It isn’t often that parents urge their children to act like cartoons. Then there’s Popeye the Sailor: “I’m strong to the finach, cause I eats me spinach,” he famously sang.
Around the dinner table, is there an animated character that moms and dads have invoked more often than Olive Oyl’s sweetheart?
Nobody has talked much about Popeye in recent days--not since spinach grown in California, probably on an organic farm, has sickened more than 100 people in 19 states in an E. coli outbreak. In a recent Wall Street Journal commentary, Dr. Marc Siegel, an associate Professor at NYU School of Medicine, commented that it is unwise to automatically consider everything organically grown to be safe.
Nobody knows for sure what caused the outbreak. However, an elderly woman in Wisconsin is believed to have died from the tainted spinach. Others have sought treatment in hospitals. The Food and Drug Administration has warned Americans not to eat bagged spinach or bagged salads that contain bits of spinach in them.
There are some theories but it may not be possible to know with absolute certainty what happened. An inevitable question arises: What can we do in the future to prevent this from happening again?
Let’s start off with a basic truth: Food has never been safer to eat in human history than right now. There are occasional moments of concern, such as the one we’re currently experiencing over spinach, but in fact these outbreaks are extremely rare and our monitoring system spots problems quickly.
There are also false alarms. Consider the recent fuss over genetically modified rice. It seems as though an exceedingly tiny amount ( an estimated 6 grains in 10,000) of GM rice known as LL RICE 601, grown in a U.S. test plot a couple of years ago, has found its way into shipments of rice bound for Europe.
Although the Europeans can be ridiculously jittery about biotech food, they’ve responded calmly. Last week, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) said there was no cause for worry: “the consumption of imported long grain rice containing trace levels of LL RICE 601 is not likely to pose an imminent safety concern to humans or animals,” it said in a statement.
This hasn’t stopped anti-biotech activists from scheming like Bluto, Popeye’s black-bearded nemesis. They’re trying to exploit this minor news event to renew their tiresome calls for a ban on farm biotechnology. They won’t succeed, but they may inspire needless worries among ordinary citizens about the “contamination” of our food supply.
But how can food be “contaminated” by a harmless ingredient? The answer is simple: It can’t. This is a deceptive use of the word “contamination.”
To be sure, there are real instances of food contamination, with this organic spinach providing the latest example. But we won’t treat these outbreaks with the seriousness they deserve if anti-biotech radicals have their way: They’d much rather impose a moratorium on foods that won’t harm anybody than devote their considerable energies to educating the public about authentic health concerns.
The irony is that biotechnology will actually improve the health of what we eat. That’s because it allows farmers to use herbicides and pesticides much more efficiently--this not only reduces their own costs, but also grows healthier crops.
We know that when bugs chew holes in crops, they create pathways for disease. Fungus can invade them, for example, and it can then infect people who don’t know what they’re eating.
But if the crops are designed to fend off pests naturally, through the increasing use of biotechnology, then those pathways never get opened in the first place--and they never get genuinely contaminated.
There’s no such thing as biotech spinach, and so it would be wrong to suggest that biotechnology could have prevented our current problem with spinach. But this is the type of problem that biotechnology is already helping us address, and which we’ll address much more effectively in the future if we embrace biotechnology’s potential rather than panic in the face of a phony controversy.
There will come a time again, very soon, when it will be a good idea to eat all of your spinach. There won’t ever come a time for our society to turn its back on biotechnology--not if we want to be “strong to the finach”.
Dean Kleckner is an Iowa farmer, father and grandfather who eats spinach with his children and grandchildren. Mr. Kleckner chairs Truth About Trade and Technology (www.truthabouttrade.org) and is past president of the American Farm Bureau.
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It isn’t often that parents urge their children to act like cartoons. Then there’s Popeye the Sailor: “I’m strong to the finach, cause I eats me spinach,” he famously sang. 
