Week 3 Reading Blog

              One thing that struck me in the excerpt “The Pollen of Desire” by Pollan was when he brought up the fact that the potato famine in Ireland occurred due to the fact that “the bounty of [it] was its curse”. When the Irish depended too greatly on the potato as a staple to feed its growing population, its economy could not support them or the food supply to feed that increased population. Had they had had some of the Monsanto potatoes or other genetically modified foods they would have been able to prevent the famine. The excerpt describes how the U.S. has since used GMO’s to help increase crop yields for crops like potatoes, corn, and grain and can now feed the world’s population every day. And now we grow these crops at an immense rate, and I wonder if we will go through the same thing that Ireland did, but instead of it being a famine because of lack of food, it would be because there is a recall on a great number of GMO products, such as a string of seed species made by the Monsanto company. And this recall would stun all corn production, and would cause beef and poultry production to stall, since we feed our livestock corn. It would also stun production for hundreds of products that use corn as a main ingredient. Our bounty of corn  will be our curse. 

            The way that our food production system is set up, it is very possible that this could happen, and it may be hard for us to come back from it, our system gives more power to agribusiness and government as opposed to the farmers and the public. The excerpt “Omnivores Dilemma” by Pollan exclaims how the government has set nutrition guidelines for the public that reflects its interests, and that they have allowed food to be sold to the public without proper labeling of GMO’s used in them. This was to of course, protect companies from losing profit. Companies like Monsanto, who controls the majority of the seeds for these products. We need to use research in planning methods, demographics, environmental science, and equitable development to better incentivize food production companies and the national public on sustainable and healthy food production options and products, so they may bring us closer to a “sitopia”.