For last nights dinner, A. and I put together a harvest bouquet. We included wheat and millet grain, because they were in her flower shop. She used to live in Niger with the Tuareg (not a car, but a ancient culture of people). Millet is so central to the Tuaregs, it’s on the Niger coat of arms. She said said “I used to feel bad that I couldn’t tell the people in my village that their stable food was what we fed birds. But I’ve heard now we aren’t supposed to feed birds millet to birds because it’s too fattening…. and now we use the food that is the cornerstone of their civilization for…. decoration.”
In other news….
Scientist have worked out a way to genetically manipulate cottonseed so that it’s not toxic to humans. Keerti Rathore of Texas A & M University stated goal is for the seed to be “used to fight food shortages”.
Danny Llewellyn, a plant biologist at CSIRO in Australia who has also been trying to remove gossypol from cottonseed, says the research will “allow cottonseed to be used more widely as an animal feed…and extend its uses as a substitute for other high-value oils, like canola (rapeseed) oil.”
Now…. I hope we are all on the same page and recognize this as unadulterated bullshit. Both of these twits, and the money behind them, are seeking high profits from the seeds, that are efficient money makers, even though they are high impact crops requiring heavy use of pesticides and water. They are thinking that we can get textiles and food from the same crop, not - hey there are starving children in India.
I guess I would be more understanding if they weren’t so fucking smug about “solving world hunger” which is well understood to be caused by poverty and social unrest — not production. More food production will not solve this complex economic/social problem.
This is about profit. Hey… I am not against profit. But profit disguised as philanthropy is….well disgusting. Also, I am disturbed by the arrogance pervasive in this race to fix cottonseed. Using science to improve on our most fundamental human activity…the production of food…is admirable…but new ideas need to be done with respect of how things got done in the last 5 thousand years, before inventing problems to fit solutions.
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