Soon it will be planting time in Iowa, and Jim and Sharon Greif, farmers in the village of Prairiesburg, will be starting up the CornCam. Mounted on a pole near their house, the CornCam was a great success last year. Every 15 minutes it dispatched images of their field to the Internet. To the couple's surprise, they got more than 2 million hits, people logging on all summer just to watch their corn grow.
Occasionally the Greifs got e-mails asking if they raised genetically modified crops, a sensitive subject. The CornCam's sponsors, a seed company and a farm journal, advised the Greifs not to touch it. About 25 percent of the corn grown in the United States has been armed with a bacterial gene that produces an insecticide, making the plants poisonous to caterpillars. Most such corn is mixed with conventional corn, and most consumers are unaware of the difference. The Greifs grow genetically modified corn, but not a lot of it. Sharon Greif, therefore, was vague in answering the e-mail. "Greenpeace could come out and destroy your test plot, you know," she says.
Ironically, if Jim had oriented the CornCam a little to the right, Americans could have watched StarLink corn grow. StarLink is the corn that triggered last fall's recall of taco shells, tortillas, and many other corn-based foodstuffs from supermarkets. It is the one genetically modified corn not approved for human consumption. The costs of its recall— losses to farmers, to food companies like Kraft and ConAgra, to grain exporters like Archer Daniels Midland, and to the StarLink manufacturer, Aventis— are still being totaled, but they may exceed $1 billion. More important, the episode may have shifted the debate over genetically modified foods in the American diet— shifted opinion against them, according to one national poll.
StarLink corn was supposed to have been used only in animal feed. Since last September, when an environmental group discovered it in food for humans, StarLink has come under tremendous scrutiny. From the magnitude of the response— the cascading recalls and litigious finger-pointing— you might think the corn posed a grave health threat, proof that genetically modified foods were dangerous. Although more than 40 consumers claim to have suffered allergic reactions, a dozen of them worthy of medical attention, the cases are unclear and can't be confirmed. Experts and even some environmental opponents of genetically modified crops agree that the risk of StarLink to public health was low. Still, opponents have seized the opportunity to question the safety of our food supply because something that was not supposed to get in it did get in it. As for StarLink, it is finished. Yanked off the market, never to be planted again, the corn symbolizes the fear of genetically engineered foods in this country and around the world.
Jim Greif left most of his StarLink standing through the winter. The seven-foot brown stalks, each with a bulbous ear, rustled forlornly in the snow. "This'll go to hog feed, I guess," he said, puzzled by the controversy.
