Discomfort Food: Analogy, Biotechnology, and Risk in Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation

It's a novelist's responsibility, and a reader's responsibility, too, to question what is happening in this world, fashioned and controlled as it is by experts.

Ruth Ozeki, "The Seeds of Our Stories"

An initial insight is key: when it comes to hazards, no one is an expert—especially not the experts.

Ulrich Beck, World At Risk

Critical Discomfort

What's wrong with genetically modified foods—those products judged "substantially equivalent" and fed to North American consumers willy-nilly; the same ones rejected for so long (and in some quarters still) by the European Union, and turned back at one point by the boatload when sent to Zambia¹—the "StarLink™" corn, the "Roundup Ready®" canola, the "Genuity™" soybeans? Answers, naturally, vary from "nothing" to "everything" and myriad points in between. And I ask the question as a layperson, for, as someone trained in literary criticism, in the reading and interpretation of texts, I am hardly qualified to answer it. Of course, lack of expertise in biology has not stopped literary and cultural critics from commenting on genetic technologies in the past. Indeed, whether it is because we cannot resist intervening in discourse surrounding something persistently referred to as "like a language," or simply because we, like all human and nonhuman beings on the planet, are increasingly surrounded by new life forms—including transgenics, which cross unrelated species, phyla, and even kingdoms, joining fish and tobacco, bacteria and trees²—that fascinate us, literary and cultural critics have produced a fairly substantial archive of responses to genetics in general and genetic engineering more specifically, our relative lack of expertise notwithstanding.³

This essay is about the discomfort—critical, ethical, political—that surrounds these foods, and in my opening question I have no doubt tipped my hand, for this discomfort is in part my own. In feeling it, I am hardly alone; indeed, what could be more "natural" than to express such discomfort, one shared by people from such diverse walks of life as activist-scholar Vandana Shiva, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Pope John Paul II, and Britain's Prince Charles?⁴ (But now, surely, I have moved from describing discomfort to eliciting some of it on the part of my readers, for opposition to GM foods can produce some distinctly uncomfortable alliances.) Is genetic modification just the latest in a long process that began with domestication and moved through hybridization (an argument often made to alleviate anxiety), or is it a dramatic leap into a new process altogether (an argument that has accompanied patent claims)? Will genetically modified crops feed the planet's hungry or prove carcinogenic—or both?⁵ Will it have mattered that the bacterial insecticide Bt was not only on but in our soy? To these questions, I must respond, at the outset, that I do not know. In this, however, I am in good company for, as sociologist Ulrich Beck points out, when it comes to the potential hazards of new technologies, "no one is an expert—especially not the experts" (35). Genetically engineered food is, as Claire Hope Cummings puts it, an "uncertain peril," in part because it is the peril itself that remains uncertain. But, confronted with the juxtaposition of an ever-growing catalog of unanticipated disasters—from global warming to mad cow disease to bisphenol-A—and an ever-renewable techno-optimism—from carbon sequestration to nanotechnology—how can one not feel uneasy?

Discomfort—rather than fear⁶—is, I believe, the emotion that best characterizes what Beck has called "world risk society," a historical moment in which the side effects of modernization have become too numerous to ignore, as yesterday's "wonders" of modern science—asbestos, CFCs—produce today's and tomorrow's horrors of environmental or health catastrophe. And, even if literary critics cannot claim any specialized knowledge of gene transfer, we do have a sort of expertise in the structure of feeling that might accompany such technology, for literature has long been a locus for expressing doubts about the hubris of science. From Mary Shelley's...