Hybrids? No, thanks!

Here some of our tomato plants growing in the garden

Last spring we planted some vegetables. It's my wife that mostly takes care of the little plants, but both of us put all our enthusiasm into this enterprise and finally, after much success with zucchini, in this period we are beginning to harvest our beloved tomatoes, maybe a little late, due to our mountain climate. We are very proud.

Our tomatoes taste much better than the ones you can buy at the store, because the fruits ripen while still on the plants. If only a tomato could be put in the telephone cable i would let you taste it yourself.

The prize for our devotion was being able to see the whole growth, from the seeds to the resulting fruits. But it's not only for this that i like the idea of gardening vegetables. I believe that producing our own vegetables shows that, atleast in part, one can exit from the logic of consumerism that fattens our society despite the poor countries.

Self-production of vegetables, moreover, reduces to the minimum any waste, especially in a subsistence system upon which the plants grow from the seeds saved from the previous year's harvest (we are planning to try this method). This past year experience delighted us so much that we have already begun to buy seeds for next year, and in this research i discovered a disconcerting thing.

At the store the tomatoes we like most are the "Mini San-Marzano". So we tried to look for informations about seeds of this variety, and we discovered that they are hybrids. In flower shops and nurseries we noticed also on packaging of other vegetables seeds the lablel "F1 hybrid" well shown.

As an ignorant that i am, i tried to give a meaning to this expression, as an analogy to the animal world. An hybrid is an individual born crossing parents of two different races. But what about it in botany?

Tomatoes "Rouge d'Iraq" variety

Surfing the Internet it opened to me a new world. A hybrid (i was looking in particular for tomatoes, but it applies also for a big number of other vegetables that are at the base of entire continents alimentation, like corn) is a plant born from a seed obtained from a fruit produced with a particular technique of artificial impollination.

The first step lies in reproducing plants by mean of autotrophic breeding, for a number of six to ten generations. Since tomatoes are hermaphrodites (that is that every flower contains both the masculine and femimine element), it is possible that they self-fecundate (autotrophic pollination).

This type of breeding obtains children-plants weaker than their parents, because (if i well understood) also the recessive genes reply. In genetics, between two alternatives, the dominante (stronger) gene tends to win, and this gene usually brings the best peculiarities, for example the vigor of the plant (infact a gene that carry a looser peculiarity would be already extinct in the history for natural selection). In an autotrophic pollination, instead, the genetic patrimony of the style (feminine part) is identical to the one of the pollen (masculine part), and so also the recessive genes can reply undisturbed.

Once obtained plants like that, weak but pure, the second step is to cross, by mean of artificial pollination, the styles of one genetical line with the pollen of another one (the artificial pollination is mandatory to be sure that the flower don't self-pollinate again). This process produces plants much more vigorous and fructiferous than the ancestors that started the lines. The seeds produced from the fruits of these plants are labeled as "F1 (= first generation) hybrids". So, buying seeds of "hybrid F1" varieties one can expect a better production, and this, if it is already stimulating for a little garden of one's family, it is fundamental for productive farmhouses.

Tomatoes "Cherokee purple" variety

The problem of hybrids obtained like that is that those plants produce fruits that contain seeds which genetic patrimony is very poor, so the next generations tend to be always weaker and weaker. So much that it proves inconvenient to use the seeds of the previous harvest to grow the next year plants.

The consequence of this is that the farmers must buy every year the seeds for their plantations. And who gets the benefits are the companies that produce hybrid seeds. Their strategy is to find commercially valid varieties, push them on the market and create a demand, so that the farmers must convert to those varieties and buy the seeds year by year.

Few multinational companies, which names are already known for production of genetically modified organisms (Monsanto, Pioneer,...) control also the market of these seeds, and so they are progressively becoming owner of the entire agricultural and food market, manipulating economy of poor countries that lived with subsistency farming till now.

For the farmers themselves it's impossible to learn to produce their own seeds by mean of ibridation, because, above the special skill required, this technique also needs a big effort in labor. Easier, for them, to buy the seeds from those multinational companies that brilliantly solve this detail of overworking cheap labor of the poor countries.

I am kind of ignorant about this matter, and till few days ago i didn't even know the existence of hybrid seeds. I wonder if there exist a movement that opposes to these techniques similar to what it is happening for GM products. I wonder if there is a regulation in Italy (i doubt there is any in the USA, being that there is none for GMO either) that imposes atleast to label the seeds obtained in this way.

I wonder, at last, how could it be possible to make an ethical shopping when buying vegetables in the stores: for what i know not even organic agriculture refuses hybrids.

References:

• "Hybrid Seed Production in Tomato" (AVRDC - The World Vegetable Center)
• Abstract from "Seminario sull'alimentazione" (Associazione Consumattori)
• "Ibridi F1" - Forum topic (Collettivamente.com)
• "Recuperare il seme dei pomodori" (AAM Terra Nuova)

Our tomatoes in these pictures are - i hope - all non-hybrids.

The clone in the dish

The clone in the dish

Guglielmo Ragozzino

During april 2007, the European Committee asked to European Food Safety Authority, EFSA, an opinion about the possibility to put on the market milk and meat coming from cloned animals, for example pigs and cows. The answer - a substancial go-ahead - came in these days, and the Coldiretti, the important Italian union of agriculturists, spreaded it to a public of non-specialists, clarifying their contrariety and concern.
In few words, EFSA just ensured that the nutritional qualities are not different from the products coming from animals grown in traditional way. It takes time anyway to make a public consultation, within February 25, in order to give a definitive answer in may. At this point the Committee will put together this opinion with the one by European Group on Ethics, and will decide. Also Coldiretti made an own practical (and not scientific) consultation, online; the result was that 55% of the answers is an absolute NO, 36% asked atleast the labelling of the foodstuff that shows the cloned origin; while the 8% is in favor and 1% didn't give any answer.
It remains the suspicion that EFSA cannot free itself from the charme of American FDA (Food and Drug Administration), that already pushes toward the liberalization of the cloned animals.
The reasons that bring also a part of Eurpoean agricultural industry to follow the path to cloning is the convinction to obtain in this way deformed animals, dedicated to the production of bigger hams, more milk, etc. But this does not consider atleast three bad things.
The first is the elimination of any biodiversity. This last thing is not a fixation of tropical ecology, but it is the attempt to have, also to our climates, less riceptive to sicknesses organisms.
The discendants of Dolly sheep won't ever be able to free themselves from the sickness present in the ancestor's (if that's the way one say) organism. From the absence of biodiversity descends an inferior immune defense, so the oxes are often exposed to epidemics. Lastly, often genetics give opposite result than those hoped by who uses it in order to "improve the races"; and it is cause of a producteive life really short, so that even a part of American agriculture moves countertendencial steps and confirms again the utility to cross animals with different characteristics in order to obtain more healthy anymals, and after all more meat and milk. The experts of the farms that we asked to, told as that instead of throwing money on the cloning science, it would be better to invest on the structures for animals. In times of climatic changes, a too strong genetic science would be a further disadvantage. Even more if the genetics is connected to cruel breeding systems, in crazy places. The cows have already a halved life, instead of 7 to 8 lactations they had in the past nowadays they have 3 or 4. The cloned oxes would have together all those defects.

from Il Manifesto on January 12th, 2008 [free translation by me - here the original]

There is a lot of noise, in these days, about the news and marketing, for food, in America, of meat and milk coming from cloned oxes and pigs.
Even if it is a different procedure, this subject has several sides in common with the one of genetically modified organisms. In the case of cloning, infact, there is no genetical artificial modification. There is no scientist that goes to artificially change the sequnce of the DNA, and so the phisical (and organoleptic) characteristics of the produced organisms are the same of the producer organisms. Instead, it is substituted the reproductive mechanism that generated the new organism, obviously with the goal to obtain a better quality from the commercial point of view. The idea is: we select a cow (or pig) commercially perfect and then we replicate it always identical to itself, and so the same commercially perfect. The genetic wealth of the result organism is infact identical to the source organism.
In the case of GMO, instead, the DNA sequence is modified, substituting some genes with other taken from DNA chains of other completely different organisms. The goal is somehow different than the case of clonation, because in this case they tend to produce new organisms, that contain characteristics that couldn't be generated in a natural way. For example i remember the demonstration, some years agon, of a flower in which genetic sequence had been inserted the gene of bioluminescence, taken from the DNA of a crustacean. The new organism was a flower which petals made own light night time. In this case the idea was: we create an organism that contains all the characteristics we are interested to, giving up those useless characteristics. Such organisms have the commercial advantage to be able to create new spaces of market to fill of business. In the particular case of the bioluminescent flower they thought to grow it next to the highways, with obvious advantages from the point of view of driving safety (the idea is not bad, even if i have to say that, thinking just few minutes about, i can find entire epical poems of alternative solution with the same effect much cheaper - for example the use of those lamps that accumulate solar energy on daylight time and give back a discrete light night time).

Even avoiding moral implication tied to the human intervent in the creation process of a new life, there are still some questions about the marketing of cloned or GM animals (or vegetables).

The first questions that filled up the European media after the news of commercialization in America of clone products are the ones that affect closest the consumers, firstly careful to health and quality of the product. The cloned meat is healthy? Is it good?
As far as i know there is no reason to doubt that the meat (or milk) of a cloned animal have different properties from the meat of the animal source of the clonation. That meat (milk) has the same characteristics, and so if the one is good, the other is good too. If the one is healty, the other is healty too.
For the GMO it is different, because the characteristics of the produced organisms not only are different from the ones of the organisms they started from, but they are different also in an umpredictable way, being that the genetic modification can (and usually it is so) create organisms that have never been produced, and won't ever be produced, in a natural way. A question is, for example, if, and in which way, an allergic to strawberries person could eat a chicken which DNA is mixed with strawberry genes. The answer to this question depends on determining the reaction of the antibodies of that person to the cells of the strawberry chicken. Since there is no medical experience on this kind of cells, the reaction cannot be predicted.
For what concerns the frlavor, it is obvious that the reason to use GMO technology for food is to produce organisms that taste differently from the ones they use to apply the technology.

Evaluating the problem from another point of view, another open question is the ecology one, well focused by the quoted article. The world, with its food chains is based on biodiversity, or right on the fact that the reproductive crossbreed of two individuals generates an organism partially different from both. The surviving differences are the more favourable ones in terms of environmental adaptation, since the mutant individuals have more probabilities to survive, and so to breed, perpetrating the mutation to the next generations. This mechanism extended the neck of the girafs so that they could feed on the higher leaves of the trees, it transformed to flippers the limbs of the cetaceans, it divided the animals in herbivores that feed on vegetables, and carnivores, that feed on herbivores. But it also divided the living beings in animals that feed on vegetables and vegetables that feed on the rests of the animals.
If we discovered the commercially perfect ox (or pig), it will end up that agriculture will produce always that same ox (or pig), entire farms full with copies of one only organism always and everywhere equal to itself, reproducing characteristics always equal, and not even necessarily the best ones under the point of view of environmental adaptation, but only under the commercial point of vies. Those organisms will steal "existency shares" to all the other oxes (pigs), that will day by day disappear from the animal world, compromising all the alimentary chains in which they are involved.
Maybe this process does not necessarily compromise the life on the earth, for sure it will contribute in the simplification of the genetic patrimony. Maybe we don't need animals that produce inferior in quality and more expensive meat or milk, but for sure the world needs them, otherwise natural evolution would have already thought itself to make "ethnic cleansing". Biodiversity is a preservation mechanism of the species and of life in general. If an individual is sensitive to a virus, for example, it can be that another similar individual of the same species wouldn't be. Genetic natural mutations of the virus will tend to attack organisms with a different genetic patrimony. The organisms of the attacked species will tend to generate natural mutations resistant to that virus. If the genetic patrimony of a set of animals is always invariant and identical to itself, a virus able to kill one individual would be able to kill all the individuals of the set. Clonation is so the antithesis of the natural evolution, on which is based how the world works.
About what it concerns to GMO, instead, the matter is slightly different. If the natural evolution tends to select the genetic characteristics of a species so that the individuals would become more competitive than the competitors, the genetic artificial modification tends to select the species so that the individual would be more competitive only from a commercial point of view, evalued on the pockets of who owns the copyright. These new organisms, even if potencially less strong than the natural organisms, they would take over in the same environment, and so also the natural ones, with time, will adapt to new entries' presence. If we will produce a variety of GM corn resistant to 90% of a certain type of parasite, and if we cultivate only that variety, it will happen that 90% of the parasites would die, leaving the remaining 10% free to riproduce. The only result we would obtain is to make those parasites stronger (for natural selection). If instead the variety of corn released would resist to the totality of the parasites, those parasites would estinguish, or atleast they would parcially disappear, compromising the food chains they belong to.

There is, then, a social consequence. Obviously who owns the technology for production of GMO and clones, would apply it for money, with disadvantages for those ones that apply traditional technologies for animal breeding and vegetable cultivation. The control on this "copyright" can be obtaining producing sterile clones or GMO's. If for example a farmer grows sterile GM corn, he won't be able to use part of the grains of the harvested corn to sow the fields for the next year, but he will have to buy them again from the same producer of GM corn. This would break into fragments those social balances coming from subsistence economies of poor countries. Moreover the traditional cultivation, nowadays, benefit from the pollinator bugs that, not respecting the borders of the cultivated fields, bring the pollen from a cultivation to another. If a farmer uses GM seeds, his sterile vegetables won't give good pollen for fertilizing the vegetables of the neighbor farmers, who will see damaged their harvest too.

Lastly there is a cultural aspect of the problem. A GM chicken tasting of strawberry is good or not? The answer can be different belonging to who answer, but i think that it makes sense the interpretation of the taste under a cultural point of view. Infact, how does one eat the strawberry chicken? In a fruit salad or roasted with french fries? Being that there is no story of tradition tied to strawberry chicken, there does not exist either a popular recipe that produce a popular plate that allows us to catalog the flavor upon known values. In other words the flavor of a food is a cultural fact, and so it's not possible to decide if the strawberry chicken have an objective gastronomical value negative or positive. One can only make some experiments and evaluate the answer of the consumer, but the attempt itself distorts the gastronomical tradition, made not only of good ingredients, but also of History. I think that a traditional steaming roast chicken, with french fries will always be better, because in that way my mother used to cook it, and before her mother, going back to prehistory. Or, also, i like a bowl of good fresh strawberries with sugar and lemon. The much good it can be, i would leave the strawberry chicken at McDonalds, where the problem is not to make good food, but to sell it good.
A last thing i would add is that the gastronomic variety of a tradition is given to the match of various available ingredients. If we eliminate from the market the "minor" ones, which are the ones worse from the commercial point of view, we would have to give up the possibility to cook the almost totality of the popular recipes. Variety of quality in the foods available on the market gives a variety of flavors in which one measure a gastronomical tradition. Having few goods, even if perfect ones, in the stores, means loosing variety in cookings.