Genetically improved foods have the potential to wipe out world hunger and even cure deadly diseases. Don’t take our word for it — the director of the World Health Organization, Gro Harlem Brundtland, said as much in October. Or ask any of the millions of people who are alive because of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Green Revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Or you can trust an ice cream man. Baskin-Robbins heir John Robbins, who now heads EarthSave International, attacked genetic improvement in a recent essay. Robbins, who has been criticized by the esteemed Library Journal for his “zealous advocacy of plant-based nutrition and his refusal to consider the need for animal products in human nutrition,” set up EarthSave largely to promote himself after he published his first diet book. Members of EarthSave’s advisory board include Neal Barnard of the anti-meat Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk, and anti-technology zealot Jeremy Rifkin.
So consider the source — and the publication. Robbins’s essay appears in Earth Island Journal. It was that publication’s editor-in-chief, Gar Smith, who said two days after September 11 that that day’s events were “not an ‘attack on freedom'” but on “the U.S.-dominated global financial structure.”
