Author: Matt Hawkins
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!
Brilliantly illustrated by Linda Sejic.
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
This graphic novel wasn't as impressive to me as the blurb originally made it sound. The best thing about it, without a doubt, was the artwork, which was remarkable, but on top of the artwork, there needs to be a decent story, otherwise it’s not a novel but a coffee table art book. The lack of realism in this story was where this fell down for me. It felt more like I was reading an Internet rant than it felt like I was reading an entertaining story. Let's look at that issue first.
The author obviously has a bee in his bonnet about genetically modified foods (GM) - and very probably an Africanized bee, in this case! The fact of this is obvious from how he tacks on a bunch of supportive 'evidence' at the end of the book. He puts it out there like he's presenting a balanced view, but it's clear that it's not so, not only from the tack he takes in the fictional story itself, but also in the way things are tipped against GM foods in the presentation at the back of the comic.
One egregious example of this is the statement reporting the number of studies into the safety of GM foods. I forget the exact number, but for the sake of argument, let’s just say it’s 1,200. It was somewhere north of a thousand. Now if there are that many studies of the foods and they declare the foods to be safe, then this very strongly suggests that the foods are safe, yet the fact that there have been so many studies is used to imply here that the very number of studies itself is indicative that the foods aren't safe! Seriously?
If there had been few or no studies, then that would have used as an argument that we haven't done enough to demonstrate them to be safe, but when the safety is established by literally hundreds of studies, that somehow suspiciously suggests they're not safe?! I mean, if they were safe, then why would they be doing so many studies?! This, my friends, is conspiracy theory in the raw - it’s the "rationale" of young-earth creationism under a different guise, and it means that no amount of evidence can ever convince some people. That said, there is no anti-gm evidence presented at the back of the comic as it happens: it’s all claims and assertions, anecdotes and panic-mongering quotes. There's no science there supporting any anti-gm claim.
How easy is it to tear something down when the burden of evidence isn't on you? It’s very easy - and these same groups who are demanding dozens more safety tests when there are already literally hundreds of them, with more ongoing, are not the people who are doing any tests themselves. If they're so concerned, then why not do their own scientific tests and present their evidence supporting their claims? Is it because it’s a lot easier to whine and gripe like a Greek chorus trying to induce Phobos and Deimos than ever it is to do the honest work of scientific research? This is exactly how creationism works. Some of the nay-sayers are so delusional that they'll twist the evidence - no matter what it actually demonstrates - to mean whatever they think it should mean. That's actually what's truly scary.
The best experiments are the empirical ones - ones which are actually carried out as opposed to purely thought experiments, which is what the nay-sayers are 'carrying out'. GM foods have been around for almost a generation without any ill effects or disasters. Genetics apart, humankind has been modifying crops since agriculture began, and even before that, plants in particular have been genetically modified by purely natural means for a quarter billion years, all without disasters looming. This is because there isn't just the GM item out there - there is the whole of nature, and it’s a battleground, with one organism modifying itself and then another modifying to compete with the previous modification, and on and on. Nothing gets to run away uncontested.
Truth be told, there's far more scrutiny of GM foods than ever there is (or ever was) of other foods. If the naysayers could actually produce solid scientific evidence to demonstrate that their concerns have an actual basis in reality, that would be a different matter, but they have not because they evidently cannot. You'll notice that all they have to offer is complaints. They offer neither alternatives nor solutions, and certainly no evidence of their own.
So enough said about that. Let’s talk about the comic itself. The story that's presented here is that an evil big business is playing fast and loose with safety - fair enough, sometimes this happens - and through an accident, this gene gets loosed upon nature. The modification which was done causes plants to grow absurdly quickly, and herein was the first problem for me. The story at this point went not only beyond anything that's being done today in genetics, it also went beyond sci-fi and deeply into the mutation fantasy of 1950's B movies. There is no genetic modification to make a plant grow from seed to fruiting mature plant in a matter of seconds!
As if that wasn't bad enough, the story then goes on to show these plants sending seeds out into the air, and these seeds fertilizing every other plant out there, no matter how genetically distant those plants are from each other, and in a patently ridiculous short time, all plants are mutating and growing out of control! It takes no account whatsoever of innately different plant breeding cycles and methods, and of the massive differences between genomes of these various species involved. This is like saying a guy gets genetically modified, shoots some sperm into the air and suddenly giant mutant snails are all over the place. Yes - that is absurd, but it's no more absurd than what this story is claiming! It utterly ludicrous.
I have no problem with someone, with a gripe or not, writing a story about an adverse mutation getting loose, but for goodness sakes at least make it remotely plausible! I don’t see how you're doing your cause - whatever that cause may be - any favors whatsoever if you create a story as wildly impossible as this one is. I don't see how you can think it will actually help you make your point, or raise awareness, unless of course you also believe that your readership is really dumb or gullible.
It gets worse, too. Once the huge variety of flora has grown so inanely quickly (and without any rainfall to help it along!), it all suddenly sets on fire and burns down Los Angeles! Never once is the fact of increased oxygen production by the plants used to support this (which actually would have had some validity). Instead, we’re given no explanation for how the plants can both grow like a fairy tale bean stalk - which would require a heck of a lot of water - and the environment can simultaneously be so bone-dry that these plants suddenly burn fiercely and uncontrollably!
So no, this story was too fantastical to even have a remote chance of being any kind of representation of reality, but worse, it was too far out there to even be a decent story. It was more like a fairy tale, but even as such it wasn't entertaining.
I have to add to this review some comments concerning a movie which takes pretty much the same attitude as does this comic (but which is wholly unconnected except in bias). The movie seriously outdoes the comic. The title is GMO OMG - a cute name for a thoroughly biased, ignorant, and amateur effort to muddy the waters. It's purportedly a documentary, but the manipulative attitude, and the chronic bias in it are as laughable as they are juvenile, so it isn't actually a documentary at all - it's a polemic. The plain fact is this: the European Union, the World Health organization, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science are in agreement that GMOs are as safe as any other foods.
That's the fact which Jeremy Seifert, abusively employing his "vulnerable kids" to appeal to a viewer's emotions rather than dispassionately examining the actual evidence, will never tell you in his work of what pretty much amounts to fiction. He will also not tell you that the FDA (the US food and drug admin) tests GMO food for toxicity and allergenic properties. Yes, the biotech companies fund and conduct the tests, but if the FDA isn't satisfied with the testing, they can demand more and there are legal penalties for trying to bypass the rules.
Having said that, Seifert makes good points about loss of diversity in crops, and about the revolving door of government employees cycling back and forth between corporate allegiance and government 'allegiance'. These things are definitely in need of scrutiny, but the way to impress that upon people is to be disinterested and analytical. Seifert is neither. Instead, he's all emotion, anecdote, and folklore. There is no science in evidence. Never are we given the tools to actually decide for ourselves if there is an issue. Instead we're told there is absolutely an issue even as Seifert disingenuously pretends to be in ignorance, 'honestly searching for answers'.
From the very beginning, his complete and unswayable bias in glaringly evident. He makes much of Monsanto's refusal to entertain him (which given his tactics and attitude is entirely understandable), yet never once does he try to interview any scientists who are not dead-set against GMOs! Never once does he present references to studies.
Seifert commendably makes much of Monsanto's lobbying and heavy spending to defeat efforts to require labeling of GMO foods, yet when he presents one lone scientist who has an anti-GMO study, he fails to mention that this same scientist was funded by anti-GM interests such as Greenpeace, and he also fails to mention that this same scientist, Séralini, announced the release of a book and a movie tied to his study, and insisted upon confidentiality agreements being signed by reporters! There were many irregularities with the study which was one reason why it was rejected, but Seifert won't tell you this. He interviews only one politician - Dennis Kucinich, who is the husband of the movie's producer, herself an anti-GMO activist!
Seifert continually employees his children to dishonestly present an image of the GMO world as highly toxic and deadly. In one particularly egregious scene, he and his two young boys dress in home-made 'bio-hazard' outfits to trespass in a field of corn, damaging stalks. The juvenile claim implicit here is that this corn is a pesticide - designed to kill insects, and therefore is universally toxic to humans, but this is not even remotely a fair picture.
The corn and stalks are neither toxic nor dangerous. Indeed, they are less dangerous than the traditional stalks he claims it was possible to run through with impunity in his youth: the ones larded with chemical pesticides necessary before GMO crops came along. He inadvertently reveals this dishonesty later when discussing with a farmer how much pesticide he has to spray his corn with - using traditional methods! In twenty years of GMO foods, there have been no reports of ill-effects and Seifert cannot present even one documented example. All he can do is talk scary about this nebulous "threat" he claims exists.
The fact is that there have been more illnesses and even deaths reported from consumption of organic foods in terms of contamination by harmful bacteria from 'organic' fertilization than ever there have been as a result of consumption of GMO food. One huge problem is the almost complete lack of regulation of organic foods! Why doesn;t Seifert ever mention this? Because he's either ignorant of the topic or he's purely biased, that's why.
The movie is all over the place, too. What is its point? Seifert seems to begin by claiming that GMOs are highly dangerous, yet he's bouncing back and forth between different ideas like a pinball. What is his alternative? Have you noticed how these scare-mongering movies never offer alternatives?
He never, for example, tries to explain what advantage labeling of GMO foods would give us! Yes it would allow people to blindly reject them, but it would not tell us what Seifert claims he wants to know: what exactly is in them. In order to learn that, you actually have to do the work which Seifert was clearly unwilling to do: you have to understand the science and do some reading. Why obsess on whether or not the food is GMO And then ignore the information that's already on there: about salt, sugar, allergens, and chemical additives? He says not a word about those even as he hypocritically dismisses the government, implicitly claiming that they're in the pocket of private industry and not the least bit interested in having safe food!
Seifert at one point slides into an aside about organic crops v. GMO, with his interviewee claiming that organic crops out-perform non-organic over time, yet the fact remains that in the US, yields of maize (corn), for example, were flat until the 1930s, when they began to rise due to scientific manipulation of one sort or another. In other words, organic - which crops pretty much were back then - wasn't getting it done at a time when world population was significantly less than it is now. A study published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature concluded that yields from organic farming are lower, in general, than from regular agriculture and that this was especially true for cereals, staples of human diet. The interviewee from Rodale mentioned drought having an impact, but Seifert failed to mention that some of the genetic modification is aimed at drought tolerance - not all of it is aimed at pest control. This is another example of his bias.
Seifert's movie opens with Haitian mobs and burning of Monsanto seeds, with voiced claims of respect for nature and the natural cycle, but at the end, when he returns to some Haitian woman dancing (which has nothing whatsoever to do with his point) he somehow fails to notice a massive pile of discarded tires behind the woman. What? These people love the environment so much that they discard tires and don't recycle? Obviously, the truth is that these opening and closing scenes do indeed capture the hypocritical tone which permeates this entire movie.
In conclusion, I have to wonder where the money came from which Seifert clearly enjoys since he's able to take some considerable time off from whatever he does for a living to travel in a gas guzzler across a large part of the US. Why did he not take that money and run scientific tests of the food he was complaining about? Why did he not take organic, regular, and GM soy and corn and see if they really are contaminated and pesticidal and if so, to what extent? That would have been impressive and made his point, but his sham of a documentary was pathetic.
