Raoul Adamchak

Is organic food the answer?

May 22, 2011

Well, that depends on the question.

Of all the things I write about – energy, the greening of business, the politics and policy of climate change, geoengineering – food is by far the most emotional. With near-religious fervor, people debate the merits or demerits of, broadly speaking, two ways to produce food.

The first can be described, depending upon who’s talking, as big, fast, modern, conventional, industrial, intensive, chemical, genetically-modified, processed and global. It’s the system that delivers most of the food that most Americans eat.

The second is described as organic, sustainable, local, small-scale, family-owned, natural, agro-ecological and slow. It’s driving the growth of farmer’s markets and community-supported agriculture, as well as Whole Foods, and it’s increasingly being taken seriously by big companies like Walmart, Safeway and Kroger’s.

As shoppers and as eaters, most of us partake from both worlds. But make no mistake about it- the advocates of conventional food and those pushing reform are deeply polarized, as I’ve seen first-hand lately. [click to continue…]

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Biotech and organic food: a love story

April 15, 2010

Pamela Ronald

Pamela Ronald

Earlier this week at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference about business and the environment, I led a conversation about food and agriculture during which a communications executive named David Kalson asked the question: Can organic food and transgenic food be part of the effort to make agriculture more sustainable? I answered “yes, I think so,” and referred him to an excellent book called Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food (Oxford University Press, 2008) by Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak.

In the preface to the book, Sir Gordon Conway, the former president of the Rockefeller Foundation, calls Tomorrow’s Table “a tale of two marriages.” The first is the marriage between Pamela, a scientist whose research focuses on the genetic engineering of plants, notably rice, and Raoul, a teacher and lifelong organic farmer. The second is the potential marriage of two techniques: Genetic engineering and organic agriculture, which now cannot work hand-in-hand because, at least in the U.S., rules governing organic farming prohibit genetic engineering of crops.

The conversation at Brainstorm reminded me to post the edited transcript of a (long-ish) interview that I recently conducted with Pamela Ronald, who is a professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis. We talked about the book, her work on rice and what her family eats for dinner.

Marc: How and why did you get involved in the genetic engineering of crops?

Pamela: Genetic engineering is not really a discipline. It’s just a tool. I’m a research scientist. I do plant genetics. I became interested in genetics in college. I had a fantastic teacher and I got very interested in understanding how plants and microbes could communicate.

Gunther: Where was this?

Ronald: Reed College. I had spent a lot of time backpacking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains as I was growing up. I’ve always been interested in plant biology. My mother and grandparents were excellent gardeners and small-scale farmers.

Gunther: Well, then, how did your interest evolve into using, as you say, the tool of genetic engineering as opposed to conventional plant breeding? [click to continue…]

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