from wired magazine: "Israeli scientist Nachum Kedar was quietly bringing a natural version to market. By crossbreeding beefsteak tomatoes, Kedar had arrived at a savory, high-yield fruit that would ripen on the vine and remain firm in transit. He found a marketing partner, which licensed the tomato and flooded the US market without any PR problems. The vine-ripened hybrid, now grown and sold worldwide under several brand names, owes its existence to Kedar's knowledge of the tomato genome. He didn't use genetic engineering. His fruit emerged from a process that's both more sophisticated and far less controversial.

 

 

writer richard manning claims that the tech behind genetic engineering has proven itself ineffective and cumbersome for modern agriculture. boy, what a relief! and just in time, too! nearly every soy bean in existence is a genetically modifed organism and GMO starlink variety corn is turning up in mexico where it was never purchased, never intentionally planted. good thing GMO's are a failure.

 

that said, i think he's correct about smart-breeding where non-commodity crops are concerned. monocropping requires the fascism of genetic modification, in order to ensure robust health and genetic purity for vast continents of single crops, growing from manitoba to the rio grande valley. 

 

but smart breeding for taste? that makes sense to me.

 

 

i was waiting for something like this to come out, although the guardian article doesn't specifically implicate the four contractors who were horribly burned in iraq, their bodies defiled. my take on those deaths at the time was, there's a horrid story behind that sick weirdness. people don't just randomly decide to kill and burn and hang the bodies "just 'cuz." that was a personal, vengeful killing.

from the guardian article:

"One civilian contractor was accused of raping a young, male prisoner but has not been charged because military law has no jurisdiction over him.

"Hired guns from a wide array of private security firms are playing a central role in the US-led occupation of Iraq.

The killing of four private contractors in Falluja on March 31 led to the current siege of the city."

it's gonna come out eventually that those 4 contractors did something very, very, very vile. and you'll probably see it on kazaa the week before it breaks on 60 Minutes.

 

 

i picked up lisa and isaiah from the airport last night, and i saw iko before he saw me. he was sitting propped up in his mama's sling, and she was turned away, so she didn't see me either. but isaiah was faced toward me, so i came tromping across the baggage claim area in big cartoon steps so that he'd have to go, "what the fuck is that?" god. his face got longer while he was away. his eyes got more knowing. when he looked at me and recognized me, it was like looking into the future at him. he looked like such a little boy. four lousy days and he looked years older to me. for just a flash. then his mouth spread in the big rubbery, 6-tooth grin and he was back to being a baby.

 

lisa's plane ride alone with the boy didn't go nearly as badly as we'd feared for her. isaiah had been sick so we were anticipating a hell-day of fevered screaming and fussiness and hateful business men scalding her with shitty attitude. so in preparation for her homecoming, i'd loaded up the bathroom with soothing salts, roses, foot scrubs, bath perfume, candles, the ravenswood vintners blend and organic body pollish (i'm really not sure what that is, but my pals in the wedge health and bodycare dept swore by it, so into the cart it went). i bought steaks and greens in case she was craving something hardy and nourishing. i brought a sandwich and macaroons with me to the airport in case she hadn't been able to eat all day. i raced to get them, prepared to be super daddy and the best husband in the world. "so, how was the trip?" i asked lisa, taking isaiah and wincing in anticipation of her story.

 

"oh it was really great!" she said, like she'd returned from a dinner party. a perfect gentleman of a fellow passenger had helped her with her diaper bag when she first boarded. then older ladies who'd been moms and had breastfed their kids were her seat-mates, so they formed this nest around lisa and got her anything she needed. when isaiah fussed, they all cooed in sympathy and took turns trying to entertain him. as a result, when lisa could get up and walk around, isaiah was in a pretty good mood, so he worked the crowd a la bill clinton and got everyone smiling like it was free to be you and me (isaiah has this effect on the unsuspecting - i've seen it and it's a little scary). the kid even got some sleep on the plane, so it looked like he'd pretty much licked his cold. tra la la!

 

surreal.

 

but what a relief, i have to say. lisa and i came home and hung out in the sun room, drank the ravenswood, listened to the night sounds of our neighborhood and watched the boy show off his new skills (he can wrestle himself up to a standing position while holding something in one hand, the little gymnast).  i have the day off today, so we'll all be together. hoo fuckin ray!!

 

 

 

this is the peak of the produce guy's calendar. the high holiday. the raison d'etre. jaded produce workers who otherwise shrug their shoulders at juicy cantaloupes or crunchy apples (it's just fruit, they say) actually get a gleam of lust in their eyes when the champagne mangos roll in.

 

though champagnes have been in the store for a few weeks now, i haven't bothered getting my hopes up - too early for glory. i'm eager to report now, however, that i just had the first, great mango of the season. buttery smooth. sweet/tart. the flesh dissolves into mango juice in the mouth. salivation glands kicking in so hard it almost hurts. yow.

 

for the uninitated, i'll conduct classes in how to eat champagne mangos in the bar at wiscon (or maybe the ratbastards party) this memorial day, assuming they're still available. if you can't make it to madison, though, here's the skinny:

 

how to select a champagne mango - yellow flesh with a slight orange luster is ideal, though once we move into the very peak of the season (i think we're there!) it's difficult to select a bad one. for any mango, regardless of variety, look for sap oozing from the black stem. sometimes you'll see evidence of black trails on the rind, mango ooze that the fruit packers obviously tried to wipe away on the shipping end. this is the clearest sign that the mango is fully ripe, so sugary that it's weeping with sweetness. again, in season, you can't pick a bad one, but a firm mango will get you a slightly tart one, and soft will get you a sweeter one. i recommend trying both.

 

how to eat a mango - get a filet knife or other long, thin, easy-to-handle knife. hold the mango on end, stem down, with one of the skinny sides toward you (as opposed to the flatter side). the mango-shaped pit sits in the fruit like a smaller mango within. cut from the top down and skim along the right, flat side of the pit. if you hit it, don't freak out, just guide the knife along the right side, curving along and downward. slice through the stem. do the same on the other side.

 

you now have two "cups" of mango fruit, lucky you. take your knife and score the fruit like a checker board, down to the rind without cutting through and ruining the bowl effect. take one cup in both hands and with your fingertips push up and turn the bowl inside out. you now have a little array of mango squares, ready to be eaten off of the rind. the delectible little mango nougats might even start separating away from the skin at this point, which means you picked a really ripe one. share the other cup with a friend, if you must.

 

or better, share it with a lover, but be prepared to finish what you started. you still have a lot of delicious fruit on that pit, so peel off whatever rind might remain on the fruit - and suck it off. look your lover in the eye while you do. get slick, sticky. watch him melt like so much mango flesh while he watches you, and don't you dare wipe your face. share the last, wet bite, together.

 

fade to fireworks.

 

~

 

from city pages, the twin cities alternative rag, here's a nice little ego boost for my store....

 

but this is a damn hoot.

 

 

 

straight from the Ministry of Genetic Improvement to your fruit salad!

 

 

look: my story "alone in the house of mims" is up at strange horizons.

 

 

lisa's grandmother died last week. it wasn't totally unexpected, but it was still sad. she was 89.

 

so, lisa and i flew out to san francisco on short notice for the funeral, which was on thursday. it was isaiah's first plane trip and while he wasn't the nightmare screaming baby, it wasn't exactly fun for him, either. he's a supernova of energy, so he didn't understand why he couldn't at least crawl around and bite the bountiful number of calves. luckily, the kid likes books and that soothed him pretty well. i think the nice lesbian sitting to us was going to rip her hair out, though, if she had to hear us read brown bear, brown bear one more time.

 

the funeral was inoffensive and actually very meaningful, i think, for lisa's family. but it was held in a posh mausoleum, a "plot" in which her grandmother's church secured for her (i think that's how it worked - she was not a wealthy woman). now to me, "mausoleum" means something out of a gorey or gaiman story. marble slabs, scurrying rats, cobwebs. juliet offing herself over romeo's corpse. but this was like the atrium of a corporate highrise with ferns, tropical plants, running water into placid pools. and wall after wall of name, date, and now and then, a cheery framed photo.

 

the internment, consequently, was pretty anticlimactic. no well-tended country cemetery. no flowers tossed into the grave. after the coffin was wheeled across the carpet to the final resting "drawer," the crowd tried to maintain a sense of sober decorum, which is hard with two workers in blue jumpsuits spraying the coffin down with adhesive and wielding sealant guns. isaiah and i strolled away at this moment. i had to get on top of my laughter after thinking, "ashes to ashes, caulk to caulk."

 

faithful readers of this ridiculous blog will remember that i have the bizarre mutant power of being able to lull my son to sleep with "the star spangled banner." well, i haven't loss this touch yet. so while the mortuary pit crew was loudly preparing the coffin, i took isaiah to a quiet and removed part of the mausoleum where i could hum to him, quietly and patriotically. problem is, contemporary as this crypt might have been, it was still mostly marble. so while i was humming the national anthem, my voice was rebounding across the mausoleum. cut back to the funeral. lisa and her sister are holding hands with their mother and trying to keep the solemn moment together in the face of a loud coffin lift, when they hear my voice. faint. but definitely barth. and then it hits them what i'm humming. fortunately it was soft enough that only they seemed to be the ones picking it up over the whining mechanical lift. posh mausoleum, bizarre hydraulic funerary practices, and national anthem were too much. the sisters got crippled with church laughter.

 

luckily that weird segment of the funeral was over fairly quickly. the eulogy was read, which was dark and lovely. then we repaired to the wake in moss beach near a farm. sunset over the pacific ocean. lots of chewy red wine. isaiah climbed his first set of stairs to the very top. then there were long walks with calla lillies blooming and horses stamping in the green growth of california.

 

the rest of the trip was pretty much a whirlwind for me. lisa, her mom, and sister have a tradition of going to a spa in the mission district of san fran. so they did that on friday, and the boy and i had lunch with the delightful and finely appointed heather shaw. it was great to see her, even if it was just a quick lunch, and she directed me to rainbow grocery and borderlands bookstore (she knows me pretty well!). at rainbow i tracked down a copy of northern gothic by the truculent mamatas, and isaiah gawked at the hairless cat, there, named ripley. fun.

 

yesterday i flew home without lisa and the boy. they're staying on so that lisa can visit other members of her family. me, i'm left holding the bag of home, work, garden, etc - which is cool, but i was surprised how hard it was to say good-bye to isaiah. on the plane ride home i read northern gothic, a fairly solid first novel/novelette (?), but nick's blog and non-fic offerings are vastly superior (i bought move under ground a few weeks ago so i'll report my findings when i finally get to it). when i got home last night i checked up on my email (i'm waiting on story feedback from strange horizons), the NFL draft in which the vikes again addressed our piss-poor defense, endured the relentless affections of the cats, and then slept for ten hours, which is very unlike me.

 

gad. sunday menaces me from the kitchen. dishes left in the sink for four days are scary foes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

jeez. too many posts today. here's the last one, dang it.

 

i forgot to mention that i bumped into the fabulous midori snyder at my co-op yesterday! when she called my name, my work-brain couldn't figure out who she was for a minute. and yet, it seemed so natural to see her there (she lives in milwaukee, the poor soul). midori and her husband were buying groceries for their son, and she had a bag of champagne (atualfo) mangos because she's a smartie.

 

 

is selling out a dilemma? harold ramis sums up:

 

“I have no trouble selling out—I’m a benevolent hack, in a certain way—but I want to pander for something I believe in.”

 

 

i've been thinking about drafts today. i tried to get wiscon programming to run a panel on drafting (no one exactly jumped at the idea), because i was curious how other writers do it. i'm not interested in a "tell-me-o-famous-author" way, but more of a "so-how-does-your-wierd-brain-work" way. do you number your drafts? label them? does this help? when you write a book, do you open a new file for every draft of every chapter? why the hell do you do that? do you have a system for finding the one passage you wrote in the third draft of chapter thirteen, or do you just remember it? just curious, is all.

 

i don't march through orderly drafts or race my troops to baghdad. i'd finish more stories per year if i did, but my draft process is more like an OCD than a "process." a phrase gets stuck in my head and i rewrite it a bunch of different ways, like dustin hoffman in rainman ("excellent driver. i'm an excellent driver.") the little phrase becomes dialog, or a lead sentence/chapter, or maybe a scene forms around it. then i rewrite the scene. then i rewrite the phrase in question some more. keeping a draft count through this is hopeless, and i get depressed because i'm not making headway on the story, so i call my friends, whine about how stupid i am. they get sick of me, then i get sick of myself. then, like a pregnant woman whose feet are swollen and who can't stand sleeping on her back anymore, i finish the first draft out of utter disgust and push it out of my body in one long push of hard labor. it's not a beautiful delivery, that's for sure. it's pretty much a breach birth out the back of my head. nonetheless, a shitty first draft, as anne lamott poetically calls it in bird by bird, is born.

 

anyway. that's where i am right now. got up at 5am today and gave birth to a squalling ugly little spud called "furious host." i'm not proud. it's technically a first draft, i guess, but it feels more like number ten.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i gave my buddy cindra halm the first chapter of the book i'm working on. she's a textual poet, whose work filters into her brain on channels that most of humanity doesn't receive, i'm convinced, so she offers a very different reading than would, say, clarion. or UW-madison. or anybody else i've ever met. i love her poetry. it can sound like a foreign language to me, because she so effectively disassembles english into building-block syllables and sounds, so that i have to back up to get meaning after my first, musical read of her work. and i love it that she refuses to relinquish this vision when she reads my stories, keying in on words, sounds of words, even letters, at times, or repeating images that i may not have known were there, but which i'm always amazed to find, as if she were an dream-interpreter from another culture. eventually, her hand-written critiques start gelling into cindra-esque poems in the margins of the manuscript: "birds/like the rooster/so far feel/ unruly,/ugly, and/unpredictable." besides all this, i love getting a crit that isn't from a fellow science fiction writer. cindra is totally unhinged from the "sf/f/h" world, wouldn't know what that referred to if she saw it in print (but she'd love it, puzzle over that construction as if she'd discovered a hieroglyph). do her critiques help? she always helps my prose, that's for sure. cindra helps me remember that sentences are not just there to make the clock tick. sentences have their own music and have to be tuned with care, and to hear that music, sometimes, you have to hear, or overhear, your own words as pieces of sound.  

 

 

isaiah cries when i leave the house in the morning. it is so heart-breaking, but thrilling in a way, too, because it's easy to feel like i'm the cheap, opening-act comedian to lisa's big number, especially when i'm watching isaiah while she's at the bookstore. when lisa comes home from work, no matter how good a time we were having, he's all eyes for the mamasan - and suddenly i'm "the help." c'est la vie. a boy's best friend should be his mother. but it gets me right in the damn heart when i'm bustling for work, finding a not-too-wrinkled shirt, loading my back pack, then aiming for the door, and i suddenly hear him crying. i realize he's paying attention to me, my morning rites. he knows when the backpack goes over my shoulder that i'm about to leave, and it gets him right in his little heart.

 

(say awwww....)

 

 

i change the titles of isaiah's books when i read to him. here's the current library:

 

 

 

you get the idea...

 

turning to the world of undead rockers, greggy points out that The Who is in need of a bassist and a drummer. meanwhile, The Beatles have a bassist and a drummer. mad scientist greggy thinks it's time to frankenstein these bands together. greg, please note: ringo would pop a ventricle on keith moon's "the real me" drum line. problem or no?

 

 

some writers mine childhood trauma for fiction. some mine childhood's imaginitive visions. steven milhauser mines fred quimby era "tom and jerry" cartoons with a straight face. i really like the effect.

 

 

i met with stella evans for coffee this week. she's becoming a writer whose work i always look forward to reading (take this for example), so it was great not only to meet her, but to know she's a very cool person beyond the page.

 

continuing on the writerly note, there's this from the new york times about the various forms of humiliation that writers endure:  "Michael Ondaatje wrote about a well-known American novelist who was invited back to her high school to read. She suddenly felt sick, ran into the bathroom and threw up noisily, forgetting that she was wearing her microphone."

 

that little anecdote segues nicely into my food news of the day. how stupidly orwellian is our food system? individual beef producers are actually prohibitted by the federal government from testing for mad cow. no lie.

 

 

 

 

 

condi rice is absolutely adorable. everyone loves condi. that's because she's america's sweetheart! when she gets all tremulous and indignant, she's every bit as huggable as mary tyler moore. don't you just want to hear her say "ooooh, mr. grant!" just once?

 

never mind that she could bite rumsfeld in half (and probably has). that just makes her all the more cuddly and precious! i want condi rice to be the next christina aguilera! i want a condi poster in my bedroom. i want condi glittery nail polish! i want to be a tough cutie pie just like condi rice!

 

 

1) dude calls to place an order of 8 chicken breasts and says, "i'll take four skin-on and four skin-off." 2) dude calls up the meat department yesterday (easter) and says, "i recently bought your wellshire virginia ham, and it says on the package, 'store below 40 degrees.' so, is it ok to bake it?" 

 

god, no! baked ham? are you insane??

 

 

(i just love picturing guy number two so stressed out with his whole family and the risen jesus breathing down his neck that he has to call the store to clear this up.)

 

 

 

tim pratt: because he writes with great soul in a genre often accused of soullessness.

 

jay lake: because jay's like a safecracker or second-storey man. he can and does get in any market, any where. 

 

karin lowachee: because she's a fully formed novelist with her first book - and karin's only going to get better.

 

david levine: because david is a one-man roots movement who writes honest-to-god science fiction - and does it very well.

 

chris moriarty: not a true "novelist" the way lowachee is, chris deserves the JWC because she cranks up a real roller coaster in Spin State - and hugo voters love that up.

 

 

despite the worthiness of the above list, barthanderson.com is offering a 'sup widdat? award to dora goss, chris barzak, and greg beatty, all of whom deserved to be on the JWC ballot, too. sup widdat?!?

 

other sup widdats? go to the hugo-stiffed jeff vandermeer for Veniss Underground, nalo hopkinson for The Salt Roads, and neil gaiman for "Bitter Grounds," which in my mind, is his best short story to date.

 

 

 

isaiah and i went walking today, with the boy wearing his maoist cap with red star beneath forest green hood. we got to may day cafe and saw my buddy angelica:

 

angelica: he looks like a hobbit! a commie hobbit!

me: thanks!

angelica: look at him! damn! he's gonna start a revolution in the shire.

me: straight outa hobbiton. 

angelica: i think he's chairman bilbo!

 

 

 

we rented "searching for debra winger" last night, rosanna arquette's documentary about women in their forties trying to make a sane life for themselves in the film industry. by the end of it, lisa and i wanted to kill arquette, who intrudes on the movie with a banality that...oh hell, it's a hollywood she-weasel with her own personal film crew. you do the math.

 

ironically, she got some good footage in spite of her vapid self: whoopi goldberg talking about her ass and good roles for women ("aunts are cool. i'll play an aunt. aunts fuck. grammas fuck. it's all good."); martha plimpton talking about the same ("i don't care about 'strong women.' i just want characters. i'll take weak women, i'll take broken women. just write us some good characters."); and the eponymous actress describing why she ditched her career and the hollywood snakepit of creepy producers assessing her water retention. jane fonda, vanessa redgrave, and sharon stone all seem to get what this movie is about far better than arquette does, and their comments on aging in a glamor-shot obsessed world are incisive.

 

arquette bashes you over the head, repeatedly reminding you that the movie is about how women balance their "art" with motherhood. yet a child never appears on screen once, and you soon realize that "working" in the case of this very movie means arquette abandoning her 6 year old in order to get drunk with ally sheedy in the russian tea room and schmoozing with Great Big Stars at cannes. there's isn't even a momentary sense of the economic privelege these people enjoy being able to work for a mere three months per year. no talk of who takes care of the kids during those months, but the importance of "motherhood" is agreed upon by daryl hannah and melanie griffith over mimosas and shrimp scampi. hurray!

 

by the time this schlockumentary gets to poor winger, i half expected her to pimp michael corleone from godfather 3: 

 

"just when i thought i was out....they pull me back in..."

 

 

if you can, read the article on madeleine l'engle in the april 12, 2004 issue of the new yorker (no link; it's not online; get yer lazy ass to a kiosk). it's an illuminating, sad, and confirming indictment of a certain process in writing. there are so many tragedies in the world of words, where narrative becomes the tool for reconstructing a broken self. i don't mean therapy in courier, but rather, a writer's fiction as a diorama of her murky internal life rendered lucid, tidy, or at least, editable.

 

the effects of this on a writer's loved ones can be as devastating as any addiction or mental illness, as evidenced by l'engle's children's various reactions to her and the beloved books she wrote (there was a similar article in the new yorker a few years back by theater critic john lahr, about growing up in the shadow of his dad burt lahr and the Cowardly Lion). as i started reading the article, my heart gladly rose to the subject matter - i absolutely adored a wrinkle in time when i was in third grade - but as it became clear what effect l'engle's fiction-as-revisionist-autobiography had on her children, it felt like i was strolling past a crash. furthermore, l'engle seems to understand what she's done to her family on some level. regarding writing, she says:

 

 

the article isn't icky reading, though - all the hurt is too deeply buried for it to appear anywhere but off of the page. besides, there's more to the article than rubbernecking. when asked for a definition of science fiction, l'engle responds, "isn't everything?" and she doesn't draw a distinction between children's  and adult ltierature. her advice about writing for children is the same as hemingway's for writing generally.

 

"write your story. "

 

but first you have to take a shot at staring at yourself without flinching.

 

 

 

strange horizons is on one of its hot streaks right now. seems i link to them every monday, and well, i'm doing it again, because the lucy a. snyder article is great. elsewhere, one of my favorite zakbar stories is up at fantopolis, and while i would like to tell you that there's another installment at ptarmigan, alan is instead talking about NBA comics. so it goes.

 

speaking of ratbastards, alan and kristin came over last night, bearing the gift of expired beer. alan was a little nervous about bringing it, but that didn't phase me or lisa one bit. liquor stores aren't open on sundays in minnesota (in wisconsin, where i grew up, this would be like churches closing up sundays), so friends bearing beer yesterday were friends indeed. besides, i ask you, what's to expire? expiration dates on beer are a blatant conspiracy (a) to get liquor stores and groceries to put "legs" on the product, as the biz refers to fast, solid sales, (b) to create an aura of precious perishability around beer, and (c) to keep me from drinking alan and kristin's beer. 24 hours later and no puke in sight. your honor, the defense rests.

 

what's to report? let's see. we ordered pizza, discussed lacto intolerance, kristin tickled iko, alan and i revealed the depths of our icky D&D pasts in greater detail to each other (oddly, lisa had to take care of isaiah during that stretch of the evening...), and we pollished off all the shiraz from last night and the expired old thumper, too.

 

later, isaiah called me da-da! (he also called me "zha-zha", but hey.)

 

 

 

 

 

 i get a dose of insomnia every spring. it's charming in its bloodshot way, i guess. rebirth, charged brain, the unlocking winter-world batting me awake with a deafening roar of microbes. sure, i'm getting tons done: nearly finished with a review and two short stories ("nearly" on the review, kristin, i promise!), research for work, a newsletter article, and even a new chapter-draft for the book. so that's cool, but damn, insomnia is triply brutal with a kid in my life. i used to think that little was more defeating than watching the sun rise after a lost-night of tapping my pen on a page. now, seeing isaiah lift his head and open his eyes is far more crushing. the sun doesn't demand so much of me.

 

only the allure of "hellboy" keeps me floating, alas!

 

 

the organic consumers union and other food action groups are flipping over the recent decision by the california rice commission to allow a small stand of genetically engineered rice to be grown in california's central valley.

 

it's hard to understand what the big hairy deal is. i share the long-standing fear of, say, winona laduke and the white earth reservation in northern MN, who fear that corporate-grown, unregulated, GE rice will drift in, dominate their natural rice, and ultimately supplant it. which it will.

 

the GE rice that california foodies fear, however, is not designed to dominate other plant forms. indeed, this rice is not even meant to be eaten. it's "pharm" rice. completely uninterested in the food biz, ventria biosciences designed their rice to "grow" human hormones, lactoferrin (from human breast milk) and lysozyme (from human tears). spliced into rice DNA, these hormones grow in the rice's storage proteins and are 30-400 times more viable in a rice vehicle than in tobacco or corn. meaning, ventria is in the pharmaceutical business, not the minute rice business.

 

when californians for GE free agriculture claim, "Contamination of the food supply with this rice is inevitable!" they're engaged in fear-mongering and, like many anti-GE enthusiasts, sound like villagers with pitchforks and torches . they don't bother explaining how they think that ventria's rice, which is self-pollinating, will actually contaminate commercial rice. ventria's GE rice pollen is only viable for 5 minutes after shedding from the grain, and, even if it could reproduce itself with other varieties, the rice won't even be grown in the same county as consumer rice. furthermore, the spooky franken-rice is transported like biohazardous material in sealed trucks, which is how anti-GE ag groups demand that GE seed/grain be transported in the first place.

 

so while i sympathize with and support the anti-GE cause, i wish "food action groups" would put on their thinking caps and make more intelligent appeals. because the real issue is not genetic drift. it's what ventria or another venture capitalist will do with the half-human/half-rice weirdness once they get their operation up and running. ventria biosciences, as reported in the Sacramento Bee, has cited diarrhea and iron deficiencies in third world children as reasons for creating a better baby formula, which they've been testing since 1997.

 

and that's the real issue.

 

consider: recently, lysozyme was the Protein Data Bank Molecule of the Month because it "protects us from the ever-present danger of bacterial infection," and Life Extension magazine says lactoferrin "documented anti-viral, anti-microbial, anti-cancer and immune modulating/enhancing effects." in other words, some Pharmaceutical Giant will probably re-open the old school baby formula vs breast milk debate all over again, believing that money can be made by selling baby formula to third-world countries with high infant mortality rates (rather than helping them create clean water supplies, better agricultural systems, or competent health-care programs). nestle's is still trying to shake down ethiopia for six million bucks, even after bilking them for years on the formula shell game.

 

and a baby formula that seemingly helps kids fight off bacterial infections will, at the surface level examination, answer one of the age-old slams against existing formulas, that they don't impart immunity as breast milk does.

 

what OCA and others should be pointing out now is that cutting-edge, sci fi, hormone-growing pharms will simply never outdo what breast milk does for a baby born in its mother's home environment - even in third world countries. "Because the mother makes antibodies only to pathogens in her environment, the baby receives the protection it most needs-against the infectious agents it is most likely to encounter in the first weeks of life." the pharmed proteins in question simply cannot do that.

 

so the problem isn't genetic drift, which is a non-issue here, or poisoned Uncle Ben's, or wrecking california's corporate rice patties (i hope winona laduke is laughing her ass off at the irony of corporate rice-patty owners fearing for the genetic purity of their rice). ultimately, it's about the first world's bizarre belief that it's easier and cheaper to to save babies in africa by creating an abominable man-rice, when those babies are far better off, by all accounts, when they suck from their own mamas for free.