M'illumino di meno

The banner of the event

February 13 was energy saving day, organized by RadioDue radio program "Caterpillar", in occasion of the anniversary of Kyoto protocol.
The hosts of the program invited viewers to turn off as many lights and electric appliances as possible for one hour and a half, starting at 6:00pm.
They computed that it had been saved about 500MW, against the 400 of last year's edition, so it was a big success.
Besides private citizens, several associations and public sites participated, such as the Coliseum and St. Peter Cathedral at Rome. The event was also exported in some foreign countries.

Also in previous years, I always thought that this event has a big symbolic value, although a small practical one.
In the 2008 edition they estimated that the energy saving for that hour and a half was equivalent to the electric needs of the entire region of Umbria for the same amount of time. Sounds like a big lot, but, if we carefully consider it, the conclusion is that only Umbria region consumes 400MW of electric in just one hour and a half, so not a big lot at all!
Without mention that if for example one avoids to use the microwave oven during that hour and a half, most probably he will have the need to do it after, using then the same amount of electricity saved.

This year, Maddie, Mr. Bentley, R and I decided to try to do it (to tell the truth only R and I have the authority in this matter). We turned off the lights, the PC, the TV and the other household electrical appliances, also the ones in a stand-by position.
Except the telephone.
And the clockalarm.
And the fridge.
"I go to take a shower", i said... In the dark? I decide to take a candle with me.
Dammit, the thermostat that switches the methane heater for the hot water is electric. Another exception.
I exit the shower. And now how do i dry my hair? Well, i could have thought about it before, now i have to use the hairdryer.
Then i have to take some clean underwear. It's in the cabinet. And the opening of the doors switches a light into the cabinet. Well... could i ever stay in my robe till 7.30?!
After the shower I went out to get a couple of takeaway pizzas. The gate of the condominium is electric driven. The light of the condominium are lit, so are the street lights and the lights in the pizzeria. I don't think the pizzeria itself, even if it has a wood oven, could ever work with no electricity.
I went back home with the pizzas, being very careful not to light anything. We ate by candlelight (which is also kind of romantic, worthy of valentine's eve). Finally we hear the 7:30 tolling from the bells of the nearby church. They are electric driven.

I thought again about it. Saving electricity is very important, but this experience taught me that doing completely without it, although for one our and a half, is quite impossible.
The only thing to do is to use clean sources.

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.

Grandpa Gino's apricots

I read some place that visual memory, in human beings, is more persistent than the one coming from the other senses.
The colors of summer in my grandparents' garden, for example, are still alive in my mind, after more than thirty years.

One detail, in that garden, almost summarizes my childhood: the apricot tree.
An ancient, huge tree, that matched in similar size a fig tree at the opposite end.
Grandpa's apricot tree used to produce tons of fruits that matured all contemporarily in few days, and in those days incredible amounts of fruit were shared with relatives, friends and neighbors because in those times, nothing was to be wasted. The excess that still remained after the distribution was transformed by my mother and the other women in the family into so much jam that one could swim in it, and came into good use for the rest of the year.
The picture of that fruit is really evocative to me, but i thought i had forgotten its taste. It's been awhile that i've eaten apricots that taste like apricots. Possibly around thirty years since the ones i eat now are bought only at the supermarket. They don't taste like anything because, for commercial reasons, they had been picked still green and matured on the shelves.
The other day i bit into an apricot bought at the GAS i was speaking about in the previous post. All of a sudden my memory flew to grandparents' garden with myself, knees all dirty and greasy, playing with my brother as if it happened yesterday.

Here, our second shopping list at the GAS:

• 1kg [2lb and 3.27oz] homemade bread loaf with walnuts - 3.95€
• 1kg bread loaf with spelt, pumpkin seeds and oats - 3.95€
• 1kg "Pugliese" bread loaf, with flour 0 and wheat bran - 3.10€
• 1kg "Tranvai" bread loaf, with flour 0, rasins and apricot - 2.50€
• 500g [1lb and 1.63oz] organic apricots - 2.10€
• 1kg organic nectarines - 3.40€
• 1kg five grain cereal - 3.55€
• 1l [2.11pt] dish detergent - 1.50€
• 1.470kg [3lb and 3.85oz] cantaloupe - 4.70€

Total: 28.75€

In particular, beneath the apricots, the cantaloupe and the loaves are very good.
This time the shopping was ordered in advance, and i collected it in another place, convenient because of the close proximity to our home (even if still reachable only by car). Unfortunately this is only a pick-up location, and dry and surplus products are not available to buy with no reservation.
The waste of packaging was almost nothing: one (parcially broken) carton box, saved from some product supply, two used paper bags for the bread, one used plastic bag for the apricots and one for the cereals, one used plastic bottle for the detergent, to be returned. Peaches and cantaloupe with no packaging.

GAS

Don't worry! This post is not about fuel for your car nor flatulency; it's the unfortunate acronym of "Gruppo di Acquisto Solidale" ["Solidarity Shopping Group"].
This acronym identifies pretty much the spontaneous and organized associations of people who, tired of the philosophy of consumer consumption at any rate, decide to give an ethical stamp to their purchases.
It's a while since i've discovered this concept by chance, and i began to become informed through the Internet that there is plenty of GAS located all over Italy (this is the website that collects all of them).

Fair trade bananas campaign

Not far from home i found three of them, and i decided to visit the nearest one (la Comunità della Sporta), which looks, among them, also the best organized.

The concept is simple: since a big part of the cost of a product is given by the intermediate trades from hand to hand between the producer and the consumer, simply removing those trades, the product dissipates less in its value. Therefore, GAS tries to use that savings to give ethical dignity to those goods.
The peculiarities of this type of commerce can be listed essentially in these points:

• The producer is compensated the right amount. The GAS doesn't "fleece" the producer as it often does the traditional trade. This feature may not be very important for some Italian producers, who can choose the best offering. But certainly it is for those in Third World counties where labor is overworked, if not reduced to slavery, and even involves children. GAS guarantees that their products do not rise from these practices.
  
• For those products where it applies, local sources are preferred. This philosophy allows to cut the (economical and ecological) costs to move the goods. Beneath the expense, infact, pollution given by the transportation must be considered. Of course for some products this principle doesn't make sense, for example tropical fruits cannot obviously be bought at the Italian producer, but for the majority this cost can be eliminated.
  
• Agricultural goods and their by-products are of optimum quality with the importance stressed on being environment-friendly. GAS infact prefers organic products, and by compensating producers with fair earnings, it allows them to conform to this type of cultivation. Product tracking is made easier by the proximity between producer and consumer, as well as direct contact (they also organize tours to the producers' farms and factories). Moreover, shortened delivery time favors nature's biological cycles (fruit matured on the tree is much better than the one matured on the shelves of the supermarkets).
  
• In GAS they also try to reduce the use of unnecessary packaging, decreasing the obvious waste and polluting materials within the environment. To tell the truth, for some products, this is not always possible, but under this point of view the situation is drastically better than the traditional distribution. For example some detergents are sold "on tap", and one can buy them only if he brings his own proper container. There is, moreover, a careful attention to biodegradability of sold products. For example, the detergents sold at "la Sporta" are all 100% biodegradable.
  
• GAS also tries to minimize the waste of perishable goods. I suppose that every Gruppo d'Aquisto Solidale adopts different methods to obtain this goal. At "la Sporta" fresh products are distributed in 2-week cycles: during one week one can pick up products that have been reserved two weeks before. Often there is excess of fresh products available that can be bought also without any reservation, but it is just a minimum part.

It is possible to shop at "la Sporta" after subscribed to the association (the fee is 9€ a year or 3€ a four-months period). Whoever is subscribed is given a user name and a password that allows online shopping. Who manages the shop does it as a voluntary service. In fact, at the time of the subscription one undertakes atleast twenty hours a year to help manage the service (receive the providers, welcome the customers, manage the store, the website, prepare the reserved goods...)
An encouraging principle is that unlike the traditional channels of consumer trade, nothing is gained from offering one product over another.

A thing that, indeed, i find a little "uncomfortable", in the GAS (at leat at "la Sporta") is the need of reservation in advance for the perishable products. It's difficult to be ready to satisfy a sudden desire of strawberries and cream if the strawberries have to be reserved eight-fifteen days before! But i suppose this is the price to pay to allow us to avoid useless wastes.

An obvious critic to this type of commerce is in the fact that, eliminating the intermediate trades of the goods between the producer and the consumer, one eliminates also those jobs that within those trades receive their profits. If i buy peaches at the GAS that stocks up from the produce next door instead of the supermarket that buy them in Spain, it is obvious that those peaches don't need to be transported, with obvious loss to the truck driver.
This is true. The price that is paid for buying the product goes almost entirely to the producer and who is involved in the production cycles, and so that value is redistributed less within the population.
But this is another reason i like philosophy of GAS. Uselessly dispersing the value of a good is typical of consumerism. Clearly GAS put much less money in circulation than how traditional trade does, and it is absurd to think to place this problem only to who has the misfortune to be employed in one of the jobs that can be reduced. But it is also true that the wealth that is used to finance those jobs is the one that does not produce any useful good (or service).
In other words, buying a useless product provides the society exactly the wealth just enough to finance the production of that useless good (or service). In order to exist, consumerism imposes us to work to acquire a wealth that we need to buy what somebody else produced. And so we are driven to buy it even if we don't need it.

Let's work less. We will be poorer and we won't have enough money to buy useless things. Somebody can like this or not, but for sure it saves resources on a global scale, it pollutes less, and, if widely applied, it reduces the differences between the poor and the rich because it allows everyone to buy what they really need.

Anyway, I like GAS because, if widely appplied, it revolutionizes the system in favor of a more just, sustainable, impartial, ecological economy.

It would be nice to progressively substitute consumeristic economy with the one of GAS, but to do this, prices must be kept competitive with the traditional trade, because the consumer (sometimes understandably, some other times less) at the end must deal with his wallet.
As much as i can say from my experience, today, the products at "la Sporta" have about the same prices one can find at the grocery stores, but they have a bigger value given not only from the quality point of view (they are all organic products), but also the ethical one.

Here it goes our first shopping-experiment at the GAS:

• 530g [1lb and 2.69oz] of fair-trade bananas AltroMercato - with no packing (2.56€ a kg [5.64€ a lb]).
• one kg [2lb and 3.27oz] loaf of "pugliese" artisanal organic bread, natural rising, with flour 0 and wheat bran - with no packing (3.10€ a kg [6.83€ a lb])
• one pack with 51 toasted bread slices Il Fior di Loto - packed in a plastic sheet with a paper label (3.35€ a 450g [15.87oz] pack).
• 2 bottles of rice oil "delicate and natural" from organic agriculture Zibra - in glass bottles, with paper label and metal cap (2.40€ a 0.5l [1.06pt] bottle - 30% off because close to the expiration date).
• one pack of organic rice noodles - plastic bag (2.85€ a 500g [1lb and 1.63oz]).

Total: 13.85€.

Since it was the first shopping, made when subscribed, it was not possible to reserve the two weeks before, and in fact the goods we bought are long-life products or dry goods, except bread and bananas that were a surplus.
We are now waiting to get next shopping, reserved online last weekend. I'll tell you about it.

I am for saving

This post starts from a discussion started on Maurice's blog, about the habit, to drink, of the water sold in the stores, typically in plastic or glass bottles instead of the "mayor's water" (the one coming from the aqueduct [in Italy it is a service by the Municipality], that is declared drinkable, and often purer than the one sold in bottles).

We, at home, use water in returnable glass bottles. The attempt is to cut to the bone the waste of plastic, fighting not only the scattering of this polluting material, but also the environmental damage, smaller but still not insignificant, given by the recycling processes.
Nevertheless also the returnable glass bottles cause a useless environmental damage, because this system produces some wastes: for example the detergent to wash the bottle, the plastic cap to close it (note that in a regular plastic bottle, the amount of material in the cap is bigger than the much in the bottle itself), the paper label and the glue to attach it, the energy for the machines that fill the bottles, the fuel for the transportation to the groceries, the fuel to take the bottles home, and then all the path backward of the returning bottles till closing the cycle.
But, the "mayor's water" in our village, also admitting that it is bacteriologically pure, is really disgusting. It tastes like chlorine and it is very calcareous. For this last problem there are efficient filters in commerce, but against the chlorine there's no simple solution, as far as i know.

In that discussion, Maurice himself writes:

Credo che sia necessario anche mettersi d’accordo sullo sviluppo sostenibile, come sostengono alcuni ecologisti fra i quali vorrei collocarmi.
Una semplice bottiglietta d’acqua inquina il pianeta, ma dà anche lavoro (e quindi produce ricchezza) a chi deve produrre la bottiglia ed il tappo, a chi la imbottiglia, a chi la trasporta, eccetera.
Leggiamo spesso cifre precisissime sull’inquinamento - ricordo a memoria che una bistecca inquina quanto un’auto che corre per 50 km - ma non ho mai letto quanto valore produce la bistecca in termini di lavoro e di ricchezza.
Credo che si possa vivere con agiatezza rispettando la natura e l’ambiente, senza con questo ritornare alle società primitive. Ammesso che esse rispettassero l’ambiente, come non hanno fatto i pellerossa distruggendo le foreste delle grandi praterie per permettere la sopravvivenza delle mandrie di bisonti e di loro stessi.

I believe that it is also necessary to agree about sustainable development, as some ecologists, among whom i would put myself, assert.
One simple water bottle pollutes the planet, but it also gives work (and so it gives wealth) to who produces the bottle and the cap, to who fills it, to who transports it, etcetera.
We often read very exact numbers about pollution - i remember that a steak pollutes as much as a car that runs 50 km's - but i never read about how much value the steak produces in terms of work and wealth.
I believe that we can live in prosperity respecting nature and environment, without having to go back to the primitive societies for this. Also admitting that those ones used to respect the environment, as the native american did not, destroying the forests of the big prairies to allow the survival of the bison herds and of theirselves.
[Free translation by me]

I believe it's a mistake to justify consumerism with the excuse that it is a system that allows a fair redistribution of wealth. Firstly because it doesn't seem fair at all to me.
But above all, the hole in the capitalist consumerism is right intrinsic in the mechanism, according to which the amount of commercialized goods (and services) must always increase, and so, also the useless has to be sold (and bought) anyway.
From one side it is true that the commercialization of a water bottle gives wealth to those who are part of its production/distribution chain. But let's consider, for example, the driver that transports it on his truck, which we can name Mario. At the end, how great is the wealth that Mario gets from the delivery of a bottle? For sure less than the cost at the store of that bottle. Mario, indefatigable worker, will eventually be thirsty, before or after, won't he? And how will he quench his thirst? Will he drink from the tap the "mayor's water"? No! Carefully applying the logic of consumerism, he will go to the shop to buy a water bottle similar to the ones he hauled (spending more money than the amount he made for each of them).
Now, it is also true that our Mario doesn't deliver only one, but an entire truck of bottles, and I'm not going to say that the necessary physical exertion for that job gives him such a thirst to drain the entire charge. But it is also true that Mario would have the need to buy other products, which probably suffered similar commercial stages. If Mario buys an apple because he's hungry, it means that there is somebody else that hauled apples. And maybe this last delivery person would have the need to quench his thirst with Mario's water besides to appease his hunger with his own apples.
In short, applying this mechanism to the whole closed system, society consumes exactly the entire amount of products that are commercialized, spending exactly an amount given by the sum of money that any single individual made as fruit of his work. In this system, so, no wealth is created. At most it has been re-distributed in higher or lower amounts belonging to how hard any individual worked. Since the amount of wealth in the closed system is not infinite, if wealth is proportional to work, when an individual works more, the other individuals must work less. And this mechanism generates social inequalities, which is the exact opposite of the system purposes.

One could raise the objection that instead of spending the entire amount of money made it would be wiser to save something. Or, that Mario should decide not to buy the apple, if he's not that hungry but to keep that money. But doing this way, that apple would remain unsold, and the wealth destined to who worked on it won't be available. In substance if the savings increase, in our closed system the consumes would decrease, and so also the money to be re-distributed would.
In other words, in our closed system, if we avoid to buy the useless, it is true that we would decrease the circulating wealth, but it is also true that this reduction is exactly equivalent to the value of the unsold useless goods.
To come back to our example, if we all used the "mayor's water", it's true that, as Maurice says, the wealth that would have been distributed in the commercial chain of the water in bottle would decrease, but its also true that globally that lost wealth would be exactly equivalent to the amount we save not to buy the water bottles.
And so, where's the social advantage in buying the water bottles?

A remark is needed about the fact that, in this analysis i considered a "closed system", which, apparently, doesn't apply very well to reality. In the capitalist westerner world (and also pretty much in the rest of the world), economical systems are not closed, meaning by this that they are based on export (and import).
The statement that working more one makes more money to the detriment of others that, working less, make less money, in a context of a non-closed system, it is false, because the eventual exceeding of product wouldn't be lost but exported. But this assumption presupposes that there is, elsewhere, another non-closed system (an importing country) that buys the surplus.
But this means that the importing country wouldn't have the need to produce the imported good, and so it doesn't have the possibility to employ workers in that productive cycle, and to produce the relative wealth, necessary to buy that product. And this looks to me a non-ethic side of the system, since it implies the increase of public debt, which means political dependency, of the importing country, increasing the social difference between rich and poor countries.
Considering instead the global economy of the world, which is obviously a closed system, since it's not possible to export outside the planet (and it looks it won't be for a lot of time), no wealth can be created, if by wealth we mean the purchasing power. Wealth equals the sum of all the goods globally produced, and so it is clear that the one coming from the production of a useless good is useless itself, because it allows only to buy a useless good.

The real wealth should be computed not in the basis of purchasing power, but according to the ownership of goods useful to better our lives. For example, the invention, production and distribution of cellphones didn't create wealth meaning purchasing power of individuals. Simplifying, the wealth given by the salaries of the workers that contributed in invention/production/distribution of cellphones is even to the wealth spent by consumers to buy that product... that's to say, at the end people that work get a salary that, after, is useful to them to buy the same goods they produce. The real wealth given by progress, instead, is the possibility to use those goods. If cellphones weren't there we wouldn't be able to send each other all those short messages to tell us romantic stuff like "TVTTTTTB" [in Italian it's the acronym of "ti voglio tanto tanto tanto bene" ("i love you very very very much"), typical teenagers' language].

Adimitting that water in bottles has the same quality of the "mayor's water" (which is clearly false in my case), to buy water bottles is absolutely useless from the economical point of view, and only a damage from the ecological one.

Anyway i am not an economist. Where's the error in my line of reasoning?

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.