"Tomorrow's Table" by Ronald and Adamchak

Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food
Pamela C. Ronald & Raoul W. Adamchak
Oxford University Press
ISBN 978-0-19-530175-5
208 pages (but everything from 169 on is glossary, references and index)

This is a slim book, designed to be neither too technical nor too political*, covering many of the issues that put organic farmers at odds with genetic engineering, and softly knocking most of them down. It's unnatural? Well, conventional breeding permitted by the organic regulations permits modifying plants through radiation and mutagenic chemicals (such as Calrose rice). Foreign DNA? Would you rather be eating papaya ringspot virus in every bite of papaya? And so on. It's an entertaining read, alternating between Adamchak, an organic farmer, and Ronald, a geneticist, both at U.C. Davis (and married to each other).

It's also a cookbook -- about 8 recipes scattered throughout, one of them tongue-in-cheekily identifying which ingredients are GE.

It talks about some of the issues of ownership of genes and seedstock, but skirts some of the more sensitive issues such as a large producer (who shall remain nameless to avoid flamewars), that requires GE seed to be bought each season and not reused from grown stock. The answer is of course that researchers should be able to make money off of their inventions, but it also goes against millennia of tradition permitting farmers to re-use seeds.

Does this book solve the issues preventing organic farmers from using GMO seeds? No, but it does make it clear that it's not an us-vs-them thing, it should be a conversation.

Reading between the lines, it appears to me that most objections to GMO originate in the corporate sources, and those sources roles in Vietnam-era herbicides. There's good to be had from GMO, with risks no worse than conventional breeding, and significant improvements in yield and food security worldwide (one interesting anecdote, though: A GM wheat that had potential for more grain per acre had lower yields in practice because birds can perch on the stems and eat the grain). The book fails to draw a firm conclusion, attempting more to open the conversations that are, right now, quite closed.

I picked up this book used through paperbackswap.com -- if anyone would like to read it, I'd be happy to pass it on.

*(too hard for clever folks to understand - they're more used to words like "ideology")

I found this book well-written, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. Thanks for the excellent review-- reminds me I should give it a re-read one of these days. I wish more people on both sides of the GMO "debate" would read it.

Jen