Book Review

Dinner at the New Gene Café: How Genetic Engineering is Changing What We Eat, How We Live, and the Global Politics of Food
by Bill Lambrecht
Review by Jake Aryeh Marcus

Bill Lambrecht is a journalist for the St Louis Post Dispatch who has been reporting on his hometown company, Monsanto, for many years. Along with this assignment came researching the growth of a phenomenon of international importance: genetically modified crops. Monsanto, the company that brought us Agent Orange, was one of the largest, and unquestionably the most aggressive, corporate forces behind the spread of genetic modification (GM) of food.

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Dinner at the New Gene Café is a long book and pondering its seeming endlessness, one must remember that news stories appear daily concerning new discoveries of possible health implications of GM as well as new international political events relating to GM. This story is far from over.

But this book is perhaps most valuable as an accurate history of an enormously significant event - the discovery of the ability to alter the DNA of seed. This discovery has led to attempts to, among other things, create crops that are resistant to insects, diseases, and insecticides. A good bit of Dinner at the New Gene Café concerns Round-Up, a Monsanto product considered one of the most toxic pesticides used on both suburban lawns and soybean fields, and Monsanto's development of seed for crops that would be resistant to Round-Up. Monsanto then produces both the toxin and the seed that can survive the toxin. This irony is not lost on author Lambrecht nor on the activist community that has grown up in opposition to GM crops.

Lambrecht presents, in a witty and engaging way, many of the other concerns of GM products such as the inevitable spread of the seed across fields and contamination of other seed thus leading to the possible permanent loss of crop varieties. He also follows the political opposition to GM with great precision both in the United States and in the European Union. And this book begins to consider what is uppermost in many minds - what effect will altering the DNA of our food have on our bodies and on an already gravely disrupted ecosystem?

This book also contains some interesting surprises. Lambrecht shares much inside information he has gathered on the public relations disaster resulting from what Monsanto itself ultimately described as its own "arrogance" concerning the company's ability to ignore consumer concerns. Lambrecht also spends far too many pages delving into related stories about chemical overuse and agribusiness corruption. Finally, scattered throughout the book is Lambrecht's diary of his own illegal use of GM seed on a small land tract.

Dinner at the New Gene Café is an important book to read. Genetically modified food is an issue each of must address and must address quickly. As Lambrecht documents so well, the United States government has been almost completely hands-off in dealing with companies such as Monsanto while the countries of the European Union opposed and heavily regulated (nearly halting) the use of GM in Europe. In both cases, though obviously with greater prevalence in the United States, GM crops have already covered huge numbers of fields, producing food products that have worked their way into a large portion of what we ingest every day. It is critical that one have the basic knowledge this book supplies in order to begin to understand the implications of GM and to decide where one stands on this urgent issue.

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Jake Aryeh Marcus is a lawyer, freelance writer and editor, and work-at-home mom to unschooling sons Luca, Nicky, and Aidan. Jake's writing has appeared in The Compleat Mother, The Family Life Journal, and elsewhere. Jake and her family live in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

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