Assc professor of anthropology at Purdue University. Environmental anthropology, ethnobiology, food, agriculture. US Midwest, South Asia, Balkans. He/him/his
Sep 3, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
New in print with @natalatl: Domestication, crop breeding, and genetic modification are fundamentally different processes. Calling #GMOs just another kind of plant modification, ignores the most critical break - the sociopolitical uses of the technology link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Yes, domestication, institutional breeding, and biotech all involve genetic and phenotypic changes, but while domestication is a diffuse coevolutionary process, commercial breeding and biotech have focused overwhelmingly on crops and traits that return capital #capitalocene
Jul 21, 2021 • 10 tweets • 7 min read
Moments of clarity looking at the big picture as to what kinds of issues GMOs might solve and why they are not doing so, but misrepresents key agrarian and genetic context in search of a simple technological fix. To name just a few:
nytimes.com/2021/07/20/mag…
On genetics: "the plant contained a pair of genes from a snapdragon" This misrepresent what GM is and does. Genes identified in a snapdragon helped to produce anthocyanin, scientists successfully inserted the same sequence into the plant, and it performed similarly
