biodiversity

As someone who has grown up in the midwest, the fact that the SGT bookclub is going to tackle Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds," by Claire Hope Cummings, is poignant and exciting. My family began farming in some of the richest farmland in Illinois over 100 years ago and members of my extended family still work that land. Now, it is rows upon rows of tightly packed corn and soybean, no doubt genetically modified to produce at any cost. It still makes me shudder, but I am never quite sure why. Cummings will certainly shed some light on this and perhaps my hesitancy to be proud of the farm will have roots.

With juice dripping down her arm, I heard my daughter tell her younger sister that they were eating “elf strawberries.” Indeed, it seems hardly more of a stretch to imagine that the farmers market berries were grown by elves than to think they are the same type of fruit as the gargantuan strawberries available at the supermarket in protective plastic shields. There have been times when I’ve watched my kid clutch a strawberry in her fist and eat it like one would eat an apple and I’ve shuddered. It just seems unnatural. But how are they supposed to know that a strawberry shouldn’t fill your entire palm or that a watermelon is supposed to have seeds or that all apples are not round?