So today's session on Biotechnology - mainly Genetically Modified (GM) Food- was rather interesting. In fact, all 5 presentations were on the same topic, with each classmate covering different aspects of it.
With regards to the heading of this post, would YOU prefer GM food or not? What are the pros and cons of consuming them? Just in case you don't know, everyone have already unconsciously consumed GM food. The first question to probe into would be, What exactly is GM food?
Take a look at the picture above. Obviously, it has been genetically modified. What else? I only found out today that tomato ketchup is considered as one too. As much as i don't wish to consume GM food, I've been tearing at least six packets of ketchup each time I buy a burger from McDonalds. (However, I don't think I'll want to eat a blue or purple corn if there is..) Somehow the first thought that came to my mind when unnatural colored corn was mentioned during class was, "Are you sure that's edible? Looks poisonous to me." (Oh well, food dye could have been injected, isn't it?)
And then we also talked about organic food. This topic got me thinking, are organic food GM food? It depends. The seeds of these crops could have been genetically modified right from the start but grown the organic/natural way. Whatever the case, if it comes from a lab --> GM. The next question would then be the ethics. I would very much like to know, why people in the US are not allowed to know the origins of the food they consume? Don't they have the rights? What happens if someone ate something really toxic/harmful to the human body, then they won't even know how they died. oO. Personally, if the reason given was to have trust in the government in which they will not harm their people, I feel that it's not valid in any sense. One needs to know what he/she is consuming, just as how one needs to know what you are doing and not just follow blindly. Therefore, labels are extremely important, at least to me.
Moving on, we also covered scarcity of land. Take Bangladesh for instance, where land owned by people will be passed down from generation to generation. And this particular land will only become smaller each time it is being inherited by the younger generation. Why so? The land will continuously be divided which makes farming by each household within the whole generation tougher.
Should land be used to grow food or energy resources?
Many students chose the option to grow food, and so do I. In my opinion, although we have to strike a balance between these two options, but food is a greater necessity than energy resources. Without food, we cannot survive.
"There's enough on this planet for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed."
- Mahatma Gandhi -
I like this quote very much because I agree with the message that Gandhi was trying to bring across. While it is true that we actually do have enough resources , food, etc, but look! So much food going to waste! People using up the planet's resources like no one else's business! If this continues, what would happen to the future generations? Really wonder how it will be like to have all resources depleted. Completely. Because of the previous' generations' inconsiderate way of using resources.. Things aren't that simple; There's more to it than just these examples. As mentioned in one of my previous post, if U.S. could just make an effort to reduce as much consumption as they can, the future would probably be brighter. Otherwise, I guess we'll just have to hope for a new planet to appear from somewhere that it allows life on it. Meanwhile, in order to bring about sustainability, farmers / people would have to enrich the soils on their land with chemical fertilizers, to replenish all the nutrients lost. That way, it will not go to waste and people can reuse it over and over again for good purposes.
Talking about food going to waste, I believe everyone knows the amount of waste (in general) that the world have. Let's not look at the world as a big picture; Zooming in to just Singapore alone, how many incinerators/landfill sites do we need to have before all of our waste can be cleared? Are we going to have to reclaim more land for our rubbish? I remembered having an excursion to the incinerator when I was still studying in primary school. (Oh yeah, amazingly I can still recall because it was such a good experience.) Standing in an enclosed "office" with glass that allowed viewing of the dumping ground, I saw how much waste was in it! According to the staff there, that was considered little (on the surface) because we didn't know how deep it was. But I can't recall if he said it was 100m deep or something. Looking at the machines doing their work to scoop up the junk we contributed and releasing all into this chimney-like hole for burning, I seriously think we contributed far too much, in a negative sense. However, the sad fact is that, I don't know how else we can improve. Raising awareness or getting one person alone to work on this isn't going to help. And we have to accept the fact that this is just Singapore ONLY. How many countries do we have.. Just a random thought which came to my mind: How many percent of the Earth contains our waste? Food for thought.
Just to keep some info. here, some interesting facts which I've learnt during class:
Biotechnology have different colors representing different sectors!
White: Industrial
Blue: Marine
Green: Agriculture
Red: Human
And finally, we touched on the last topic for the session: Food Security.
What's that? Some might ask. Here's the definition:
It refers to the condition where all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.
Basically, it means that there's no period where there's not enough food; That is, famine.
And how do you go about having food security? Notice that pests consume much of our food. This meant that a finite percentage of them had actually gone wasted due to the negligence of humans. Imagine that amount of food could have been used to feed the poorer rural areas. (Then a smaller fraction of the population would have to starve now!) Other than pests, food left to rot away. If we consider carefully, all these actually impacts us greatly without us knowing. We have been taking food for granted, always assuming that there's food somewhere out there for us but we ignored the fact that people are in fact, taking care of all these for us.
So, coming to the end, we went through 7 readings; and a question was raised:
How much land do we need to feed one person? On-the-spot research said 0.07 hectares - for vegetarians, and 0.5 hectares if we consume like how U.S. does, including meat consumption. The main aim of these figures was just to show the comparison. Therefore, conclusion: U.S. really really REALLY needs to reflect on themselves!
With that said, here's the end of my blog post. Rating for this session: 8.5/10 as we could have discussed more on environmental issues as well. But it's still good! As usual, looking forward to the next session in Week9.
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