number 24
Authors Teitel and Wilson have performed an important and timely service in writing their book.


New Texas, June 2002
An honest, eye-opening read for the consumer who is concerned with what really comes off the grocery store shelves.


Earth Island Journal, Volume 17, number 4
A gripping account of the environmental, social, political, ethical, legal and economic decisions . . . about genetic engineering and our food supply.


The Environmental Magazine, January/February 2000
In simple, straightforward language... guide readers through the questionalble process of toying with a food's gene pool...


Book Description
This revised and updated second edition is both an exposé and educational primer on this controversial technology that is already a part of every American's diet.


About the Author
Martin Teitel, Ph.D., the author of Rain Forest in Your Kitchen, is Executive Director of the Council for Responsible Genetics. He lives in Boston. Kimberly A. Wilson, former director of the council's program on Commercial Biotechnology and the Environment, works with the Greenpeace biotechnology campaign and lives in San Francisco.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Hijacked Dinner
Imagine yourself one morning on a modern jetliner, settling into your seat as the plane taxis toward the active runway. To pass the time you unfold your morning newspaper, and just as the plane's rapidly building acceleration begins to lift the wheels from the ground, your eye catches a front page article mentioning that engineers are beginning a series of tests to determine whether or not the new- model airplane that you are in is safe.
That situation would never happen, you say to yourself. People have more foresight than that. Yet something we entrust our lives to far more often than airplanes-our food supply-is being redesigned faster than any of us realize, and scientists have hardly begun to test the long-term safety of these new foods. 
The genetic engineering of our food is the most radical transformation in our diet since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago. During these thousands of years, people have used the naturally occurring processes of genetics to gradually shape wild plants into tastier, more nutritious, and more attractive food for all of humanity. Until very recently, these evolved food plants were part of the common heritage of humankind. Food plants have been available to all in conveniently small and storable packets-seeds-for distribution, trade, and warehousing. In fact, selective plant breeding has brought food security, greater nutrition, and increased biodiversity, while at the same time protecting food systems against hard times, like natural or economic disasters.
In the new kind of agriculture, a handful of giant corporations have placed patents on food plants, giving them exclusive control over that food. These transnational corporations have altered the minute life-processes of food plants by removing or adding genetic material in ways quite impossible in nature. And like our nightmare vision of the untested airplane, genetically altered food is being quietly slipped into our markets and supermarkets without proper labels, and without having passed adequate safety tests. Furthermore, genetically engineered food confers no advantage to consumers: it doesn't look better, taste better, cost less, or provide better nutrition. To distinguish this different sort of food from the natural food we have eaten all our lives, people give it different names. In Europe they call it "GMO food." Here, we use a new term: "genfood."
While we eat this new kind of food and feed it to our children on a daily basis, independent scientists are just beginning to conduct tests to learn about the food's safety. In fact, a person in the United States shopping in a modern supermarket would find out that most food products contain genetically modified ingredients-but the lack of useful labeling of genetically engineered food keeps this information hidden. Meanwhile, economists are determining if our local and national farming will be hurt by this dramatic change in agriculture, and environmentalists are considering the ecological damage that genetically modified plants may cause. Unfortunately these food crops are already growing on millions of acres all around our world: at the end of the twentieth century enough genetically engineered crops are being grown to cover all of Great Britain plus all of Taiwan, with enough left over to carpet Central Park in New York. With this abrupt agricultural transformation, humanity's food supply is being placed in the hands of a few corporations who practice an unpredictable and dangerous science.
As we eat genetically altered food and read about new safety tests, we may start to realize that we are the unwitting and unwilling guinea pigs in the largest experiment in human history, involving our entire planet's ecosystem, food supply, and the health and very genetic makeup of its inhabitants. Worse yet, results coming in from the first objective tests are not encouraging. Scientists issue cautionary statements almost weekly, ranging from problems with monarch butterflies dying from genetically modified corn pollen to the danger of violent allergic reactions to genes introduced into soy products, as well as experiments showing a variety of actual and suspected health problems for cows fed genetically engineered hormones and the humans who drink their milk. And this doesn't even consider slow-acting problems that might not show up for years or decades. Who decided this was an acceptable risk?
On the economic front, trade wars are starting to break out around the world as the countries that produce genetically modified food seek to force other nations to accept it, even when such modified food provides no benefit to recipient nations and raises all the risks mentioned above. Meanwhile, environmental activists warn of "superweeds" and "superbugs" being created by genes that escape from genetically engineered plants. And the file of court cases grows as people questioning this new technology are sued into silence and as activists around the world demonstrate to express their concerns.
Three features distinguish this new kind of food. First and most important, the food is altered at the genetic level in ways that could never occur naturally. As genes from plants, animals, viruses, and bacteria are merged in novel ways, the normal checks and balances that nature provides to keep biology from running amok are nullified. Exactly how genes work is a topic of enormous complexity and some controversy, so it is difficult if not impossible to predict what will happen when individual combinations of genes are created in ways that have never been seen before-and then released into the environment.
The second novel feature of the revolution in our food is that the food is owned. Not individual sacks of wheat or bushels of potatoes, but entire varieties of plants are now corporate products. In some cases, entire species are owned. The term "monopoly" takes on new power when one imagines a company owning major portions of our food supply-the one thing that every single person now and into the future will always need to buy.
Finally, this new technology is "globalized." This means that local agriculture, carefully adapted to local ecology and tastes over hundreds and thousands of years, must yield to a planetary monoculture enforced by intricate trade agreements and laws. According to these trade treaties, local laws that we have come to rely on for protection must take a back seat to decisions made far away by anonymous officials working in secret.
In the forthcoming chapters of this book, we are going to examine the genetic engineering revolution in our food. We're going to have a non-technical look at genetic engineering and how it works. We're going to see who benefits from genetically engineered food and who loses out. We'll take some time to look at risks to health, the environment, and our economy. We'll also consider some of the wider implications of genetically engineered food, including the ethical and spiritual consequences of owning and altering the substance of life. Finally, we'll spend some time looking at the practical steps each of us can take to preserve the independence and integrity of our food supply and to safeguard our ability to make informed choices about what we feed our children and ourselves.
Biotech's commandeering of our food is widespread but hardly inevitable. Tens of thousands of natural seeds still exist to form the basis of a diverse, healthy, and locally controlled food system in our world. With proper attention from ordinary people, our food supply will be put back into the hands of farmers and food suppliers and all the rest of us-for the sake of our health and our environment, and for the future that we leave to our children's children.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Picture a world where the french fries you eat are registered as a pesticide. Where corn plants kill monarch butterflies. Where soy plants thrive on doses of herbicide that would kill a normal plant. Where multinational corporations own the seeds that farmers grow and legally control the farmers' actions.

That world exists. These events are happening now, and they are happening to us all. Genetically engineered foods -- from plants whose genetic structures are altered by scientists in ways that could never occur in nature -- are already present in most of the products you buy in supermarkets. They are unlabeled, unwanted, and largely untested.

In this updated and expanded edition of Genetically Engineered Food: Changing the Nature of Nature, authors Martin Teitel and Kimberly Wilson explain what genetic engineering is and how it works, then explore the health risks involved with eating these newly created foods. They address the ecological hazards that could result from modified plants crossing with wild species and escaping human control altogether, as well as the economic ruin that may befall small farmers who find themselves at the mercy of huge corporations for their livelihood. Addressing the "feed the poor" propaganda spread by the agribusiness industry, they describe how the genetic engineering "revolution" actually threatens to displace farmers in the Third World and intensify the problem of world hunger. Finally, the authors consider the ethical and spiritual implications of this radical change in our relationship to the natural world, and show what the future holds if we don't act now to implement a moratorium on the production of genetically engineered food.

SYNOPSIS

According to this primer for non-scientists, there are three basic problems of biotech food: future uncertainties, owning food, or more exactly, seeds; and the globalization of monoculture. Topics include how genetic engineering works; who wins and who loses because of the biotech industry; risks to health, environment, and the economy; ethical aspects; genetic engineering's claim to end starvation; and finally, making "informed choices" (or better, informed refusals) regarding—what this book might whisper between its lines—"frankenfood." Teitel is president of the Council for Responsible Genetics, and Wilson works with the Greenpeace Genetic Engineering Campaign.

Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

FROM THE CRITICS

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