Zhao et al., "Transgenic plants expressing two Bacillus thuringiensis toxins delay insect resistance evolution," Nature Biotechnology 21/12 (dec. 2003), 1493-7:

Preventing insect pests from developing resistance to Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxins produced by transgenic crops is a major challenge for agriculture. Theoretical models suggest that plants containing two dissimilar Bt toxin genes ("pyramided" plants) have the potential to delay resistance more effectively than single-toxin plants used sequentially or in mosaics. To test these predictions, we developed a unique model system consisting of Bt transgenic broccoli plants and the diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella. We conducted a greenhouse study using an artificial population of diamondback moths carrying genes for resistance to the Bt toxins Cry1Ac and Cry1C at frequencies of about 0.10 and 0.20, respectively. After 24 generations of selection, resistance to pyramided two-gene plants was significantly delayed as compared with resistance to single-gene plants deployed in mosaics, and to Cry1Ac toxin when it was the first used in a sequence. These results have important implications for the development and regulation of transgenic insecticidal plants.

The same issue also reprints the latest ravings of everyone's favorite science fundamentalist -- from the Washington Times:

Although involvement of the public is critical to their understanding of government policy, it is less useful for the formulation of policy. This is particularly true when complex issues of science and technology are involved. Science is not democratic. The citizenry do not get to vote on whether a whale is a mammal or a fish, or on the temperature at which water boils, and legislatures cannot repeal the laws of nature. However, on questions to which there is no scientifically 'right' answer (e.g., at what age can persons drive and vote, or whether we should carry out more manned exploration of the moon), public opinion can play a critical role.

Pretty disturbing bedfellows there, O enlightened ones.

Nature fish farming news focus (by Kendall Powell):

Global aquaculture is on the rise, growing more than 5% per year over the past decade. That might sound like good news for the world's food supply, but there's a hidden cost behind some of the farmed fish on supermarket shelves. Many, including the popular salmon, trout and cod, are fed on wild fish. Lots of wild fish. Today, about 11 million tonnes of fish � 12% of the total haul from seas and rivers � are caught each year just to feed farmed fish. It takes 2 to 5 kg of wild fish just to produce 1 kg of a farmed fish such as salmon.

This will soon pose a huge problem. Farmed fish are fed on a diet that leans heavily on fish oil and fishmeal � a protein-rich powder of ground-up, cheap fish such as sardines, anchovies and eels � as a source of vital proteins and nutrients. A simple calculation shows that the current haul of fish oil and fishmeal will soon be outstripped by the needs of global aquaculture. If the number of fish farmed continues to grow at its current rate, and if the supply of oil and meal stays the same � as it has for the past decade � then demand will outstrip supply of oil by 2010 (ref. 4). If those projections are extended, fishmeal looks set to face the same problem by 2050.

Over the past few decades, researchers have begun to think that one way to make aquaculture more sustainable is to change the diets of some of our farmed fish � to turn carnivores into vegetarians. It's a solution that carries its own challenges, but in the face of declining wild stocks and a booming aquaculture industry, many fish farmers and conservationists agree that if we are to continue farming carnivorous fish, this is the way to go.

[paragraphs out of order]

labels [Seattle P-I via tidepool]

The scandal has highlighted one of the messy truths of today's dolphin-safe, free-ranging, rain-forest-crunching, hormone-free grocery shopping: Some of the labels meant to appeal to the nation's growing ranks of environmentally conscious consumers are sound. But others are virtually meaningless. Still more are only as good as the ethics of the company that makes the products or individual workers stocking the grocery shelves.

biopharming state of the industry.

Apocalypse, Saatchi & Saatchi style:

Brands have run out of juice. More and more people in the world have grown to expect great performance from products, services and experiences. And most often, we get it. Cars start first time, the fries are always crisp, dishes shine.

Five years ago Saatchi & Saatchi looked closely at the question: What makes some brands inspirational, while others struggle?

And we came up with the answer: Lovemarks. A future beyond brands.

Lovemarks transcend brands. They deliver beyond your expectations of great performance. Like great brands, they sit on top of high levels of respect -- but there the similarities end.

Lovemarks reach your heart as well as your mind, creating an intimate, emotional connection that you just can't live without. Ever.

Guess I better head down to Wal-Mart and get me some of those [via gawker]. Oh wait, Chuck, they don't sell Damien Hirst at Wal-Mart?

Reading this while listening to Vandana Shiva speak about fair trade almost made my head explode.

On Thursday, Romeo Ramirez and two other members of the Immokalee, FL workers rights coalition, Lucas Benitez and Julia Gabriel, will receive the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in Washington for their role in helping expose five migrant-laborer slavery rings.
[Kari Lydersen in the Washington Post]

march of progress [New Scientist via corante]

A tropical fish that fluoresces bright red is set to become the first genetically modified pet to go on sale in the US.

update: also, Nature

Carlo Petrini, who is going to preach to the converted in a couple minutes, has something intelligent to say:

Coming back to the issue of GMOs, even though the recently published research findings of the British Royal Society -- fairly critical -- are being treated in Italy like election results, where everyone has won and scientific data can be used to support diametrically opposed points of view, it is clear that the real split on this issue is within the scientific community. So the supposed daggers-drawn Manichean conflict between scientists and environmentalists is nonsense. It has become a ridiculous partisan game where people feel they can only win through mockery and derision. Things are a lot more complex. There are many other matters to be considered in this issue -- questions involving economics, ethical values, work culture, conservation and sharing of resources. There is much discussion about world hunger and models of development; there are discussions whether it is really economically viable to embark on massive use of GM crops in our agricultural system. Perhaps we can only find ways to resolve these issues by calmly addressing the complexity of the problem.

Update [BBC]: A similar point from the UK:

Lord May, president of the Royal Society, says opponents and supporters of GM spun the outcome of farm-scale trials to suit their own arguments.

Lord May said some members of both the biotech industry and environmental campaigns had represented the results "in a biased and selective way".

Update 2: It is probably for the best that an enormous crowd filled up the venue for Petrini's appearance last night well before it began -- at least I got to watch the uncommonly shitty MNF game. And it is supposed to show up as a webcast here, if you really want people to tell you what you already know in the most annoying way possible.

update 3: Actually, having watched half of it, it was well worth the hour spent, but I promise to double my Niman Ranch intake if Orville Schell can put up a transcript of these things instead of the fucking webcasts. But if you care enough to read this, you should watch it.

What does it mean to eat local in the real world?

You get what you pay for

The company is so ruthlessly efficient that 4% of the growth in the U.S. economy's productivity from 1995 to 1999 was due to Wal-Mart alone, researchers at the McKinsey Global Institute estimated last year.

[LA Times welcomes Wal-Mart to California].

I declaim this a Martini you will love or hate, no middle ground. You could get drunk on the bouquet alone, a secondary high. Your neighbor will notice -- and I mean your next-door neighbor, as you mix this at home, not the crackhead on the next barstool -- and ask "Hey, is that pork you're drinking?" "Yes!" you trumpet proudly. A great way to make new friends. Unless he or she is a vegetarian. But who wants a vegetarian friend?

When will it stop?

East Bay Animal Advocates ('A Voice for Compassion and Justice') issued a news release last week announcing that while "millions of turkeys are cruelly raised and slaughtered for holiday food festivities ... this year, several turkeys escaped this horrible fate when rescued from numerous California farms by East Bay Animal Advocates' Animal Bureau of Investigations (ABI) team."

Salad, the silent killer [ NYT/Yahoo]

When the F.D.A. tested 1,003 samples of fresh produce imported from 21 countries in 1999 and 2000, 4.4 percent were found to have harmful bacteria. Of 959 domestic samples, 1.3 percent tested positive. Dr. Bob Brackett, director of food safety and security for the agency, said the results were statistically insignificant because of the study design. But some scientists disagree. "While the study design may not have been optimal," Dr. Morris said, "the differences are striking given the relatively large overall sample size."

"When you liquidate a population, one of the things that you need to do is to tell lies in order to devalue and marginalize those people. The most pernicious lie told about our family farms during this crisis is that they are 'inefficient'" [nfu (canada) via FoodRoutes].

Read with soundtrack of the deafening silence emanating from Miami, or the whines of the shafted from the Fed.

Monsanto has agreed to annual audits of its facilities to assure the federal government it was not selling genetically engineered wheat, a company spokeswoman said on Thursday. [Forbes via corante]

Update: this is why.

I was reading a pretty meaningless story on Mendocino County's efforts to ban biotech when I noticed that RoundUp resistance has become a bit more of a problem than Monsanto would have you believe.

Fash mag slag, and other tales of the zeitgeist
Please, everyone, can you tell me your opinion on gay marriage? The very fundament of our republic rests on this incredibly important topic.

Just try not to be so gay about it.

Turning to other crucial subjects that reveal the way we live now, my local "news" graciously took the time to introduce me to a man who has trademarked the term "govenator" in order to emblazon it on t-shirts and become rich. (I admit, I am a little hazy on the details of this whole "commerce" thing, but it definitely seems to involve fraud of some kind). I am, however, fascinated by the way this man decided to spell his useful and amusing contraction. I have already trademarked my own neologism for our next governer: the glimmenator. I expect to rake it in by cross-branding with special martial arts crystals.

And just in time, Maytag has released their personal beverage vending machine: "The SkyBox by Maytag brings the concession stand right to the living room, so you can savor the excitement of punching a soda machine without having to feed it coins or dollar bills." Thank God. That was close: I was teetering on the verge of running out of things to consume.

The final, and perhaps most epiphanic news item to which I would like to draw your attention: Scientists have found microbial communities thriving in slag dumps with a pH of 12.8.

I have to admit that --like Brazil and the Pope -- the release last month of the UK farm-scale evaluations for GM crops left me rather cold, but you can find all the information and commentary you can handle at AgBioWorld.

Gore Vidal returns to LA:

I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won't be pretty.

[via A&L Daily]

The New Pew report University-Industry Relationships: Framing the Issues for Academic Research in Agricultural Biotechnology appears to be one of those reports that concludes: we need more reports. But you can read it if you want.

11/19: And on that note, Syngenta unsurprisingly declined its option on the Berkeley Plant and Microbial Biology "partnership." [Nature]

11/26: Edie Lau wrote a much better article on this in the Sacramento Bee.

You have undoubtedly seen the news stories with their ridiculous headlines by now:

Genetic manipulation not new, study suggests

Farmers genetically modified corn 4000 years ago

...ad nauseam. The first problem is that this is not news -- we have known since the 'twenties that maize "evolved" from teosinte thanks to human selection. Nina Fedoroff's commentary in Science at least makes that clear. Unfortunately, she insists throughout on on calling this process -- which normal people would call "breeding" and "selection" -- "genetic engineering"; thus the irrelevant headlines.

This little episode reveals some of the reasons why you can't really trust anything you read any more. First, the tiresome insistance of agenda-driven scientists on manipulating the evidence: Fedoroff told Wired news:

Changes being made today are probably much smaller than the ones that changed a wild grass with very hard seeds to one that is edible and useful for people," said Nina Fedroff [sic]*, a plant biologist at Penn State University, who wrote a perspective that accompanied the Science study. "As far as a general hazard, (modern day genetic modifications) are much less hazardous than what people have done for most of the century."

This bizarre non sequitur suffuses her Science commentary, albeit a little more subtly. Wired at least got a reasonable reply from the lead author that explains why this endlessly repeated argument is so stupid:

"In the genes we looked at, early farmers did not 'change' anything within the gene," said Viviane Jaenicke [sic]*, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "All (of the genes) were already present in the teosinte (corn's precursor) populations. All the early farmers did was to select teosinte plants which carried the alleles they were interested in. And this selection process created then the maize. So it is not 'engineering' but a selection process."

*[Wired amusingly got both names wrong: Nina V. Fedoroff and Viviane Jaenicke-Despr�s]

Of course, this all came about because "journalists" simply scan the commentaries for news items (figuring that Science will highlight anything remotely newsworthy) -- and perhaps there is pressure on the commentators to sex up the research. Because the real import of the study -- interesting indeed, but hardly ripped from the headlines -- is summarized simply and concisely in the abstract:

Maize was domesticated from teosinte, a wild grass, by 6300 years ago in Mexico. After initial domestication, early farmers continued to select for advantageous morphological and biochemical traits in this important crop. However, the timing and sequence of character selection are, thus far, known only for morphological features discernible in corn cobs. We have analyzed three genes involved in the control of plant architecture, storage protein synthesis, and starch production from archaeological maize samples from Mexico and the southwestern United States. The results reveal that the alleles typical of contemporary maize were present in Mexican maize by 4400 years ago. However, as recently as 2000 years ago, allelic selection at one of the genes may not yet have been complete.

11/18: both the article and the commentary should be publicly accessible from this SciDev.net page.

Gary McKee of FSIS gave a pretty astonishing speech to the nation's meat inspectors last month:

If a plant is getting positives then it is a symptom that something is wrong with their process. Their system is broken and it needs to be repaired. If they are failing then we, as the regulatory authority, need to be ready to take decisive action.

Astonishing not only because someone needed to spell out the obvious in this way, but that someone from FSIS actually went ahead and did it. Of course, McKee's faith in both the efficacy of HACCP and the authority of FSIS is sadly misplaced.

[via USA Today via ABE]

Update: In case that wasn't clear, here is the fifth circuit opinion in Supreme Beef Processors v. USDA, which ruled that the USDA does not have the right to withhold inspection (they have never had the right to "shut down" a plant, or demand a recall, or really, do anything but refuse to inspect -- which right they no longer have since this ruling, 12/17/01).

Something called the Cascadia Times has devoted its fall issue to the demise of Pacific fisheries, including an excellent expos� of how the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council works, and the history of the rockfish fishery disaster. It's depressing reading.

via tidepool, which also sends along this beyond organic story from Grist [see here for more].

For some reason, Red Herring still exists, and they have an article about agbiotech VC in Brazil. This reminds me of the chaos Lula has unleashed down there about GM soy, (which, like the Pope, I haven't really cared enough about to mention; but for the sake of completeness, there it is). In other boring news, "free trade" continues to disintegrate in Miami, and Republican senators are unspeakably childish. "Daddy, I want my own filibuster. Look at me." Whatever.

Conversely, you do (or should) care enough about pizza to read another article on how to make it [LA Times].

Do you care what the pope thinks about GM food? Just in case.

Fascinating press release ("news story" from the Ottawa Business Journal [via corante]):

GangaGen is developing a phage-based drug that would kill off such harmful bacteria [O157:H7] in the guts of farm animals before they can even pose a risk to humans. Its sights are also set on salmonella and campylobacter.

The amusing part, aside from the obvious limitations of this approach, is the extensive discussion of phages without ever mentioning the word virus.

Can we all agree that despite Mr. Latte and the Food Network -- or perhaps because of them -- that mango chutney is an abomination? It is so 15 years ago.

USDA's Agricultural Biotechnology Intellectual Property database

Speaking of corn, ETC, formerly known as RAFI has just released a study on Mexican corn with some startling results:

Of the 306 samples in total in this case -- from all the communities and points of sampling -- 32 samples (10.45%) tested positive. 1% of the samples registered the protein Bt-Cry 1Ab/1Ac; 1% of the samples registered the protein Bt-Cry 9C; 3.6% were positive for resistance to herbicides CP4 EPSPS. 4.9% of the samples were positive concomitantly for two or three different transgenes: 3.9% of the samples for three types -- two different types of Bt (Bt-Cry9C, Bt Cry 1Ab/1Ac) and the herbicide resistant CP4 EPSPS; while 0.65% of the samples registered the presence of two transgenic characteristics: CP4 EPSPS and Bt-Cry 1Ab/1Ac. The remaining 0.33% was positive for CP4 EPSPS and Bt-Cry 9C.

I can't assess the accuracy of their methodology (they checked the proteins, not the actual genes), but this is serious. Let's hope they publish it.

11/10: CIMMYT responds, but not to the substance of the report.

The latest Pew 'zine focuses on maize biodiversity in Mexico in the wake of their conference. [I'll let you know when they finally publish the papers.]

Venkatesan and Ganapathy, "Impact of nitrogen and potassium fertiliser application on quality of CTC teas," Food Chemistry 84/3 (2004): 325-328:

Tea flush shoots, comprised of three leaves with a bud, were collected from long-term fertiliser trial plots, in four successive plucking rounds after NK manuring, and processed into black tea. The black tea samples were analysed for thearubigins, theaflavins, caffeine, volatile flavour compounds, crude fibre content and water-soluble solids. Results indicated that overall quality of tea was impaired when either nitrogen or potassium was used at high levels. The NK ratio of 1:0.83 appeared to be optimum with respect to quality of made tea as well as for flavour index, particularly when the N dose was 300 (or) 450 kg/ha/year. Amino acid and polyphenol contents of the crop shoots were also higher due to this ratio of NK manuring. A lower polyphenol content was recorded when the plots were supplied with less (or) no nitrogen and potash fertilisers. Positive correlation coefficients were obtained between nitrate reductase (NR) activity of crop shoots and amino acid content"

Reviews: R. Mohan Babu , et al., "Advances in genetically engineered (transgenic) plants in pest management -- an over view," Crop Protection 22/9 (2003): 1071-1086; FAO/WHO Expert Consultation on Safety Assessment of Foods Derived from Genetically Modified Animals including Fish background document.

USDA to relax BSE rules:

The proposed minimal risk region would include regions in which an animal has been diagnosed with BSE but in which specific preventive measures have been in place for an appropriate period of time that reduce the risk of BSE being introduced to the United States.

I.e., Canada.

11/6: Senate chokes.

They have also revised the organic rules.

[both via the IFT newsletter]

Food: Angelenos rabbits no more, alleges Shaw, perhaps inventing the "Beard effect" in passing; and Karp on the glories of the Newtown Pippin.

CJR media octopus. Where to find out that Si owns the New Yorker (duh) and the Muskegon Chronicle. [via gawker].

more on cloning [Post]

Eight of 10 panel members said they were confident it would be safe to eat food products derived from cloned animals or their offspring, the key conclusion of a draft FDA report released last week. But some members of the Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee, meeting in Rockville, appeared uneasy about the level of animal suffering that a large cloning industry might entail, and the panel deadlocked 5 to 5 on whether the FDA had properly characterized such risks. Several panel members said the scientific data on that issue are disturbingly thin and the question needs more research.

Smithfield invades Poland: "Villagers only grasped what had happened when the company began dumping liquid faeces on the snow-covered fields." [Spectator via ABE]

You know, if someone would only stop shaving, maybe Tom Ford wouldn't quit Gucci. Ahem.

EPA approves YieldGard Plus corn.

olestra II, but shittier [USA Today]: "Z-Trim, an insoluble fiber that goes through the body without being digested, was invented by a government scientist. It's intended to replace some of the fat, including unhealthy trans fat, found in processed foods."