Bean or Frankenbean?
08 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Distressed Genes Tags: bean, crop, genetic IP, GMO, plant, soy, soybean
Are GMO soybeans another “New Coke (TM)” It’s midnight in the garden of good and evil, and I’m not sure anyone really knows beans.
After 40-ish years of being told that soybeans are very good for me, I am being told that they are now very bad for me, specifically because so many of them are GMOs (genetically modified organisms). Being the stickler that I’ve been taught to be (and being interested in crop-plant genetic IP), I went looking for reliable primary sources.* I found out:
- In the US. about 94% of the planted soybean acreage was given over to GMO strains in 2011 – up from about 9% in 1996. Well, that just means the US crop has gone largely GMO; no more. no less.
- However, “[n]inety-eight percent of the soybean meal produced by U.S. farmers is fed to animals such as pigs, cows and chickens.” That means all the GMO soy could be going for animal feed, in which case vegetarian consumers of US soy products could just be getting non-GMO soy. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a fact, just that it’s possible. As an analogy, consider “This garage is big enough for that truck to fit inside;” it’s not the same as being able to say “That truck IS inside this garage,” but it does eliminate the argument that “That truck CANNOT POSSIBLY BE inside this garage.”
- Soybeans for human consumption, including as tofu or soy-milk, are from a different family of cultivars (“vegetable” or “garden” cultivars) than soybeans for oil production (“field” cultivars). Vegetable cultivars are much more expensive to grow in large quantity because mechanical combine harvesters shatter the pods, and because they often must be harvested before reaching maturity which does not produce viable, “saveable” seeds for the following year. Besides, vegetable cultivars are known to have very few problems with weeds or pests. The particular cultivars used in “soyfoods” are produced in boringly low volumes and and nothing about them “is broken” that GMOs could “fix.” These are two other strong suggestions that soyfoods are unlikely to be GMO. In our truck/garage analogy, we now see some tire tracks of about the right type leading to the garage door.
- Compared to non-GMO soybeans, GMO soybeans require less pesticide for the same yield and are more adaptable to no-till agriculture. Gosh, that sounds kind of green.
- Lest any single strain of soy “take over,” the USDA maintains “a collection of over 10,000 accessions of soybean seeds.”
- Last July, the European Food Safety Authority concluded that Monsanto’s Roundup-Ready (TM) strain, the most common and longest-established GMO bean, “ is as safe as its conventional counterpart with respect to potential effects on human and animal health and the environment in the context of its intended uses.” This is particularly interesting because it was the EU’s previous fussiness about GMOs that convinced many Americans that something must really be wrong with them (the GMOs, that is).
- As far back as 2003, Oxford researchers concluded “Current GM crops, including soybean, have not been shown to add any additional allergenic risk beyond the intrinsic risks already present. . . Biotechnology has been used to remove a major allergen in soybean demonstrating that genetic modification can be used to reduce allergenicity of food and feed.” The UK has been presented as spearheading the no-GMOs movement in the EU, but this casts at least a shadow of doubt.
- The “Soy Bad” articles on many of what I’ll (with all the charity I can muster) call “opinion sites” seem to focus on the badness of ALL soy, not GMO soy as distinct from non-GMO soy. This even includes a “soy bad” article from a site called “Genetically Modified Foods, The Silent Killer.”** Some authors conditioned the badness on processing or non-fermentation (i.e., a type of “lack of processing.”)*** Several are dedicated to soy’s suboptimality as baby formula,**** including one that says it’s turning little boys gay. Ohhh-kayyyy. . . Most of the worries about GMOs in particular is “nobody knows what they’ll do long-term,” NOT “there is evidence that GMOs are unhealthier to consume than regular soy and here it is.”
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Meanwhile, many, many producers of vegetable-cultivar soybeans and the associated products say they now use only “identity-preserved”***** non-GMO beans (predictably their product is more expensive, but don’t you just feel better now?). Monsanto, the producer of Roundup-Ready and other GMO beans, has even jumped on the bandwagon! Recall that from the references above, it’s entirely possible that most or all of the vegetable cultivars used in soyfoods never were GMO in the first place.
To me, this whiffs suspiciously of the “New Coke (TM)” marketing game.****** For those too young to remember, that one goes like this:
- Take a popular product.
- Introduce a new version and quit producing the old one.
- Make sure the consumers who loved the old product the most will hate or fear the new one.*******
- When the black market for the old one shows sufficient profit to finance its own space program, grudgingly-but-magnanimously re-introduce the old product to a public who will be too relieved-and-exhilarated to notice, e.g., a higher price or any other side effect you’d like to sneak in.
- A redacted article, “Coke Produces Carbon Monoxide!” went viral.
- Redacted was the explanation that the article was actually about small-c “coke,” the derivative of coal used in making CO-containing “producer gas,” and not Coca-Cola(TM) at all.
- A bunch of people quit drinking Coca-Cola (TM) to avoid the in-fact-nonexistent threat of carbon monoxide.
- The Coca-Cola Co. introduced a “testing and certification program” GUARANTEEING that their soft drink would not produce carbon monoxide. . . and passed the costs along to consumers who were grateful to be protected.
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*E.g., articles with titles like “GM-Soy: Destroy the Earth and Humanity for Profit” did not make the first cut.^ Oh, P.S.: Any site that pops a “Give me all your contact info and Subscribe Now!!!” window up in my face, before I have a chance to skim even one paragraph, I rebuttably presume not to be a reliable primary source. Just sayin’.
**Wherein, the author writing about beans missed a golden opportunity to incorporate the phrase “Silent but Deadly.”
***At least one fairly scholarly-looking paper concludes that fermented soy is better for digestive flora than unfermented soy. This is distinct from “fermented soy is healthy but unfermented soy would just as soon kill you as look at you.” And it also doesn’t say anything about GMO vs. non-GMO.
****Thankfully this is not a law review article, so I can say things like “Well, du-uh.”
*****Confusingly abbreviated “IP!” This will probably hurt the producers’ case with the particular consumer sector convinced that any plant with a patent, trademark, or copyright^^ is bound to kill us all. And because of the multiple language-and-logic barriers involved, neither side may ever figure out where the problem started. Unless they read this blog, of course.
******Coca-Cola(TM) is an IP wonder. Its formula is possibly the most successful trade secret in the world.
*******Humans’ built-in change-resistance Gripe-O-Matic may do most of the job for you if you calculate the type of change well enough.
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^I mean, if I were to destroy the earth and humanity it would at least be for FUN and profit.
^^No, I don’t believe it’s possible to copyright a plant (as distinct from a picture, sculpture, poetic description, or interpretive dance about one). Others apparently believe it is.
The Mishmash Nation of Neverland – I kinda liked ‘em
14 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in Allegory Details, You Bet Your Sweetgrass
I can’t help but sympathize with the creators of Syfy’s Peter Pan prequel, “Neverland.” Here’s this forward-looking bunch with an ethos of fairly and sympathetically portraying — not only HUMANS of all ancestries — but aliens and robots and ghosts and super-intelligent shades of blue as well. And they’re forced to be simultaneously backward-compatible with an Edwardian British fantasy of “Red Indians.” That has to be worse than designing websites aimed at lawyers who haven’t updated their browsers since 1985!
I couldn’t wait to see how they got out of THAT one. I only hoped it would be more graceful than Disney’s purported “Michael-Jacksonizing” of the animated (now-white) Indians in the DVD version of their “Peter Pan.”
There is no Migratory Blogs Protection Act – and it shows
02 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
Bootlegacy is changing hosts. Some things couldn’t quite migrate correctly. Don’t get me started.
Little by little, we’ll fix it though! Thanks for your patience.
(For Thanksgiving): _Ringer_’s Bodaway Macawi: Return of the F.B.I.*
25 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment
in Allegory Details, You Bet Your Sweetgrass

*For those who haven’t been monitoring pow-wow T-shirt booths (a great way to catch up on Native sociopolitics while munching some of the better food on the planet), there was this shirt that said “F.B.I.- Full Blooded Indian.” Soon followed by parodies that said “F.B.I.- {Flat Broke Indian, Fat Butt Indian, or my fave, Fry Bread Inspector}.” Bodaway Macawi, the villain of the CW suspense series “Ringer,”. is a kind of FBI we haven’t seen in a few decades: the Fictional Bad Indian.
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Late, Great Jim Thorpe: NAGPRA’s Newest Draft Pick?
28 Jul 2010 Leave a Comment
in Grave Doubts, Splitting Heritage, You Bet Your Sweetgrass
His Sauk (Sac & Fox) name was Wa-Ho-Thuk. The world knew him as Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century. He played professional football, baseball, and basketball, and took gold medals in both the pentathlon and the decathlon in the 1912 Olympics. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) took away his medals (amateur-standing issues, having been paid to play semi-pro baseball); the Great Depression took away his career and earnings; a heart attack in 1953 took away his life. At that time, Thorpe’s native Oklahoma appeared singularly uninterested in erecting a monument. Frustrated, widow Patricia cast a wider net for the kind of memorial she felt Jim deserved. She found it in the towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, which proposed to merge into the single town of Jim Thorpe, PA and provide a granite mausoleum to house Jim’s remains. He was posthumously inducted into several athletic halls of fame, and honored with a “Jim Thorpe Day” in 1973. In 1983, after years of stonewalling, the IOC reinstated his Olympic medals.
So now this remarkable personage can rest in peace? Nope, not yet. His three surviving sons are suing the town of Jim Thorpe under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, 25 U.S.C. 3001 et seq.), to have Jim Thorpe’s remains returned to Oklahoma for burial in the family plot near his birthplace (which has a historic marker now). Different facets of the controversy have been presented in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
NAGPRA is a handy legal lever here, but is it really the right tool for the job? In the last half-century, federal statutes that bolster tribal sovereignty and Native cultural identity have seemed especially vulnerable to being crushed – or at least noticeably flattened – under the wheels of justice. One plaintiff tries to push the law just a little too far, and the court severely narrows the scope of the law or strikes it down altogether. More
Consumers Confuse Your “Face,” My “Butt”?
20 May 2010 Leave a Comment
in On your Mark
North Face v. South Butt settled out of court on Apr. 11, 2010. Nobody’s sayin’ nothin’ about the terms beyond “no comment” or “The matter has been amicably resolved between the parties” (nobody was quoted as saying “If we told you, we’d have to kill you” but it may be implied).
But(t) – even though Plaintiff was after a permanent injunction against marketing pretty much anything with a South Butt trademark, Defendant’s website is still up a month later and even features a “South Butt rap.” Score one for the smartalecks; I am so freaking glad the law hasn’t been able to suck all the humor out of the marketplace yet. A couple of the broader interpretations of trademark dilution and and the “goodwill-hitchhiking” aspects of unfair-competition law could do that someday if we’re not careful. More
Subsection Arrr: Did pirates really have Codes?
15 Jul 2007 1 Comment
in Allegory Details, Splitting Heritage
Several authors, including an economics professor, are pretty sure they did. Even the snooty-booty New Yorker has noticed, although New York is far more famous for “corporate pirates” who would have been useful to their high-seas counterparts only as ballast or sharkbait. (BTW, many thanks to Keith Nagel, author of highly useful patent-perusal program IPDiscover, for bringing this article to my attention).
These authors are probably right. Piracy is largely an organized crime; pirate chieftains like Blackbeard, Jean Lafitte, Grace O’Malley, and Madame Chiang commanded sizable fleets. Organizations have to have rules if they want to grow and achieve.
Don’t get me wrong; pirates were (and still are) “not very nice persons at all.” They stole ships and their cargo for personal gain, took prisoners for ransom or slave-price (or addition to the crew if sufficiently useful), and killed anyone who got in their way. Not like, for instance, national navies and letters of marque, which confiscated suspected enemy ships and their cargo as prizes shared by the crew, took prisoners for exchange or impressment into service, killed anyone who got in their way, and were sanctioned by governments and mostly financed by taxes.
My point -and I do have one – is that 17th- 18th-century pirate codes reveal a professional culture exhibiting much more democracy, safeguards for dispute resolution, and merit incentives at all levels than could be found in most governments of their age, and far more than can be found in most legitimate business ventures of our own time. They could certainly be a model for contractual relationships among salvagers and others who, albeit within the local law, profit from things that they find (rather than make or buy).
For US Independence Day: Thanks, Haudenosaunee
04 Jul 2007 1 Comment
in Splitting Heritage, You Bet Your Sweetgrass
This is a Haudenosaunee wampum belt. The Haudenosaunee (“Longhouse Builders,” aka the Six Nations of the Iroquois* Confederacy) used wampum (beads carved from the purple-and-white-striped shell of a quahog clam) for many purposes. Wampum belts weren’t for holding an individual’s trousers up, but for memorializing important agreements, metaphorically minimizing potentially uncomfortable exposure for whole groups, and often their descendants as well.
An elder of the Wisconsin Oneida nation, part of the Haudenosaunee, once told me that every traditional Haudenosaunee prayer is a prayer of gratitude. That’s impressive. Would you rather be in charge of people who say “Thank you” all the time, or people who say “Gimme”?
On this Fourth of July, I feel it’s appropriate to say thank you to the Haudenosaunee for providing a model of federalism for the Founding Fathers – an example of how separate sovereignties (like the newly independent colonies) could function as a nation without losing their separate identities and all of their autonomy.
Your 15MB of Fame: Schlemiels, Schlimazels, and Schadenfreude
06 Jun 2007 Leave a Comment
This T-shirt means “If you take an amusingly embarrassing picture or video of me, don’t put it on the Web without my permission.” With or without Photoshop embellishments. With or without grammatically incorrect captions. The shirt is a creation of R Stevens, the brain and funnybone behind the underground fave Diesel Sweeties web comic, among so many other things that one wonders if he’s really just one person.
What this shirt is suggesting, to the legal eagle eye, is celebrity rights for the rest of us. The shirt has no legislative or judicial backing - yet. But, just maybe, this idea’s time has come:
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