states department of agricultu agriculture. then we have the author of the book how to read a french fry, how to pick up each. both explore the science of cooking, farming and flavor. he is the winner of multiple awards including the berg green a award for distinguished writing. most of you probably know him as the former food editor and columnist of the l.a. time which was his home for more than 25 years. then we have ted person. he is the professor of environmental law. he is the faculty company director on climate change and the environment at ucla, past professional roles include serving as an advisor to domestic and international institutions including the white house office of science and technology policy, united nations environment program, and the council office of the government of canada. welcome gentlemen >> thank you so, this topic isn't controversial or anything. but we are not here to discuss whether or not there should be gm owes. the horses are out of the barn for decades now. so what i'm interested in hearing about this evening is more about other technologies because gm owes are such a small part. sort of the larger landscape and of course some issues about ethics and larger cultural questions. first i want to start with russ. so, if we were to walk through the supermarket, what are we likely to put in our cards that might have some gm owes sprinkled through their >> depending on how you shop and what kind of cook you are, either everything or nothing. if you are buying processed foods that include different grain oils, things that have cornstarch or corn products in them, that whole, the boxes and cans part of the supermarket is pretty hard to avoid. if you are buying produce and fresh fruits and vegetables and meats, it's almost impossible to find anything. there are a few types of zucchini that have been genetically modified, a hawaiian papaya has been modified and there may be a few other things but i think that's pretty much the limit of it. >> did you know that papaya's are genetically modified? if they weren't, you wouldn't have any >> the hawaiian papayas. okay, so bob you are the plant guy, tell us a little bit about what the dmo is and how to find that is in the context of larger technology work that's going on >> it's a great question because those of us who do this, we think that all plants are gm owes because there's actually nothing that you buy in any of your grocery stores, whether it's organic or conventional that hasn't been genetically modified. every single broccoli, corn, cauliflower, kale, squash, pumpkins, everything was modified, meaning manipulated genes. there is really no difference between manipulating a gene the classical way by breeding because you are directing some change by selecting some traits that you want or by adding a gene. in the modern context of the popular context, dmo really means having a gene in the molecular sense that an individual wasn't born with. and so, there are two extremes, one is genetic modification by breeding and the other is by adding an additional gene or tweaking a gene by doing some molecular work in the cells. so, from the popularization of gm owes in this day and age, it is being born with a gene that didn't have originally, and i think most people would be really surprised that this technology is now 40 years old. that's when genetic engineering was invented. you may also be surprised there are actually human beings walking around that are gm owes. that is a fact, they are only alive because i have a gene in them they didn't have when they were born because they were born with a lethal disease, most of you may be surprised that if you use insulin or other drugs, they are made that have human genes that were injured engineered in them. if you are wearing blue jeans, the blue color was reengineered. there are a lot of different organisms that are gm owes. from a plant point of view, those of us who do these things to try to improve agriculture, we would consider genetic modification the classical way or the modern way by adding genes or tweaking them. >> okay. >> that's what's so exciting >> i will come back to you about some more excitement. so ted, the next natural question would be, has there been work and how do we know these things are safe >> well you never know for sure because you can't prove a negative. science doesn't prove anything and anytime somebody demands scientific proof of something, whether it's scientific proof that human beings are changing the climate or proof that gm owes are safe, you know they are using debating tactics and that is not something that can ever be provided. we have an awful lot of evidence. if you think about, i have to say, i find it persistently puzzling what intense controversies there are around dmo. it seems to be a strange place for people that have passionate feelings and acute political controversies. if you think of the narrowest way those controversies and concerned are framed, concerns about healthy food and environmental impact, the fact that genetically modified organisms, organize organisms modified, the fact that we have 25 or 30 years of experience all over north america of these things being planted and cultivated at huge scale and eaten by essentially everybody and there is no sign of any differential health impact on north american consumers relative to the europeans who provide a perfect natural experiment because they had very little. people have been exposed very little. that is an awful lot of basis for confidence that the narrowly framed worries that it will hurt you, it will make you sick or harm your health to the products genetically modified, we have an awful lot of confidence that is not a problem. >> how much discomfort of the subject you think as a result of its acting proxy for pushback against an economy that fails to respect ecological and ethical limits >> is that to me to >> it could be to any of you >> i think the short of it is, in speaking about the ecology, there's nothing natural about agriculture. if you think about feeding people, at one point the united states we had the great plains with buffaloes and grass and natural grass and now there's farms making foods using coin and slavery and wheat and canola and that means the ecology of that area has been drastically changed. the question really is, can you in fact feed the 9 billion people we will have by 2050 which is an enormous number of people in which we have to double the food supply and actually make more food than we've ever made in the whole history of humankind, how are you going to go about doing that with minimum ecological impact and i think the way in which that can be done is by good science, and i think some of the dmo that are out there have helped the environment quite a bit rather than negative. it's very difficult in agriculture to do something environmentally friendly >> what would you say to people who, for example the new york times article came out recently and said this will be a fallacy that gm owes are sold to the public all the time on this promise of higher yields and they did a study covering 30 years comparing canada and europe and in fact showed no higher yields >> and gets a little technically complicated to go into in this forum, but i can give you an example based on how the hawaiian papaya was very susceptible to disease and was being wiped out. that means the yield is being dropped. it could be insects or fungi or viruses and bacteria but just wipes outcrops. think about the irish famine that wiped out potatoes. think about locust in the bible. this goes very deep because these things are at war with the plans they eat. the hawaiian papaya was susceptible to a virus and essentially 20 years ago, it was immunized by a very slick genetic engineering technique that i won't describe, but essentially it prevented the virus from infected the papaya which meant, if you haven't genetically engineered it, you would have zero papaya. if you engineered it you now have a thriving population which means that genetic engineering did increase the yield of papaya because it went from zero to one 100%. it's a very complicated thing. yield means grow more on less space. there is really no one gene that would be the yield gene. i don't think the gm owes were sold on the basis of yield. they were sold on the basis of we can do this without pesticides. we can do this without plowing the soil over. it was an efficiency an economic point of view. in terms of increasing yield, we haven't even tapped the potential of what genetic modification can do in the molecular sense. in the classical sense, think hybrid corn. you can take two different varieties of corn, grow them together in the offspring are taller, hardier than the parents. if we could learn what those a are, we would very much be able to do that in the laboratory, and then be able to think about increasing yield on a scale which we can't even dream of today >> i would like to take a question in a somewhat different way. i would like to take on the broader implications. it strikes me that very often when people express concern about their opposition to dmo they are more motivated by a set of broader concerns about the character of the food and agricultural system. they are concerned about things, let's back up a little and ask, what kinds of things would you want out of in agriculture and food production system? it seems to me you might want healthy good, safe food produced in quantities to meet the needs of feeding people in an environmentally sustainable way and a way that is consistent. i think anybody who turns her attention to thinking about food and agricultural system will come up with a similar set of things. doing all of those is really challenging and there are a lot of concerns about our current way of organizing and producing food that implicates all of those. they implicate the environmental ones more acutely than the health and safety once. so, if you think that way, you will be concerned about things like agricultural practices broadly. you will be concerned about the scale and uniformity of agricultural production. you will be concerned about the concentration of ownerships involved in it and also the concentration of ownership in the intellectual property and you'll be concerned about the conditions of safe employment. those are all really important legitimate concerns. what puzzles me a bit is that focusing on dmo's is a lousy proxy for those concerned. of a lousy proxy for any of them. you're going to think about antitrust, the breath and scope and duration of property protection. you will think about environmental regulations and the whole suite of mechanisms we try to put in place to push agriculture and other enterprises toward sustainability. feeding 7 billion people safely and sustainably is going to be really hard. it's going to be harder than getting off fossil fuels to solve climate change. it's coming down the pike at a slower so we haven't embraced how severe it is. you will think about worker self safety and health concerns. they implicate a bunch of areas in public policy but gm owes are a weird place to focus concern and attention and opposition. i'm not saying there is no connection, but i'm saying it's a thin connection and it's a strange place to have intensity of conflict >> don't you think it's natural given the introduction to most of us with these products, this process went from a company who is a chemical company, often known for agent orange, not monsanto but one of the others, tao, but a lot of these companies are chemical and seed companies and are becoming intellectual property owners. it would be great to also talk about that. i think those issues are issues that make having this discussion much more difficult. , with all that comes with that idea, it makes having a discussion about the safety of this technique much more laden than if it had been coming to us through another way. >> here is the irony of all of that. in the old days, in the beginning of biotechnology, exactly what you said applies to the farming industry, it's in a parallel worlds, but the irony is in the old days, back in the old days when genetic engineering was invented, there were scores of little tiny companies that were entrepreneurial and going down different areas and exploring the front niches. it was extremely exciting. i'm not going to take up that discussion right now but what happened is the cost. the irony is all of the original discoveries were done by tiny companies, not by the dupont or monsanto's, they didn't have enough resources or money to get to the revenue just like with stage one, two and three clinical trials. it takes hundreds of millions of dollars. we created these monsters and there's no spot for tiny startups because they wouldn't have the capital get through the whole thing. agriculture is very big. not so much making the gmo in the lab, it's making the billions and billions of seeds in different geographies and climates that go to the farmers and that's where the cost is, plus the regulatory cost. it's a challenging issue >> do you want to talk about intellectual property and patents? >> that's a great topic >> it is a great topic. there has been a lot of intellectual property in agriculture, but it didn't come a new with gm owes. seeds have been patented for 80 years >> since the 1930s >> there you go. patents on life forms were affirmed in 1980. there is intellectual property. patents don't last forever so, there are limits to our system of intellectual property, and i'm not sure it makes sense to think about intellectual property as the unique locust of the problem any more than it makes sense to think about gm owes as being the unique locust, it's a big complicated system that has to serve a diversity of societal ends, and it's very complicated to push and maneuver in that direction. i find your observation fascinating that there is a pathological partnership between the drive for very effective, careful regulation of the health and safety of this new technology and the concentration of ownership necessary to live with the system that also elicits the suspicion, it sounds like a perfect perverse vicious circle >> for consumers, what's ironic, the gm owes that are out there, let's say you have some soybean products and stuff, they've gone through ten or 15 years of testing before they are approved by the epa. >> there is not one conventional variety of crop given new new varieties, there's nothing you bought in the grocery store that's gone through any regulatory whatsoever. for example, in my lab, and this is the irony, in about two weeks i could give you a hyper allergenihypoallergenic peanut. people are allergic to peanuts would have no reaction, that will go through ten or 15 years of testing before it will ever be approved, if it ever is. on the other hand, on another part of my laboratory, i could use classical breeding to breed a peanut that might has ten times the concentration in the seed that the ones you buy in the grocery store and i can give it to the farmers tomorrow without any form of regulation whatsoever. that's for the system, i think, is screwed up. the national academy of science and the panels that i've been on basically said we need to think about the final product and whether it's safe with respect to allergens or toxicity and focus on the product and not the way it's made. genetic engineering is the process, not the end. i think we need to consider that as a society >> i think from the consumer's point of view, i think a lot of the opposition i hear the focal point of the opposition goes back to an uneasy relationship that has become a stand-in. i think we have, one of the really reassuring things that's happened in food and farmers market and all that and it kind of reinforces the idea of this romantic process that happened in our parents and grandparents day, but it actually is just a romantic image. i think people who live on farms and when you talk to them, they don't want to leave everything to nature to take its course. >> it's natural, these interventions that we don't li like, they hold a mirror up to things that we don't like about ourselves or our society at this point, but it's probably the wrong argument >> i'm really curious to know have how you have walked the place that you are. you look at it from a very big picture view point, and you have a middle ground that you have staked out >> my journey >> yes. you have been painted with that brush from time to time. i admit, i have. twenty-five years covering much of what i covered with agriculture and food, i've spent a lot of time talking to ag scientists and walking dirt. as a journalist, the two things i try to keep in mind, how do i know what i think i know, and the other is what does the other side say. that doesn't mean that what the other side said is right, but it does mean i need to fully investigate that and find out what is valid about it, if there is validity to it. i think, for me, the journey started back in the 80s with the organic movement and the organic philosophy which has seen such a wonderful thing but then again when the regulatory arm stepped in and became a catalyst of things that needed to be done, in a weird way it kind of got set in stone at the time that it was legislated. and so, i would talk to people about organic this and that and the image was either you are either buying stuff from barefoot baby jesus or you might be mainlining agent orange. i knew those farmers and i would walk those fields, i knew these pictures that were being painted didn't fit the reality that i saw, and when i started looking at what was being made and pulled apart, i realized what was being painted in the organic world, and some of my best friends are organic farmers was this black and white world of two extremes in the reality of the agriculture that happen in this gray area in the middle were conventional farmers were using cover crop and pest management and integrated pest management, they were using all kinds of organic techniques but they were too ornery to go through the certifications because they reserved the right, they believed it was better to use some of the things that were outlawed and organic. there were plenty of paradoxes. : so anyway, questioning that led to questioning when gm started coming out and they think they have a little bit more -- a little bit more open mind and a little more questioning mind. the things i would hear, argument against what i would begin to investigate, they seem to be fairly flimsy. >> one of the things that is really fascinating to me is do you and the kind of research that you do, do you also interact with people who are doing research -- i don't even know how to describe it at this point, but on fertility of the soil, things have that we might think of as being more conventional. our resources being poured into the other kind, the more traditional kind because it seems to me if you feed all these people you need more than one match at bullet. you need like a million magic bullets, right? and do you, if we're to think of this as political, do you remain on different sides of the aisle or do those of you in applied science not in the genetic modification part of it, do interact with one another? >> i can give you one example. i'm on this thing called board of agriculture and the national academy of sciences which is pfizer's president and congress on policy and we get together in a room in washington and regular biologists, traditional breeders, agricultural economist and people who are involved in the whole system of agriculture and were always interacting how this piece and not piece together can get the best recommendations so you look at the agriculture as a whole. i think you're absolutely correct. i don't have as much a loan because we don't have an agricultural college. we can talk about that, but the thing is that a database or riverside or berkeley is doing molecular things, soil science, microbiology, all integrated together to best agriculture the most environmentally sustainable with as little inputs as we can possibly do. >> another one of the great ironies is one of the hottest topics right now and kind of the anti-gm of roundup ready crops. one of the hottest topics in sustainable agriculture protects the soil surface. it prevents erosion. it sequesters carbon, but you can do no till. it's difficult to do no till and herbicide. that's the opposite of no till. i don't think it's accurate, but think of all of these things as being the tools strictly of degrading the soil or degrading the planet. this great comments there for developing and increasing sustainability. >> it's interesting if you read farmers account, you hear how many of them will talk about. it's the first time they have been -- tilled and he gave them the opportunity to do that the first time. >> we do think the >> we just need to trash him last year's harvest and they spray roundup ready before seeds emerge in that they and all the soil has been saved tons and tons of soil and it's been a quite a dramatic change in agriculture. [inaudible] >> does consolidation and monopoly worry people? >> well, i think in some respects it's a little bit of a misnomer because there's literally thousands and thousands of seed companies all over the world that are doing what they need to do to make the best seats for local environments. i think that when you think about consolidation, for example, the university of california. if we do anything significant in agriculture and let's say we have some intellectual property or some content embedded in anything that we might license, the fact that you have to give a royalty-free license to get in a small company to develop in the world anywhere where people need it to grow food locally in a developing type world. monsanto and dupont and i know they get a lot of that price, but as a matter of fact they do get royalty-free license as for other technology and parts of the developing world. it is not a black-and-white world in terms of these people have this and they have the intellectual property. it's really important agriculture is not the one gene that you had to deceive is really important is the whole series of genes which we call the germplasm that makes the seed. most of agriculture is really based on classical rating. you might add one gene here and won there, but most of it is just breeding. that is done by thousands of little companies whether it's in india, bangladesh, south america, you just hear about it. >> you understand when monsanto says something about the seeds it's going to south in 2050, he'll have 14 saturated, hotbot -- from where the culture has brought us to now and what we expect now which 30 years ago would've seemed insane. looking ahead to that, it is frightening for a lot of people. >> it can be appearing on the other hand where they can numerous of those feeds. consumers are farmers. a lot of other seeds they don't have it by. they have adopted the technology faster than many an agricultural history and they do it because they are business people. they know that they can grow their crops more sustainably and cheaper and more efficient lane and get a better crop if there's pressure or something like that. so in some respects i'm not here to defend our monsanto. i have no connection with any of them except it's the farmers adopt the immense and they are voting actually to say this is great technology because we need this to bill to make our thin profits that we make. if we had this conversation in ames, iowa rain columbus ohio, they would really be start by that kind of thing. what also will surprise everyone is in the added value, that is the value you get when you use the gml, there's a monetary amount the agricultural economists have done lots of studies on this. 75% of the added value, the money that comes back is to the small farmers and not to the monsanto or that dallas. most of the increase in economic value is really going back to the farmers and not corporations that develop the technology. they get a cut, but they are not getting most of it. >> monopoly is bad, but not all production at-large concentrated scale is monopoly and also, we have a kind of sad a foundational and legal principles that we allow or even grant monopolies sometimes at one place that the government grants monopolies and has since the constitution was adopted in the area of patching because you want to encourage beneficial innovation and what patterns do is grant a monopoly under certain conditions in return for somebody doing innovative, useful things. i don't think you can fairly consider one side of this without thinking about the other. goodness knows it's like innovation in food production to cancel the values have been talking about are by and large good games. but harms -- associated harms gaming regulation when they do. >> what are you working on that is like a love project, something you're excited about and feel the idealism about when you decided to go into this work. >> i always feel excited every day of the week. one thing about science as it changes every day. the goal of all of us i think there's a healthy food supply that sustainable and minimizes the input. minimizes chemicals, minimizes water, minimizes any of the things we need to do to grow agriculture, to grow food. so it's exciting and this era of genomics leslie have the human genome sequence and i could sequence the genome of every single person is room in in my lap in about one week and know everything there is to know about you. that's been applied to agriculture. there is really no planet on the face of this earth or in some environment either without water or a combat from chad or bacteria in the exciting thing is this is what excites me as we are learning about all the genes in these organisms that do this because they do it naturally with the genes in their plant body so to speak. with the tools that now exist, the things that we are talking about is the gml is this the model t. ford. think about some little wild tomato growing in the mountains of amd's and let's say it's resistant to some folk that the domesticated tomato growing somewhere in the midwest would be destroyed by it. we can find that gene in that little tomato you would want to eat in the andes. we have a little typewriter and we can change it. very simple change. we don't have to add anything in outlook and make that domesticated tomato resistant to that fund us. that means we can go with fungicide. the new technology is going backwards. it's going back to the future. use all of the diversity and all of these crops around the world that makes them different, what makes them resistant to pass, what makes them grow in the santa monica beach with almost no water. find all the information in labs all over the world and we can use that and be able to tweet the things that we grow agriculturally because they make a really great sustainable agriculture. i look at it as an organic farmer stream because 50 years from now i doubt that will be spraying a lot of stuff and i doubt that will be flooding the fields with water because we are understanding these processes. that is what excites me. [applause] >> so now i have to ask a question of the three of you. what do i know. do you cook? >> i love cooking but my wife is 5 million times better than i am sorry let her do it. >> what's your dish? >> i love steamed vegetables, particularly broccoli and for nice wild rice. >> do you cook? >> not much. not much and not well. i like raw fruits and vegetables. >> you look like you like raw fruits and vegetables. you look really healthy. >> suspiciously healthy. i've been genetically modified. >> me too. >> for you, sir, what's the most interesting thing you've eaten recently? it could be raw or at a fine dining experience. >> i don't know. most interesting thing. this is totally off topic, but i'm working on a boat with somebody who is one of these kind of very advanced -- he is advanced in that weird way, the weird perfection way and he's the coach for the american war which is a big cooking competition that takes place in leon. last time they did it use the coach this year. gavin did it three or four times ago. i was up there in their lab if they're protecting their dishes than watching them sharp and carrots with this great big pencil sharpener so any carrot was exactly the same size and decontaminate the glue together and different things fit together. dishes that were not intended in nature. it sounds unnatural. >> before we get to q&a, there's one more question i wanted to ask you. this is a different can of worms i'm opening up and i apologize. so when you talk about the papaya and you describe what you did with it, you describe -- you said and not delay. is that how we should think about this, like vaccination? >> papaya wasn't immunization and defense. they don't have an immune system per se but is immunized to protect and that's essentially what was done. >> how often is that done? >> depends upon the plant. in the case of papaya and squash, those are the only two food in which that has been done. but it can be generally done with almost anything you can imagine. >> now, that that's all a big problem. we work on soybean, tofu. >> are we ready? let the floodgates opening. >> we now have time to take questions from all of you. two of us going around with microphones. please raise your hand it will come to you. if you could please say first and last name before asking a question, we greatly appreciate it. this is being recorded for rebroadcast. but a public square.org and also c-span for broadcast a later date. first question i nearby. >> hi, i'm under the impression that there are no gml organic roots of vegetables. do you guys think they will be an upside or downside to having gml organics? >> it's an oxymoron, right? >> would be a regulatory decision of what falls in the category. the interesting way of understanding it is would there be gm modifications would be consistent with the underlying philosophy in organics and make us about a lot of specific knowledge is that would be. it could be environmentally beneficial. you disagree. >> it's a very difficult topic because gml is organics is a no no. for the lack of me i don't understand it. >> it's really acting as reverse labeling since people really feel they want labeling which we didn't get into at all knowing god if you do choose something organic, then you know it's been assured it does not gml is good >> what my favorite molecular biologists, pam arnold of you see davis shoes with her husband who is the director of the you see davis student organic farm and a son of a former member of the california organic certification board. i think there is tremendous promise they are. it's getting across the political hurdle. >> so that couple can sit together at dinner. [inaudible] yes, thank you. wonderful. >> next question is on your left. >> i wonder how long is it going to be before crops are going to be able to accomplish nitrogen fixation? >> my god, that is such a great question. one of the dreams in 1985 when plant genetic engineering was invented was to be able to do nitrogen fixation from bacteria. bacteria fix nitrogen from the air in the soil and they associate with the wrist and give the nitrogen different forms of the plant. the problem is that involves literally hundreds and hundreds of genes, both on the bacteria inside and on the plant side. and so, it is going to be quite some time until someone is going to be able to engineer hundreds and hundreds of genes at a particular point in a crop in order to be able to do it. if it can be done because there's a lot of energy requirements in things like that that make not be so suitable. it's a much, much more complicated problem than one could've ever imagined in the beginning of this science. >> next question is on your right. >> my question has to do with is the nutritional value of organic food and non-organic food the same? the part of that question is will i become ill if i eat non-organic food and tea, will i be healthier if i eat organic food? >> this is a topic of some controversy. it's been studied. there have been surveys studies that come down kind of fun the margin of each argument. there have been surveys studies that take a look at all the literature -- all of the studies that have been done and analyze them. some say an upcoming guest commanders marginal benefit to eating organic food. some say no, there's no benefit whatsoever. nutritionally, for my point of view, nutritionally the food that we get this conventionally grown is what we are talking about is 1% or 2% more at the most than the most optimistic scenarios. so to avoid conventionally grown food because you're going to get a 1% or 2% gain in vitamin k seems shortsighted to me. >> also a very privileged place to be a super privileged place to be. i think a lot of times it's good to remember that because boy do we live in a series that can venture bubbles. >> organics are more than they have to be marked as it because the guild are so low. the usda statistics varies depending on growing area, but the average is 20% reduced yield. if a farmer's got to make his rent, it's got to charge 20% more. the equations she -- you know, they keep complicating rather than simplifying. >> so basically make some difference. >> eat vegetables. eat lots of them. >> next question is on your left. b. mckay, scott kennedy and a documentary filmmaker. i have to start by thanking you for putting on amazing things and having a mature conversation. thank you so much. i'm a little excited, so i'll try and control myself. i've been working for about three years on a documentary called food evolution about almost everything we're talking about, trying to reset the conversation i gml is. we hope to come -- we will be coming to movie theaters around the country in 2017. we are so honored to have our narrator and we are trying to have the same mature conversation that you all are having. we touched -- there's so many things i want to ask and i can't wait to have drinks and going to be tackling all of you. i have to go -- it's only been touched on a little bit and i really would love to hear you talk about in thank you, and then for doing this. we know to a lot of people you record and organic. you represent local. you represent perfect food. >> people think i am a foodie, too. >> that's a tricky word. so you asked how did we come -- which gml is there brought to us by month info? that made it very difficult. i ask everybody in this room, how did they first hear about gml is? it wasn't from a van till. it was someone interpreting mont sainte. i'll take that a step further with organic marketing. it was the organic industry usually does that look, if we tell you to gml is there's gary, look what we can get you to buy. >> actually, that isn't the first time i ever heard. >> i would love a show of hands of people how they first heard about gml is and i guarantee was one of three documentaries. >> you shouldn't guarantee. you should have an open mind. >> i complement you on that and then i fail. my question is, some of the organic to stop fear mongering and stop confusing people and say peter vegetables, please. >> well, i don't know. you wanted to answer that? >> are you afraid of gml is? >> am i afraid of gml is? no, i'm not afraid. i don't eat them at the supermarket. you know, i'm a cook. they take raw foods than a transform them in the privacy of my own kitchen. so have i ever had it ever had it to read zero? sure. have i got to talk about? yes. >> taco bell? >> of course. [laughter] so for me it's not that i avoid gml is. i just don't eat a lot of processed food. and so, you know, for example, when i was in washington and oregon in the spring and dating black varies as big as my head, it would have bothered me at all. i was happy to put the gorgeous, juicy blackberries big as my head into my mouth. that was in a gml. for me it's a much bigger conversation. for me, the first time i heard about anything genetically modified must have been the tomato. >> absolutely. i was on the market. >> economically viable. >> it didn't taste very good either. >> we didn't need those. >> but there is no controversy. none, zero. >> and i respond to two points? one is natural versus unnatural is a really lousy proxy for good versus bad whatever normative value of talking about. good for you, good for the environment, virtuous. the other as we expect enterprises, commercial interests to advance their interests. one of the oddities of this debate as people perceive a bunch of commercial enterprises on one side of it as villainous and receive a bunch of crucial enterprises on the other side is virtuous. i don't want to cast aspersions on any individual enterprise, but i think both of those premises are kind of suspect. they are doing what they do, which is to innovate and sell products people want to adopt and thereby make money and neither of them is set up for kind of organized in their genome to attend to the public consequences. that's why we have government and laws to control health effects, environmental effects and other stuff like that. so i mean, i love the aesthetic of organic and natural as much as anybody else, but i counsel a skepticism both as to whether it's a sensible category to frame your passions around. there's not a lot of natural stuff that's really bad and an awful lot of a natural step is good in my opinion. and i also counsel you against sort of a naïve credulity that enterprises and people who manage appropriate certain symbols to themselves are necessarily acting in your interest. >> yeah. >> next question. >> hi ,-com,-com ma anna henderson. you made a great case for gml is and therefore modern cultures and yet you said the most exciting advancement are in diversity, and in peruvian tomatoes let's say. how do we balance the monoculture that's taking over because gml produces more, because you have seeds that are being sold to produce more and it's taking over the diversity and that diversity might get close and promise. so how do you balance those two things? i say that in a very non-weighted way. >> at ink in terms of monoculture kind of an overused word. the reason i say that is the soybean grows in mississippi is not the soybean that grows in ohio nor is it the soybean that grows anywhere else in the world. and though, there's a tremendous amount of what we call genetic diversity within soybeans, within, with any of these crops that one would think this is a monolithic thing, which it isn't. there's as much diversity in these crops that are grown as there is in this room. it is not a site they are all the same. fahrenheit very, very, very different. the key is that if you go to the grocery store, you are going to see this rich, bountiful store of plenty where you have all kinds of different vegetables and all kinds of different crops. not simply corn and soybean. .. until you sort of change the way in which we do things, rather than than going from a meat -based food to something else then you're not can have those rich kind of different crops and plants that you perceive to be less of a quote on because you see differences that's growing in the midwest be back i mean that's what is it? 70%? 70% of all of those monoculture crops so, if we stop eating so much livestock then will have less mono crops. >> one of the reasons their monocultures is because they're very low margin crops. so, to grow them you need to grow a lot of them. it's not like tomato where you get a high return. one of the things we need to keep coming back to in all of these discussions is that net farm income is actually negative. everything that were doing, any time were asking farmers to give something up, we, we need to remember that there already in the hole. >> and there's fewer and fewer of them. >> 4%. >> was ironic, in the segway, in the 1930, believe it or not, there were 29,000 29000 farms in los angeles county, if you can believe that. los angeles county from 1950 to 1954 was the largest agriculture producing country in the united states not simply in california. about 50% of the workforce in los angeles county was in the agricultural workforce. and now there's no farms and no one works in agriculture, in exchange. >> one thing i'd like to bring up because rightly we've been focusing on the modern aspect of cultural but sometimes people get fixed in their minds that you're going this way or this way. i think were in a golden age of agriculture untreated, especially in california. for people like us is like godhead and we can get those lettuces at the farmers market. they are there for us if we want them. for the vast majority where it's a nutritional exercise they can get really nutritious, cost-effective, very safe food at reasonable prices. food is no longer a barrier to health. we have to remember that we can do both of those things at once. it's not a zero-sum game. [applause] >> my name is felice. i'm very curious about the presupposition upon which much of this conversation has been built and that is the statement early on that there is no evidence that happens to health as a result is gml's. i think my question is: how is that being evaluated? who would be funding that research? how many generations would be required for evaluation to be truly justify the truth behind that statement? for me, i guess, i'd i'd like to understand more about the meat and potatoes of justifying that there is no evidence that gm owes are harmful. my other question is in reference to, are they categorized somewhat ? it's one thing to take a gene from a tomato in one part of the world and integrate it a tomato from another part of the world. isn't that somewhat different in terms of how a human system would work with that? even over multiple generations, if you take a full flower and stick a pig gene. now we have cross species. now we have much more genetic differentiations untreated differentiations. >> you first. [laughter] first of all, i'll take the second part. a gene is a gene is a gene. how many jeans did you eat today. >> quite a few. >> do you know what happens you get the saliva in your mouth and it goes into your digestive system. for the most part when we eat things they get digested into their hydrogen, carbon nine carmen that get re- utilized or you them out. okay? so, from that.of view what are we most concerned about with food? are you allergic to it? that's what's really important. you don't want to have an allergic reaction death put into your food supply. secondly, is it toxic. untreated? will it harm you in any way? one of the things they fda looks at when it has been genetically modified and has only been eight and most of them have not been consumed directly so in case of the indirect. >> the animal eats it and we eat animal. >> or we get the oil from a plant and the oil has been processed in the process goes away with the dna or protein that went into the genetic modification because the process is destroying everything there is. there's very few crops that you are eating like squash and papaya that are directly eating the jeans so to speak that was put in there to make it live better, so to speak. in terms of who's doing the studies, that's a really good question. it gets on a couple of things but let me just answer it directly. the stories are done for a very long period of time, there's set protocols that are established, animal feeding studies, toxicity studies, all kinds of things that people look in laboratories and systems about whether they'll be harmful or not. those studies, just like clinical studies and pharmaceutical companies, carry out drug trials these are carried about by the people who are trying to develop those seeds. however, in the case of the gm owes, they been independently validated by hundreds of labs all over the world that have been funded by governmental agencies and not by industry the best study that's been done in that regard is the you opinion it would help organization that spent a half a billion dollars and spend it out to independent european labs who don't use gmo's and after ten years of study with governmental money and doing the best kind of studies they could ever do they came to the conclusion that it's no different than conventionally grown crops and they provide no safety risks. essentially,. >> can you ever prove the negative press mark but over the last 20 years there's never been one documented case of disease. so case of the gmo's that are out there. they appear to be safe. what another one be just as safe ? it has to be tested on a case-by-case basis with the best scientific that we have. all of them had been independently evaluated not by corporations but by government sponsored agencies and labs. >> so, is the reason that gmo's is not is accepted in europe is simply a pr problem ? i think it's a political issue that has nothing to do with the scientific issue. gmo's were pioneered in europe and were first on the market in europe. i think it's a political issue and there's nothing to do with scientific issue. >> and if you ask farmers just like anything else it's not monolithic. there are farmers there would like to try it, to see for themselves? >> that's the.were going to wrap up this discussion. on behalf of zilkha low public square i like to think the ucla for making this event possible and for hosting us. i'd like to thank all of you for joining us this evening and invite you to join us at the reception that immediate follow this. it's just in the front, right up the stairs where you entered. of course thank you to all of our wonderful panelists for sharing their thoughts and insights with us tonight. [applause] white house spokesman sean spicer says he made a mistake when comparing syrian president asad to adolf hitler. he made the comments this