How Does Your Garden Grow?
December 2, 2004
The other day I received an email from my father, with a subject title that read “Geography Puzzle…it’s fun”. In the body of the mail was a link and the message attached warned that this type of fun was addictive. I went to the link and found both the subject and warning to be true. The link sends you to an online game called “Place the State”. To play the game, you are given a blank map of the United States and have to drag and drop each state, given to you in a random order, on the map within 50 miles or so of its correct location in the country. At the end of the game, you are given a percentage score and information on your error average in miles. The game is addictive - I can’t tell you how many times I have played it now, but it is rivaling Solitaire in my world. Achieving a high score in the game depends in large part on what states you are given first, but regardless, you’ll improve your knowledge of American geography every time you play.
Around the same time that I received the email from my father, I was chatting with a friend at work, who had seen Brussel sprouts on the stalk for the first time and was amazed. My friend is a food professional, and yet she had never seen Brussel sprouts on the plant, and I don’t think she is the exception. In general, we have lost touch with how our foods grow. Many of us, me included, could easily be stumped with a question on how certain foods grow – on a plant, on a tree, on a vine, underground? I think we’d also be stumped with the question of where our foods grow. That notion brought me back to Dad’s geography game. Wouldn’t a similar game with fruits and vegetables to drag and drop onto a map teach us a lot?
I started doing a little research into what particular states were providing a majority of various crops for the country.
My first random discovery was that Wisconsin, not New Jersey or Oregon as I would have guessed, grows more than 50% of the country’s cranberries. My second discovery was not so light-hearted and stopped my research. I found out that the United States as a whole grows over two thirds of the genetically modified (GM) crops on the planet.
This was somewhat of a surprise to me at first, but not so much when I stopped to think about it. After all, the United States is the land of progress, fast food, convenience, mass production and economic success. In theory, perhaps GM foods make some sense. Perhaps by using biotechnology we could create foods that help to produce vaccines, drugs and chemicals. Maybe GM foods could be used to give much needed nutrition to famine victims in developing countries. Possibly, but we don’t know for sure. No research has been done on the long term effects of GM foods on humans. Some GM foods have been tested on rats, but the results are not so positive – weakened immune systems. In addition, it is troubling that once the GM foods are planted, pollination becomes difficult to control. If not strictly controlled and regulated, we could find ourselves without foods that are NOT genetically modified. Read more about this issue here or here.
Most of Europe is opposed to GM foods for the reasons stated above, but also for another more emotional reason. Much of Europe feels that messing with foods and how they grow will have negative consequences on their culture and culinary traditions. This last argument truly sheds light on a major difference between Europe and North America. What are the culinary traditions here in the United States? Certainly there are some traditions, but they are not as embedded in the culture of the nation as in many European countries, and the public certainly does not feel as committed to protecting them as they do abroad. Food and eating do not carry the same weight here as in other countries, although I believe it is gaining importance and meaning in our lives. Perhaps as it does, we will start to know more about our foods, like how they grow and where they grow. Maybe then we’ll have an agricultural map game on the Internet where we place crops on a blank map of the United States. Until then, “Place the GM Crop” is just not much fun.
“Food and eating does not carry the same WEIGHT here as in other countries,…”
Literally speaking, it carries a lot, lot more!
Do you think there might be a link between GM crops, cheap food and obesity in the US?
Perhaps GM crops are already shortening the life of many Americans?
Perhaps if food and eating did carry the same weight (in the sense intended in the article) here as in other countries, the USA would not be the world’s most obese nation. How many obese Parisiennes have you seen recently?