Super foods and wild technologies
Technology changes lives, and sometimes quite literally, sustains lives. But that awe-inspiring ability can be its greatest enemy. People, amazingly, often take a stand against things like advanced fertility treatment, artificial organs (an artificial heart transplant patient broke new ground this week in being able to leave hospital, go home and begin living an independent life) or stem cell therapy. There is a quite common view, that we will not let technology’s ability exceed our own. Two thousand years of a human centric world is built on this notion.
Also in this category of technologies too clever by half, is GMO technology. GM foods – Frankenstein foods – are often assumed to be insecticide or herbicide resistant crops and are frowned upon (this seems less right in a world still so challenged by famine). But GMO properties extend far beyond this – offering massive nutritional advantage. Purple tomatoes can carry a much heavier load of the good things that vegetables give us – health promoting anthocyanins. Golden Rice fights vitamin A deficiency and therefore the malnutrition that causes blindness. Other GM benefits can include significant reduction in carbon used for food production and the production of alternative energy sources for fuels and pharmaceuticals. We’re looking at hardier food, potentially better for us, able to fight disease and produce biofuels. The difference these technologies can make to vast parts of the world challenged by hostile environmental conditions is enormous.
Whilst it’s difficult to talk about GM in one lump - they, and their effects are too diverse (and there is no doubt, given their power, that they need to be deployed carefully) - there is much to suggest the need for a new climate of opinion. As long as the public don’t support research in this area, it will remain in the hands of private companies who can pursue opportunistic, sometime monopolistic intentions. We have to stop shooting ourselves, and the people who need help, in the proverbial foot. We have to bring GM into the mainstream – to serve public interests, not such commercial agendas. That means that it has to become something people feel much more positive talking about.
The biggest source of general resistance to GMO seems to be the idea that it is not ‘natural’. And yet our bodies moved beyond natural a long time ago – we continually consume all kinds of additives and drugs, apply a wealth of lotions, breathe in polluted air and literally shape our bodies and minds to physical technologies all around us. Natural is a fantasy. Ironic then, that one of the possibilities of GM technology could be to get plants and crops back to their original traits – to undo the muddying of plant and crop varieties which has happened already as a result of centuries of farmers’ cross breeding to create stronger, tastier, prettier variants which suit prevailing tastes.
The idea of ‘natural’ is holding us back and potentially depriving people of life-saving improvements to how we live. This is exactly the kind of issue that companies like Wolff Olins need to get their teeth into. How can we ensure that a one-sided story doesn’t take over, and that technologies with so much potential aren’t ruled out wholesale? It’s our role as a brand consultancy to keep looking at difficult issues with fresh eyes, in order to ensure that the pervading opinion does not shape our reality for the worse.
Suzanne Livingston
