20.6: Of Science and Malnutrition

Worldwide, hundreds of millions of people are malnourished, and millions die each year of malnutrition. Far too many people are sick and dying for lack of good food.

Although there are gifts of food to the world’s hungry, the greater gifts come from advances in agriculture and food science. Even in our own not-so-distant past, we’ve come to know the benefits of these advances.

We may have a sentimental attraction for the days when organic farming on small family farms was the only farming, but the reality is that the advent of “chemical” fertilizers, pesticides, and such, helped make the rapid development of other industries possible.

Increased crop yields became possible with fewer farmers, allowing many to leave the farms for the cities. Even with only a relatively small segment of our population continuing to do our farming, we’re able to provide an abundance of food, not only for ourselves, but plenty to export as well.

High-yielding seeds have been developed— seeds which have been said to advance the health of more of the world’s people in a shorter time than any other technological advance in history. Plants have been bred which produce less stalk to yield more rice. The development of hybrid corn increased U.S. corn production from 23 bushels per acre in 1936 to 114 bushels in 1982—a 5-fold increase.¹⁰ From all parts of the world came reports of incredible increases in crop yield from the use of such hybrid seeds—and with it the alleviation of much hunger.

In 1964, the opaque-2 gene was discovered, a corn gene that markedly increased the nutrient value of the corn protein. (But the gene was recessive and the crop yield was less, so it was with some difficulty that researchers were finally able, by crossbreeding, to develop it into a commercially useful breed of corn.) This astonishing grain has protein of a quality that approaches that of cow’s milk. Even when it’s the only protein source in the diet, it meets the hard test of curing kwashiorkor, the tragic protein-deficiency disease which has crippled too many of the world’s children.

Many such rabbits have come out of food technology’s hat. The new tools of biotechnology have broadly widened the possibilities for agriculture and food technology, promising much faster and more precise contributions. But the goals of agricultural scientists and food technologists remain as before—greater crop yields, the need for less fertilizers and pesticides, more nutritious and tastier plant foods, drought-resistant varieties of staple crops, crops that stay fresh longer from farm to table.

The greatest gains are for the world’s hungry. Many can’t afford the fertilizers that can result in more food from their plot of land, nor the pesticides that would preserve more of the crop for human consumption. Many live long distances from the farming—with no refrigerated trucks to bring food without spoiling.

A varied diet is a tenet of good nutrition, yet the world’s hungry typically have but a few staple plant foods to choose from. For them, new crop varieties can mean the difference between health and disease, between life and death.

Rice, a dietary staple for half the world’s population, lacks beta-carotene, which our bodies can convert to vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency, common in developing countries, impairs immunity, causes blindness, much suffering, and millions of deaths each year. Golden Rice goldenrice.org was created by biotechnology to enable rice to produce beta-carotene, giving it its golden color.

Creating Golden Rice was a huge scientific endeavor. Beta-carotene isn’t a protein, so it was not a matter of inserting a single gene. Biosynthesis required several genes for the needed enzymes (proteins) that had to work in sequence —a breakthrough in biotech. It was also a humanitarian endeavor, the seeds to be offered free to poor farmers in developing countries.

The 8-year project was headed by Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, culminating in 2000 by publication in the journal Science and a Time magazine cover featuring Potrykus.

Much to the distress of the science community, Golden Rice still isn’t available commercially (as of 2020) and isn’t widely available to people who would benefit the most. Potrykus retired in 1999 at age 65 from his professorship at the Institute of Plant Sciences of the Swiss Federation of Technology, but continues to work to make Golden Rice available. In 2013, he even met with the Pope, who gave Golden Rice his personal blessing.

In 2016, more than 100 Nobel laureates signed a letter asking Greenpeace to end its opposition to Golden Rice and to GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in general. In 2018, the U.S. joined Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in approving Golden Rice for human consumption.

It’s hard to cross the barriers of old taboos, of unconscious fears and frightening myths, of suspicion of new food forms or tastes. Let’s go on in the next chapter to examine our fears of the food additives that are added in food processing.