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1 " Peter Singer put it when discussing the use of biotechnology in food, “It is a mistake to place any moral value on what is natural. I mean many things are natural, including racism, sexism, war, and all sorts of diseases that we try to fight all the time. So the argument about [genetically engineered] food being unnatural and therefore wrong oversimplifies this debate.”14 "
― Jayson Lusk , Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World
2 " The nutritional composition of beef provides much-needed protein, vitamins and iron.... Let us also not gloss over what is beef's most obvious benefit: Livestock take inedible and untasty grains and convert them into a protein-packed food most humans love to eat. "
― Jayson Lusk , The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate
3 " We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other. "
4 " Mortality rates for cage-free hens can be twice as high as those for hens in cages. So even though the hens have more amenities and freedom than in the battery-cage system, they die at a much higher rate. Some of that is a result of more fighting (the phrase “pecking order” is not some abstraction but a reality in hen houses). "
5 " The hypocrisy is astounding. So now, “in the City by the Bay, if you want to roller skate naked down Castro Street wearing a phallic-symbol hat and snorting an eight-ball off a transgender hooker’s chest while underage kids run behind you handing out free heroin needles, condoms and coupons … that’s your right as a free citizen of the United States. But if you want to put a Buzz Lightyear toy in the same box with a hamburger and fries and sell it, you’re outta line, mister!”3 "
6 " It is instructive to recognize that the gluten-free diet fad is a decidedly American (and to some extent Canadian and western European) phenomenon even though wheat is widely consumed everywhere in the world without reports of the wide-ranging maladies gluten supposedly causes (beyond celiac disease, which affects about 2 percent of the population). "
7 " Life expectancy in Mozambique is about twenty-five years shorter than it is in the United States.16 The problem Naico focused on was vitamin A deficiency in Mozambique. "
8 " The nutrient-rich biotech crops could arguably do much more good in the world than the original pesticide-resistant crops, but many of the entrepreneurs and inventors who have developed the biofortified crops lack the legal teams, political power, and financial resources to clear the regulatory hurdles. Potrykus is hopeful that golden rice will be approved by regulators throughout Asia by 2019, two decades after its creation. "
9 " there is broad scientific consensus that the technology is at least as safe as all techniques we have been using. . . . There is not a single documented case of harm from the technology—I doubt that there is any technology ever with such an unprecedented safety track record.” Most "
10 " Elites mistakenly believe they know more than they actually do, and successes within their own specialties of knowledge lead them to overestimate their competence in other areas—such as policy "
11 " This not only illustrates the challenge of being a profitable commercial farmer in today’s world, but it helps us begin to appreciate one reason why food is so abundant and affordable in the United States: the myriad technological innovations and concomitant options available to today’s farmers. "
12 " Right now the robot arms don’t chop or cut, but Oleynik told me that giving the robotic hands a knife is not a big deal. "
13 " Virtually all the insulin now taken by diabetics is produced by genetically altered bacteria in a lab.6 Before that it had to be extracted from the pancreases of cows and pigs—a process that was both expensive and lacking in quality control. As "
14 " Moreover, about 80 percent of today’s cheeses are made with rennet (an enzyme used to help turn milk into curds and whey) produced by genetically engineered bacteria developed by companies like Pfizer and Chr. Hansen.7 Before the development of the new bacteria in the 1990s, cheese makers often relied on rennet taken from the intestinal lining of baby calves. "
15 " Only about 5 percent of the U.S. population is vegetarian or vegan, and 84 percent of the people who are vegetarians and vegans eventually go back to eating meat.7 "
16 " Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, eds., Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); "
17 " There is no perfect government except in textbooks. "
18 " One of the leaders in the field is the Swiss company Evolva, which is already selling vanillin and stevia (a zero-calorie sugar substitute) produced by genetically engineered yeast. "
19 " So important was manure to crop yields that the ancient Romans elevated excrement to deity status by paying homage to Stercutius, the god of manure. "
20 " There are different ways of creating double haploids. One method is by crossing wheat with corn. Wheat thinks it’s being pollinated by another wheat plant and sends over half its genes (the haploids), but when they can’t match up with the corn’s genes, you’re left with the single haploids that you wanted in the first place. "
