USA - From kitchen tables worldwide you can hear a chorus of parents chastising their children with the same refrain: “Stop playing with your food.” Children aside, this rebuke needs to be loudly directed at the profiteers of industrial agriculture. They keep toying with the very nature of food, not to benefit consumers, family farmers, workers or the environment — but to fatten the profits of Silicon Valley tech giants, food monopolists and Wall Street financiers.
Meet Recombinetics, Inc. It’s a high-tech, gene-manipulation corporation with bio-engineers in its labs remaking farm animals. Pigs, for example. Recombinetics wants to mess with the very DNA of Mother Nature’s oinkers to make them produce bigger litters to supply the pork factories of brand-name marketeers. It is also genetically altering milk cows to withstand hotter weather, so climate change won’t reduce the output of huge dairy corporations.
The industrializers are not out to make food better or more affordable for us, but strictly to make it more profitable for them. Rather than remaking animals and the marketplace to benefit corporations that play with our food, let’s remake the corporate system so it cooperates with nature and serves the common good.