Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
shipment to the United States it is going to get in and you won't get
caught, and you won't have your food returned to you, let alone get
arrested or imprisoned.”
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For many years, FDA inspectors have simply
returned the small percentage of contaminated food imports they have
caught to their country of origin, and many of them turn up again at
U.S. ports or borders, making a second or third attempt at entry. The
odds strongly favor their admittance.
A poll by Consumer Reports in 2007 revealed that 92 percent of
Americans wanted imported foods to be labeled by their country of
origin. Such labeling was vigorously opposed by food industry groups,
and their lobbying of congressional representatives was successful in
delaying the implementation of such a law for many years. But the pub-
lic's wishes were realized late in 2008 when such labeling became man-
datory. There are exemptions, however. Meat and poultry sold in butcher
shops and fi sh sold in fi sh markets, which total 11 percent of all meat
and fi sh, are exempt because the law is worded to cover only large
establishments that sell a certain minimum amount of fresh produce.
There also are exemptions for processed foods. Imported ham and
roasted peanuts, for example, do not need to be labeled unless they were
canned or packaged in another country. Mixtures such as mixed frozen
vegetables are also exempt.
Can We Improve on Nature? Genetically Modifi ed Food
Plant breeders have been modifying the genetic makeup of crops for
centuries. Today, almost nothing we eat is a natural product that could
survive on its own in the wild in competition with naturally occurring
vegetation. By selectively breeding individual plants within a single
species, cross-breeding plants from different but related species, or
inducing genetic mutations using chemicals or radiation, conventional
plant breeders have promoted desirable traits to increase agricultural
productivity.
Living organisms contain genes, complex chemicals that for unknown
reasons have physical meaning. One arrangement of genes translates into
tomato, another into fruit fl y, a third into tiger. Certain snippets of the
gene pool (genome) in broccoli are expressed as fl orets, another snippet
as stalks, a third snippet means green. It is nothing short of magical.
Geneticists and biochemists are now able to take a gene that they have
determined to have a certain meaning in an organism and splice it into
a completely different type of organism. Grapevines have been injected
