13 Mar 2006
Strawberries by design

Are we sure we want to stay in the business of "redesigning" Nature? (I say "stay in" because we've been at this type of thing for a while now.) Should we just sit back and let everything get redesigned by agricultural "scientists" to be "better"? Is todays new design for strawberries really just trying to fix our previous design errors? Consider this:

In spite of what Mother taught you about the benefits of eating broccoli, data collected by the U.S. government show that the nutritional content of America's vegetables and fruits has declined during the past 50 years -- in some cases dramatically.

Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas, said that of 13 major nutrients in fruits and vegetables tracked by the Agriculture Department from 1950 to 1999, six showed noticeable declines -- protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and vitamin C. The declines ranged from 6 percent for protein, 15 percent for iron, 20 percent for vitamin C, and 38 percent for riboflavin.

"It's an amazing thing," said Davis, adding that the decline in nutrient content has not been widely noticed. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

The real questions here are : What is "better"? And "better" for whom? The farmer? The consumer? The government? The "agribusiness" conglomerates? Qui bono? You supply the answer...

Researchers have developed a new procedure for the efficient transfer of specific DNA sequences into the genome of strawberry. By helping researchers establish the function of large numbers of strawberry genes, this method could, in the long term, be extremely useful in enhancing the nutritional value of these plants as well as the amount of health-enhancing antioxidants that they may contain.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

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