Greetings
Fellow gardener!
There
seems to be a lot of confusion running around these days as to what varieties
are Heirloom, what varieties are “Hybrids”, and what varieties are GMO.
It
will be my attempt here to see if I can clarify that a little bit for you.
Here
we go!
Heirlooms, Hybrids, GMO. What’s up with all that?
First
off “Heirlooms”
– Real simple. These are basically just older varieties that have been
relegated to the care of those gardeners who care to keep them alive for future
generations. These can include the children of those varieties as crossed by
the backyard gardener who has crossed one older variety with another to get
something new but genetically of older parents that were dropped by mainstream
agriculture in favor of higher yields or disease resistance often times
sacrificing things like flavor, color, and food value in the process. This
brings us to the next item:
Hybrids – In essence, we are all
hybrids. Being born of parents makes an individual, be it plant, animal, or
person, a hybrid of Mom and Dad. This is a process of nature and how she does
things so don’t let “Hybrid” scare you off of a variety you’re considering for
your garden.
Most
of our garden plants have been crossed with human assistance since the days
when our species stopped being hunter gatherers in favor of a more stable
agrarian society. Corn is a classic example. It was just another grass once
upon a time. But one that had nice big seeds that were tasty. Our ancient
ancestors just kept picking the plants that had the biggest and tastiest seed
heads until what we know today as corn started coming off the stalk. Upon
examination it isn’t hard to see why so many of our ancestors relied on corn.
It grows just about anywhere and the seed keeps F-O-R-E-V-E-R.
Take
an ear of that old Indian corn from the dust in Grandma’s attic and sow it.
Chances are it’ll sprout and grow. I’ve had it grow in 8” of crushed lime in a
corner of our parking lot and left it there for a season just so I could show
folks the power of corn as a food source.
Back
to the home “hybridizer” and how that works. Let’s say that we like Bell
peppers a lot but we’d like one with some heat. To get that we’d plant a nice
fat bell pepper variety next to a jalepeno and let the bees pop the pollen from
one to another and vice versa. Or to have more control over the mating we place
a screen box over each plant and do the buzzing from flower to flower with a Q
tip, or my typical method of choice, finger tip. : )
At
the end of the season we taste some of the fruits of this crop and save the
seed from the fruits that are closest to what we’re looking for. Next year we
sow that seed and at the end of the season do another selection for the
qualities we’re looking for. After about 5 or 6 seasons of this we should have
something pretty darn close to the “Bellapeno” we were looking for.
This
takes us to the next level of current human biotech:
GMO
– Those three
letters stand for Genetically modified organism.
You’re
probably not going to do this at home unless you’re a mad scientist with one
serious lab in the basement or behind the door hidden by the bookcase.
The
basic process is we decide we now want our Bellapeno that we just got stable
with the breeding selection to now have the same omega 3 concentration of
salmon. We isolate the protein strands in the DNA of salmon that make it grow
omega 3 fatty acids. Then we find a carrier virus that easily affects peppers.
We “infect” the carrier virus with the salmon strands and give our Bellapeno
plants the “fish flu”. If you’re looking to get there from here you infect
multiple plants and select the ones that show the best result for omega 3
concentration and pepper qualities.
Whoohoo!
We got there! Yay! We’ve got peppers
that give us omega 3’s! Sounds good? Maybe not so much…
Because
we’ve circumvented nature we have no idea whatsoever what will happen when the
“fish flu” we just created gets loose in the food chain. All of a sudden weird
things can start to happen. Salmon start getting plant viruses, Peppers start
getting fish diseases, God only knows what happens to us when we eat it and get
fish flu. Wisdom would dictate to not mess with something so potentially
dangerous unless we can see all the consequences of our actions. The simple
fact is, we can’t.
Nature’s
been at this biology thing for what we guess to be about 4 ½ billion years or
so. Ya think maybe she’s just a little bit smarter than Homo sapiens sapiens
who was treating diseases with leeches just 600 years ago, and prescribing
things like turpentine and mercury for human ingestion just 100 years ago?
Observe
the side effect lawsuit ads for modern “miracle drugs” on any given night of
TV. Do you trust these people to monkey around with cross species DNA
modification? I don’t. In my view they might as well still be prescribing
turpentine and mercury.
But
hey, we just got peppers that have omega 3’s and everybody wants them because
they’re “healthy” and rich with Omega 3’s!
Now
we go to the patent office with our virally modified gene structure for
Megabellapeno and sell it to the highest bidder. And whenever nature carries
the patented genes to somebody else’s pepper patch we can sue them for patent
infringement.
That’s
precisely what’s happening in our culture today.
As
of a couple of years ago Monsanto was taking people’s farms because the wind
carried patent genetics across the fence line from a neighboring farm growing a
Monsanto variety of GMO corn, that you probably ate in the Corn flakes you had
for breakfast.
As
long as we buy the products and take the prescriptions manufactured by these
companies they’ll keep on with it. Market demand for processed convenience
foods and “whiz-bang” pharmaceuticals that’ll cure what ails ya has shown them
that we’ll blindly buy whatever they sell us so why should they do anything
different?
To
quote one of my favorite science guys, “Just because one can do a thing,
doesn’t mean that one should do a thing”… “Seek wisdom first, then knowledge”. David
Suzuki
To
quote myself, “It’s the right of a sentient life form, to have the freedom to
choose, this world can turn for the better, it depends on the logic we use.”
That
is why I choose to Just say No, to GMO. : ) Your path is yours to choose.
Hopefully
I’ve helped you understand what’s up with Heirlooms, Hybrids, and GMO and the differences
and similarities between them.
If
you’d like to spend about 45 minutes of your life to gain a deeper
understanding of the potential dangers posed by GMO in agriculture here’s a
link to Silent Forest with David Suzuki. You can view it on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSl7sQXVzUQ
A
wise man, that one is. ; )
‘Til
next time,
Happy
gardening!
Al