by ....© 2000, Kimit A. Muston
I hope you have padlocks on your kitchen cabinets. Because if you have tacos in there, you are playing with fire. Those Tacos could be toxic. They could bring about the end of the world!
I'll bet you never thought Mexican food could be so active.
The doomsday tacos in question are Taco Bell brand sold in supermarkets. Because of a mix up they contain small quantities of a genetically engineered corn that has not yet been certified by the Food and Drug Administration for human consumption.
The corn is not poisoned. It has been okayed for animal feed and it's okay for humans to eat the animals that feed on it. Nobody has died and there have been no reports of illness from eating the terrible tacos. So why the big news story?
If you listen to the bio-terror activists, these traumatic tacos are the thin edge of the wedge, the first step toward an ecological doomsday where newly invented genetically altered vegetables and fruits cause human mutations, vast mass extinctions and the end of life as we know it.
I can understand the nervousness. The future is a very scary concept. Why, a mere century from now a large number of us will no longer be alive. Although many of us will still be registered to vote.
But the year 2100 is not going to be all that different from 2000. Men will still leave the seat up, women will still not tell men why they are mad at them and some people will still feel that if one more thing changes the world will end.
Let's get some perspective on this. If the sun should blow up, that would the end of the world. If CBS should broadcast a second season of "Big Brother", that would be bad. But making corn more resistant to insects is not going to bring on doomsday.
How do I know this? Well, I don't want to shock you but a seedless watermelon is not a naturally occurring plant. And next time you are in the woods your chances of stumbling over some wild iceberg lettice are pretty small.
Green beans, apples, carrots, tomatoes, oranges; they have all been genetically modified using crude methods; grafting or cross pollinating. Luther Burbank did it with roses and Mendel did it with peas and Gorg the Caveman did it with wheat so often he eventually produced Wonder Bread.
And how about that eco bon vivant Johnny Applesead? This drifter imported a non-native genetically altered species of tree and spread it all over North America. And the world did not end.
It did change. But the world is always changing. Species did become extinct. More will become extinct wether we plant the new corn or not. But not, evidently, the monarch butterfly.
The enviro-panic squad put out the story that the pollen from the new "Bt" corn would kill the lovely, fragile monarch. But a preliminary study done by the EPA says it won't. Should we be careful? Of course we should be careful. But let's not panic until we see the final CBS fall line up.
We're not talking just corporate profits here. Asian children raised on a rice diet stand a good chance of being crippled by rickets because rice does not contain vitamin "A".
The new genetically engineered "golden rice" could make rickets a memory, unless some eco-hero of the new millennium breaks into the research facility and destroys the experimental plants in the name of passionate stupidity.
"Bt" corn has a gene inserted into it's cell that tells the corn to produce by itself just enough pesticide so it tastes bad to insects. The pesticide "Bt" is already being sprayed on fields all over the world. The goal is to stop spraying poisons into the air. It would nice not to have to use pesticides at all but so far the grasshoppers and beetles have refused to negotiate a political solution.
I think the Bio-Chicken-Littles should stick their panic in their gnomes and smoke it. I think the news media should stop treating genetically altered food as if it were something new, rather than a new technic for an old science. And I think all the great Taco crises proves is that ultra-liberals are as terrified of the future as arch-conservatives.
Kimit Muston is a writer sweating in North Hollywood. If you have comments about his columns, you can reach him at editor@inditer.com