Word: well
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...theatrics and shrill agitprop. To be sure, it was Greenpeace that pressured Gerber to drop genetically altered soybeans and corn from its baby foods and played a key role in forcing Monsanto to halt research on its self-sterilizing "terminator" seeds. But more measured voices have expressed doubts as well. Says Rebecca Goldburg of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF): "As a biologist, I find it hard to oppose genetically engineered crops or foods per se. [But] I also think that there are some genuine food-safety and ecological issues that have to be dealt with...
...come a decade or so too late. There's something a bit retro, a shade Dynasty-esque, about such gilded offerings as the Chicago Fairmont Hotel's two-night suite package for two at $306,426--which includes a party for 10 with Dom Perignon and beluga caviar, as well as a 2000 Lamborghini Roadster. ("We'll even throw in a tank of gas," says public relations director Susan Ellefson.) The late-1990s boom is a time of less conspicuous, if no less expensive, consumption, when Donald Trump has morphed from poster boy for ostentation to tax-the-rich political...
...public pressure grows, it may be forced to go slower in the future. One possibility: the FDA could begin applying to g.m. foods the powers it already has to regulate food additives. As EDF's Goldburg explains, the proteins produced by new genes are in a sense additives as well--"and while food manufacturers intend food additives to be safe, every now and then they screw up." Even more likely, food producers will respond to the changing public mood by labeling their products as g.m.-free, a trend already evident in Europe...
There's a downside to such actions, however. By overreacting to fears fanned by well-fed consumers in the industrialized world, food producers might uproot an industry that could someday provide billions of people in the rest of the world with crops they desperately need...
Society's horrified reaction has plenty of precedent as well. In Leviticus, God tells Moses: "Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard. Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you." And John Bulwer's Anthropometamorphosis, Man Transformed or, the Artificial Changeling, Historically Presented, a Puritan diatribe published in 1653, railed against disfigurement of the body in pursuit of "ridiculous beauty," "filthy fineness" and "loathesome loveliness...