Adam, Eve, and Genetically Modified Organisms

A while back, I was walking through the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. I was attracted to a Renaissance painting by some grand master. I don't remember the title of the painting, nor do I recall the artist's name, I'm so bad with those details. As I walked closer to the painting and the group of onlookers standing nearby, I saw a scene of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Except for some gravity-defying loose-leaf system, they were stark naked, and, in Eve's hand was The Apple. Adam's hand was outreached to receive it, presumably to a big bite and get thrust out of Eden and do nothing for the rest of Eternity except view Baywatch reruns.

The Apple was dead center of the painting and, of course, my eye was drawn right to it. "Ugh!" I said, "who would eat such an apple?" It was the most mis-shapen, gnarly, mealy-looking apple I've ever seen. It was unappetizing, unappealing, and hardly worth a Garden of Eden Eviction Notice from the Landlord.

A woman standing in the group near the painting responded to my outcry of revulsion to the Apple. It's true, I did say my comment out loud for all to hear, that's how I felt. The woman told me that, since this is the forbidden fruit, the artist painted it to look pretty forbidding, as it indeed was. OK, that seemed logical, forbidden fruit should look forbidding. Makes sense....sort of.

However, something about her comment didn't make sense to me. I began thinking about life in the 14th century, or at least how I thought life might be. I thought about apples, for example. How would an apple in Renaissance times appear? Well, I'm guessing that sciences like horticulture were not advanced compared to today's standards. The concept of determining traits in plants and mating them to achieve plants with superior traits was first suggested by Gregor Mendel in the mid-19th century. So, I think it's a fair guess that much of the food people ate was what we would call "wild." Fruits, for example, came from trees whose genetic material was determined randomly by pollen-carrying bees and such. So, it's possible that apples in the time this painting was created didn't look so great.

Fast forward to the present. A walk in the grocery store produce aisle is like walking through a still-life painting of perfect fruits and vegetables. But, consider, in Renaissance times, there was no such perfection. What happened? What did we to to our fruits and vegetables that made them so perfect and beautiful? We would never accept the apple in that painting. Any self-respecting fruit grower would leave it on the ground to be next year's fertilizer.

Our understanding of Nature now helps us to eat better than royalty did in the 14th century. As our understanding of genetics, horticulture, plant nutrition, and plant pests increased, so did the quality of our food. Horticulturists have been mating plants with desirable characteristics to create perfect peas, spectacular citrus, delicious corn, potatoes to die for, and squash about which to write home.

You see, by purposefully mating plants with positive traits to get an optimum organism, we are manipulating their genetic material. Using the mating process, we are controlling their genetic codes, their DNA, to give us what we want. And, once we've created this perfect produce, we grow it all over the place. And, while we are growing our perfect produce, other, less-desirable varieties, are not being grown, and are becoming extinct. This is not only the case for plants, but for domestic animals. Cattle, for example, are bred to produce high levels of tender meat. Breeding programs can produce cattle that are so heavy, they cannot stand, their legs won't support their weight.

So, when we hear about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), it's not a stretch to see that we have been genetically modifying plants and animals for centuries. We have accepted organisms that are products of breeding programs and believed them to beneficial because of their higher yields, resistance to pests, and better taste.

It's interesting to me when we apply today's standards and morals to times of the past. I often hear people wishing for simpler times, when life was slower and therefore better. If you could put them in a time machine back to the 14th century, for instance, I doubt they would find much very desirable. The available food would be pretty bad, diseases rampant, dirty water, sewerage all over (no plumbing, you know), and no escape. And, you die early.

Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, things are going faster than you ever imagined. These days, we don't have to bother with horticulture, we can go directly into a plant's or animal's DNA and have a good old time. Any biologist will tell you that you can't mate two species, Nature's safety valve kicks in and there is no progeny in such acts. So, if you have a plant that is resistant to, say, the boll weevil, and you have cotton, which isn't, you can't mate those two plants. But, today, we can take the genetic material from the boll weevil resistant plant, and incorporate it into the cotton. Voila, you have boll weevil resistant cotton.

It isn't that easy, but, it's not impossible. A half century ago, it was impossible. Today, there are companies that will take your organism and DNA from another organism and incorporate the DNA into that organism to create a completely new variety of that species. The USDA's Plant Variety Protection Office (PVPO) administers the "Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA), by issuing Certificates of Protection. The Act provides legal intellectual property rights protection to breeders of new varieties of plants which are sexually reproduced (by seed) or tuber-propagated" (from http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?template=TemplateC&navID=PlantVarietyProtectionOffice&rightNav1=PlantVarietyProtectionOffice&topNav=&leftNav=ScienceandLaboratories&page=PlantVarietyProtectionOffice&resultType).

Maybe we are living in a modern Eden. We have perfect fruits and vegetables, our food supply is the most varied ever, and it's just down the street at your local FoodWay store.

I'd stay away from the Apples if I were you....

Food and Geometry

A scene in the most recent remake of the movie: The Day the Earth Stood Still stands out in my mind. Keanu Reeves plays Klathu, who is charged with destroying life on the planet, because us humans are destroying it. So, to keep us from destroying earth, Klathu will deploy that famous robot to destroy earth so we don't. This is not making sense.

After Klathu emerges from his ship and some panicky soldier shoots him, resulting in a trip to the hospital, where he recovers despite whatever a doctor does to him, Klathu easily escapes the hospital and finds himself in the Newark, NJ train station. The last time I was in the Newark train station, I also felt a fleeting urge to destroy the earth, just so that station would disappear. However, I didn't have the resources Klathu had, so, the earth survived the day I was in Newark Penn Station. Klathu is hungry, so he zaps a vending machine and coaxes a tuna salad on Wonder Bread sandwich out of it. Kathu opens the cellophane wrapper and pulls out a perfect right triangle of tuna salad sandwich. Wonder Bread is almost a perfect square, and, when you cut it on the diagonal, you get two triangles of sandwich.

Let me describe that triangle of tuna salad sandwich: to you geometry geeks, it's a right triangle, meaning that one of the angles is a right- or 90-degree angle. The other two angles are very sharp and pointy. Keanu (Klathu) put the sharp angle in his mouth, bit it off, and started chewing.

"Man!" I said to myself, "That looks good! I feel like I should find a vending machine in Newark Penn Station that has diagonally-cut, tuna salad on Wonder Bread and take a bite out of it, just like Keanu." Then the sensible voice in my head began to rain on my parade, you know the one, it's annoying and you don't listen to it anyway, said: "Hey, you don't like tuna salad and you wouldn't go near Wonder Bread. So, what's the deal?"

Then it occurred to me: so much of the food we buy, especially the manufactured food, comes in perfect geometric shapes. Cookies are perfectly round or oval, candy bars are some variation of a perfect geometric shape. Even potato chips can come in perfect shapes. I don't know what it is, but, there is something very inviting about eating perfect geometric shapes. I know everytime I see a perfectly-formed Chips Ahoy, a Snickers bar as a perfect rectagular solid, or those Milano Cookies as perfect ovally things, I want one. I want to bite into it. I want to look at that first bite into my perfect snack and, as I'm chewing, I will stare feeling pretty happy with myself that I made my mark, I've staked my claim. Nobody will touch any morsel with my bite mark in it.

What is it about food in perfect geometric shapes that attracts us? Why do we have an almost uncontrollable urge to destroy that symmetry with our teeth? Pringles Potato Chips don't taste very good. They taste like chemicals to me, which is the only way you can drug a potato enough to conform those three-dimensional parabolic shapes. It's possible the only reason anybody eats those chips is because you get to trash something perfect with your teeth.

I think there is something primordial about these urges. They come from our distant past. Consider a dog, which, some believe, occupy a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder than humans. Give them anything with a perfect shape and all they can do is rip it to shreds. Come to think of it, dogs seems to want to trash any shape they can get their teeth around, until they all look the same, all chewed up, soggy, no-shape blob sitting in the backyard someplace.

Do an experiment. Go to the convenience store and buy a few items having perfect geometric shapes. Sit at the dining-room table and open each one of them. Wait 10 minutes. If there is any food left on the table, congrats! You are an evolved person. If there is no food left on the table, immediately evacuate your home and tell Bowser to make room for you in the dog house.

Guys and Beer

One of my main motivations for going to the gym is to watch network TV. I climb onboard that elliptical exercise gadget, positioned between two large-screen TVs, and I pump and get my Network TV fix. I’ll never understand why they put on the Food Channel, with program after program featuring chunky chefs telling you how to get as chunky as they are. For your information, I’m not exactly svelte, and I’m probably as chunky as some of those chefs on The Food Channel. And, the fact is, after absorbing about 3.6 minutes of the Chunky Chef Fat-Off, I lapse into some meditation, which has the effect of closing my eyes and transporting me to another dimension lacking any kind of network TV.

Today, during that 3.6 minutes of attention, I saw something that I can’t stop thinking about. Standing in the kitchen with Zaftig Zoe, or whatever, was her hubby, who was pretty thin. It made me think of Jack Sprat and his wife. Anyway, Hubby looked bored and disinterested, sometimes he even frowned. I definitely got the feeling that he didn’t want to be there. Well, all that changed when Zoe pulls out about 4 bottles of beer and a bottle of apple cider. Hubby’s facial expression went from passive to very interested. He started smiling this odd smile. It wasn’t one of those symmetric smiles, where the sides of the mouth go up and out in equal directions, it was a very lopsided smile. The right side of the smile was more to the right, and the left side of the smile didn’t smile very much. You could see more teeth on the right side of his face than the left.

Zoe asked Hubby to pop open the bottles, and he did so with gravity and reverence. She took out a glass pitcher and asked him to pour the bottles of beer into the pitcher in such a way as to minimize foam formation. Hubby’s face shifted into the Lop-Sided-Smile Totally-Focused mode as he verrrrry carefully poured the beer slowly down the side of the pitcher. You could tell that, to Hubby, at least, this might be the most important thing he does this week.

If there’s one thing that guys know how to do, it’s pour beer with little or no foaming. The reason is very simple, the more foam in the glass, the less beer. And, I think we all know a few guys who value the volume of their beer mugs and understand that foam is wasted space, but, seeing that golden nectar with a minimal head of foam might be a thing of beauty, but it won’t last long.

So, with Hubby a Happy Pappy, the dinner guests sit around the table, nibble at the food, and demolish the beer-apple cider gemisch.

Even though I enjoy the occasional beer, it’s still an occasional beer, maybe once every two months, when I’m not the designated driver. And, I like red wine about as often. But, face it, I just don’t indulge myself like Hubby seems to. There are other things that get me excited, but a frosty cold one just doesn’t do it, and I know this one thing has made me a misfit in some parts of society.

The question I ask is this: What the big deal about beer anyway? I am fortunate to live within walking distance of a grocery store, and there’s a liquor store across the street. Every time I walk to buy groceries, I see people coming out of that liquor store loaded with 6-packs, cases, beer balls, kegs. I see men and women whose physical size is dwarfed by the monster beer box precariously balanced in their arms. Lite Beer seems to be the most popular, but that's another column entirely. Think about it, a case of beer; 24, or more, containers of beer. Friends, who buys 24 anythings these days? Do you see anybody buying 24 tomatoes, or 24 bunches of celery, or 24 cans of Green Giant Niblet Corn? Do you even see anybody buying 24 packs of Twinkies, or 24 Big Macs, or 24 2-liter bottles of Mountain Dew? Nobody buys 24 anythings anymore. Except beer.

The beer culture in this country boggles my mind. I’ve heard beer drinkers fantasize about having their home plumbed to deliver beer to any room in the house. They announce that a weekend without drinking themselves silly is a wasted weekend. They count up the beer containers and divide by the number of people to determine how much beer they can get. They know which beers are 2.2%, 2.4%, and 3.2% alcohol. Speaking for myself, if I had such a command of this beer vernacular, I’d be too embarrassed to brag about it.

I still can’t get Zaftig Zoe’s Hubby’s smile out of my mind. I think I’ve seen that smile a million times, but this is the first time I truly noticed it and began to wonder what it meant. Maybe some women have that reaction to bottles of beer as well, but, I’m beginning to think it’s a phenomenon among guys. It’s one of those guy things that make me regret the accident of birth that made me a guy.

So, I think I’ll pass on the beer and apple cider recipe. That bruscetta didn’t look so bad, though.