It's not news that the government and big business have led us astray on multiple levels. Pick up any Adbusters or Mother Jones magazine and you'll find a plethora of ways corporations have sold the environment, animals and human health to the highest bidder. What's fun (or horrific, depending on your mood) is learning the specifics. Seeds of Deception delves into the details of genetically modified (GM) food: what we should know about the politics, science and investment behind the industry.
One of the many issues the book raises is that GM food is almost impossible to distinguish, since it's generally not labeled here in the United States. Companies, such as Monsanto, spend millions, if not billions, of dollars keeping the public happy and ignorant about the lack of testing behind their products. They even have some pretty smart folks believing GM food is going to feed the world and cure blindness in Third World countries. It's taken a lot of dough to create that groupthink. As we've learned from pharmaceuticals, the cigarette industry and the meat and dairy industries, when a company is willing to spend that kind of money on public relations, someone's putting frosting on a mud pie.
Peppered with anecdotes about animals choosing non-GM food over GM food, Smith's evidence of scientific and political cover-up is startling. It's impossible to ignore the evidence in this book. Even if only a fraction of it is true, we're in some serious crap. The problem comes down to a simple statement Smith quotes from geneticist, David Suzuki: "Any politician or scientist who tells you these products are safe is either very stupid or lying. The experiments have simply not been done."
Seeds of Deception's chapter "Muscling the Media" discusses corporate strategy to eliminate media reporting on GM food in the United States. "Under the auspices of the public relations and lobby firm Capitoline/MS&L, they [GM giant Monsanto] created a plan to identify and then stifle those reporters and reports that were critical of rbGH." (rbGH is the infamous growth hormone that makes cows produce more milk - horrible stuff.) The question remains: Doesn't Smith worry about being slammed and discarded like the many journalists and writers he describes? His book isn't going to show up on Oprah anytime soon - or is it? If enough people consider the seriousness of the topic, Seeds of Deception won't fall by the wayside.
If you have room for another New Year's resolution, please let it be to follow the suggestions in this book. Eat organic, locally-produced food. Feed your children organic food and encourage schools to look into the realities of GM food in their cafeterias. Avoid certain foods altogether (like non-organic papaya from Hawaii, for example, which has a 50% chance of being GM) and encourage restaurants to eliminate GM food from their menus.
Seeds of Deception will open your eyes - eyes that, from then on, will search for organic alternatives to take-your-chances, you-might-be-a-guinea-pig ingredients. It has been praised for reading like an exciting novel, and I agree it's quite a thriller. If only this terrifying exposé were fiction.
