Word: rifkin
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Critics, like anti-biotechnology activist Jeremy Rifkin, decried the FDA decision, arguing that tampering with nature could endanger consumers. In fact, though, many seemingly natural foods, including corn, nectarines and navel oranges, never existed before humans began to cross-breed -- a form of genetic engineering that simply takes a little longer than the laboratory version...
...since he took on the biotechnology industry over the safety of genetic engineering has Rifkin been embroiled in a higher-profile controversy, or one with the potential for greater economic consequences. With so much at stake, it is hardly surprising that environmentalists and meat-industry advocates have locked horns over Rifkin's charges. Among the most notable areas of dispute...
...Rifkin's critics -- and there are many -- regularly accuse him of taking a nugget of truth and enlarging it beyond reason in ways calculated to raise public fears. "Beyond Beef is about the worst book I've ever read," exclaims Dennis Avery, director of Global Food Issues for the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Indianapolis. "It establishes Rifkin as the Stephen King of food horror stories." Among other things, Rifkin raises the specter of beef contaminated with viruses, including a bovine immunodeficiency virus that he provocatively labels "COW AIDS," though there is no evidence that the virus can infect...
...Rifkin is using beef as a metaphor for all that has gone rotten in the modern world, wrongs that he attributes to a metaphysical loss of humans' | sacred relationship to nature. And cattle, because of their prominent role in ancient mythology and their haunting presence in prehistoric pictographs, lend themselves well to this moralistic exercise...
...blame for environmental degradation should the cattle industry rightly shoulder? In the Netherlands, for instance, manure from pigs poses a major ecological threat, defiling water supplies with excessive nitrates and acidifying local soils. Sheep have permanently scarred the landscape in Spain and Portugal, while in India -- a country that Rifkin praises for its kindness to cows -- bovines are ravenous wraiths whose constant quest for food drives them to ravage standing forests. Holy or not, most of India's 200 million cows go hungry much of the time...