Re: BIOTECH: Re: Nobel food prize for "Miracle Maize"

From: Barbara Lamar (shabrika@juno.com)
Date: Fri Sep 08 2000 - 19:56:02 MDT


On Fri, 8 Sep 2000 12:50:46 -0700 (PDT) Brian D Williams
<talon57@well.com> writes:
>
>
> >"In New Mexico, Hispanic farmers were initially interested in the
> >higher-yielding corns ... One by one, the farmers returned to growing
the corns
> >favored by their wives. To this day over much of New Mexico, blue
> >Pueblo flours and flints are grown for tortillas and cornmeal
> ...
>
> Why not produce products that preserve the best of existing
> products (taste,color,texture,open pollination) but improve them by
> increasing their resistance to things like drought, insects
> (without pesticides), and improve the overall yield.

I'd like to hope that research would move in this direction; but at least
in my part of the world, the majority of the people don't seem to care
much about the quality of their food. I live in a rural area where
almost everyone has garden space, and yet most people don't even keep
small vegetable gardens.

 When fresh produce is made available to homeless people, they don't want
it--too much trouble to prepare it (this remains true even if kitchens
are made available for their use). They'd rather eat out of cans.
Homeful people are often in too much of a rush to think of what they eat,
spending long hours at work and commuting and taking kids to
extracurricular activities and shopping and picking up the dry cleaning
and doing housekeeping in odd moments. They grab some takeout food or
eat frozen dinners.

In neighboring Austin there is Whole Foods, which has now expanded into a
nationwide chain; and Central Market. At both of these stores one can
choose from a wide variety of fairly fresh vegetables; but the prices are
outrageous. The people who shop at these stores make up only a tiny
faction of the total population of the area.

As one who grows heirloom corns such as Texas Honey June (sweet corn) and
Texas Gourdseed (good soft corn for tortillas), and my own variety of
field corn which I've bred especially for my climate and soil, I readily
agree with the New Mexican farmers' wives about the taste and texture of
the old varieties. Until enough people share that view to make it worth
while for commercial seed companies to develop better tasting food crops,
the only solution seems to be for more people to grow gardens and
preserve the old varieties, which are disappearing at an alarming rate.

Meanwhile, I'm glad to see research being done on at least improving the
nutritional value of food (although as I've mentioned before, I think
there's a chance that some of the GM foods are not metabolized properly).

Barbara
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