Long before they declared war on vaccines and chemicals, anti-science activists got their first cultural homerun - they got a catchy buzzword to get media to repeat claims that food was killing us. Not with chemicals, which even environmental activist Rachel Carson wanted in lower quantitites, but with biology, which Carson believed was the future of crop protection.
The fuse was lit by an English professor (naturally), Paul Lewis, who wrote a letter in the New York Times reading "If they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it’s time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle” and a violent fundraising campaign was born.
Professor Lewis was talking about the Calgene tomato, which was under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The what? That's right, a tomato most of you don't know ever existed was driven out of business by anti-science propaganda. The Flavr Savr tomato had a completely harmless enzyme modification that allowed tomatoes to ripen longer on the vine and keep their flavor. It reduced both food waste or chemicals. This was an Abomination Against Gaia to humanities scholars and the environmental groups they run. Creating a catchy term to oppose science became the preferred method to oppose vaccines, BPA, cell phones, food coloring, and claim bees were dying.
Despite his analogy being hopelessly flawed - Frankenstood was a genetically grafted hybrid not a GMO, as I noted in the Los Angeles Times, he would be Certified Organic by the $140 billion 'science is evil' alternative food industry he helped create - it caught on with activists.
It didn't matter that the product passed all scientific review, corporate journalists know to 'sell the sizzle, not the steak' and they began to 'teach the controversy.' The term "Frankenfood" appeared everywhere and it is still common in propaganda campaigns today. While they were talking about one specific type of genetic engineering, they now use Non-GMO to make their alternative foods sound healthier. Mutagenesis, literal chemical and radiation baths to force random mutations until they get something they like, has thousands of products that can be certified Organic despite it being far more 'dangerous' than GMOs or every breakthrough that came after those which still draws protests.
1992 was a good year for Boomer Environmentalists. Public relations flak Jeremy Rifkin also got politically allied journalists to repeat the weird claim he popularized that it took a gallon of gas to grow a pound of beef. And they were about to get a U.S. president in their own mold, the own John F Kennedy of the anti-science left. President Bill Clinton. Though receiving only 44 percent of the vote, he got into office and beforr was done ruining science he had let the NIH grow stagnant and gave science funding to a bizarre alternative medicine group called the National center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, gutted NASA, exempted supplements from FDA oversight, banned nuclear energy, and forced USDA to create a government Organic seal.
Yet there is hope. One of the most famous progressive science deniers, who opposes GMOs and cell phones and vaccines and everything else that Boomer Environmentalists have long railed against, became a Republican. That means all the Democrats who cheered him on in the past - his former employer, Natural Resource Defense Council, dismissed criticism of him by me and others as him being "mainstream" - have pivoted to the pro-science side. And brought journalists with them. It will be impossible for them to flip again when a Democrat is back in office and nearly 90 percent of career government employers are in that political tribe.
Which means Secretary Kennedy may have unwittingly set off a new Golden Age of Science acceptance, only 34 years after we all believed Frankenfood hysteria would be here to stay.
