Rep. Don Young, Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Sen. Dan Sullivan all responded to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of genetically engineered salmon with outrage and resignation. Sadly though, it looks like the fight to prevent Frankenfish from entering the market has been reduced to ensuring it’s labeled so consumers don’t mistake it for the real thing. It’s another chapter in the evolutionary history of trade where economic opportunity is the only measure for progress.
Young provided the most colorful commentary by calling it a “harebrained decision.” He’s wrong though. The decision may have been made by the FDA, but they only followed a pattern laid down by more than a millennium of human satisfaction with value-added foods.
“Value added” is a term used when a product’s trade value has been increased by special processing or manufacturing. Cheese is a perfect example. Back in the 7th century dairy farmers of Italy’s Po Valley produced cheese because, even after production costs, it was more profitable than selling just cow’s milk.
Salt was the essential additive for making cheese. In Mark Kurlansky’s bestselling book “Salt – A World History,” he describes how that simple crystalline compound vital for preserving foods was once the most sought after commodity in the world.
Salt was obtained in many ways, including taking advantage of seawater evaporation in river deltas and costal marshes. But in cooler climates, such as Cheshire, England, burning wood was necessary to increase the rate of evaporation. In the late 17th century, Kurlansky writes, trade merchants in that city looked “to the sky with pride, blackened twenty-four hours a day from clouds of smoke from the salt pan furnaces.”
Cheshire is an example of how economic progress has long been prioritized over public health and the environment. Since that time the industrial revolution has accelerated both advances in trade and damage to our air, waters and lands.
The genetic revolution that produced Frankenfish is just a continuation of this history. It follows the use of growth hormones in other farm animals. Diethylstilbestrol was a synthetic estrogen used in poultry and beef from the late 1940s until it was banned for health reasons in 1971. Melengestrol acetate and trenbolone are two synthetic hormones banned in the European Union but still used by U.S. cattle farmers.
These practices, along with the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, helped give birth to the organic and slow food movements. Both are growing because more and more people don’t trust big agribusiness or the government agencies that regulate them. But most members of Congress, including Alaska’s delegation, are still swayed more by monetary economics than these kind of concerns.
That’s why it’s hard to believe Young, Murkowski and Sullivan are really worried about possible health risks from eating genetically modified salmon. They’re primary objective is to protect the commercial value of Alaska’s wild salmon from being driven down by competitively lower prices if that fish reaches the market.
Their argument that Frankenfish posed risks to the gene pool of Alaska’s wild salmon population was equally laced with contradictions. The condition of their environment matters, too. That’s why the Alaska Department of Fish and Game lists habitat loss, habitat degradation and climate change as threats to wild Chinook stocks and potential threats to the other wild species.
Despite the concerns of the best fisheries managers in the nation, our delegation supports giving the owners of the Pebble Mine the chance to prove they can operate one of the world’s largest open-pit mines without risking harm to Bristol Bay’s world renowned sockeye salmon runs. And they oppose President Obama’s new rules on emissions even though coal fired power plants contribute to the rising mercury levels in the salmon’s ocean home.
But this is more than just a story of our elected government putting business interests ahead of everything else. For centuries, our culture has been wired to enjoy the value added to the food we eat without thinking about long term consequences. And we still haven’t evolved enough to prioritize worldwide environmental and human health ahead of local and national economics.
So it’s easy for any Alaskan to call Frankenfish a grave mistake and say we‘ll never put it on our dinner plates. It’s a local matter facing us today. But we still have to work on thinking globally about the health and welfare of future generations.
• Rich Moniak is a retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
