are they Frankenstein food – or heralding the era of the 99.1% virgin?
As it happens, the phrase “you are what you eat” stretches back through the hippy era (the title of a weird film in the 1960s) to the great 19th Century French food pioneer Brillat-Savarin who seems to have coined it. The idea is extremely potent and underpins the long argument about genetically-modified food, an argument which is growing in intensity. On the one side are scientists and researchers, many food companies and some governments who see enormous possibilities in the ability to engineer specific traits into a plant’s DNA. It might make the plant salt-resistant so that it could be grown in marshy land near the sea in developing countries where no food plant would previously survive. It might be made resistant to certain insect blight or to herbicide which means weeds could be better targeted and the range of herbicides necessary could be reduced. Luddites On the other side however, are many other governments and countless environmental organisations and individuals who reject
