I binge watched Unnatural Selection on NetFlix last night, because it is of dual interest to me – both from the perspective of my research, but also because of my interest in science communication. I had also spent a couple of days with the directors, Leeor Kaufman and Joe Egender, at UC Davis in late 2017 and early 2018 as they filmed some of our discussions with the public over the use of genome-editing to produce the “hornless” dairy animals we have been researching.

Ultimately the miniseries ended up not including any of the agricultural applications of genome editing, as the directors wrote to me in an Email earlier this month, “we were not able to open the discussion about food engineering within the scope of 4 episodes.” They rather focused the show on the biomedical and gene drive applications for pest control noting that “other stories – especially of the patients – became larger than we anticipated, making it very difficult to introduce such a broad subject in between.”

I can certainly understand the emotional appeal of treating genetic conditions, and that such framing lends itself to narrative storytelling. However I believe it unfortunate because the many researchers I know working in this area are addressing very real and pressing problems in food production, and we have not had much success at effective science communication on the need for these genetic innovations in agricultural production systems.

One of the more bizarre characters featured on the miniseries was a dog breeder called David Ishee located in Mississippi who was apparently trying to create a green fluorescent mastiff puppies by adding Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP)-expressing E. coli to dog sperm. I just watched dumbfounded, knowing all of the animal use authorizations and regulatory hurdles we have to go though to perform any animal research on campus. And also  because that is not how genetic engineering works, that is not how any of this works. If it was that simple, my laboratory would not have spent the last three years trying to get a CRISPR knock-in cow.

GloFish

It is possible to get fluorescent animals, like the GloFish. But they are expressing a transgenic fluorescent gene under the control of a eukaryotic muscle promoter, and this recombinant DNA gene construct was integrated into the genome though genetic engineering in developing eggs. The reason you can see fluorescence clearly in Glofish is that they are somewhat translucent. Mastiff puppies are not. Even if it green fluorescent protein (GFP) did somehow find itself expressing in these puppies, it would not express or be visible in their dark hair. It is similarly lacking in the plumage of the GFP-chick in the featured image made by the Roslin Institute.

A fluorescent rabbit was made 20 years ago,  in the bizarre case of Alba the GFP-bunny. In 2000, Eduardo Kac, a professor of art and technology at the Chicago School of Art Institute produced a picture of a green fluorescent protein (GFP) transgenic bunny called “Alba”. “GFP Bunny” was realized in 2000 and first presented publicly in Avignon, France. The artist proposed that “transgenic art” is a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering to transfer natural or synthetic genes to an organism, to create unique living beings.

Alba Image

The artist came under considerable criticism for the picture which some consider to have been fabricated. According to a 2002 Wired article “The picture itself is a construction,” said Reinhard Nestelbacher, a molecular biologist at the University of Salzburg.  “The rabbit could never look like that,” he said. “The main reason is that the GFP gene is expressed, for example, in the skin and cannot be expressed in the hair.” Stuart Newman, a member of the Council for Responsible Genetics and a cell biologist at New York Medical College, said “Art misrepresents reality all the time — and he’s an artist, not a scientist, but I think people are beholden to tell the truth.”

Which raises an interesting question, are artists beholden to tell the truth about genetic engineering?

And that is I think what frustrated me most about the miniseries. This was potentially an opportunity to have a fresh look at this technology of genome editing, and how it does and does not differ from the older technology of genetic engineering. The two technologies were rapidly conflated in the miniseries, along with other issues such as the cost of medicine in the US healthcare system. And while these tensions were thoughtfully addressed, I would argue the tensions around food production are equally important and were not addressed.

There is a very real reason that the public fears the use of genetic engineering in food production, and it is not the science or decades of safe use. It is a deliberate misinformation campaign that has been waged by competing-business interests and special-interest group for decades. That topic warrants its own examination.

It was therefore somewhat ironic to see Dana Perls from “Friends of the Earth” as one of the interviewees in Unnatural Selection. She was unchallenged when allowed to repeat the same unsubstantiated talking points around genome editing and food safety risks that have been parroted for decades to demonize genetic engineering,   This to me was opening a discussion around food engineering, but in the absence of any mention of the 30 years of safe use, or the overwhelming weight-of-evidence.

Just as there is money to be made in commercializing pharmaceutics, there is money to be made in fermenting fear, uncertainty and doubt, especially against your competitors. If those same special interests again direct their well-funded coffers towards a campaign against the use of genome editing in food production, then I fear that as a society we will lose. We will forgo the benefits that could result from bringing in useful genetic variation like disease-resistance into our food species using genome editing.

One of the most powerful stories in Unnatural Selection was that of a young boy who had a genetic condition that threatened his sight. And the $850,000 treatment that might help save him from blindness. It is very moving part of the series, as we see his parents grapple with their frustration at his deteriorating sight.

There is a non-genetic condition that results in between 250,000 and 500,000 children going blind every year, Vitamin A deficiency. And yet the war that special interest groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have waged against GMOs for the past 30 years, in concert with the retarding force of government regulations on GMO crop development, has slowed the release of vitamin-A enriched crops as detailed in this recent book, Golden Rice: the imperiled birth of a GMO superfood.

The 2019 Wolf-prize for Agriculture laureate Prof. David Zilberman from University of California at Berkeley, estimated in 2014 that if Golden Rice had not be delayed in India alone it would have  “prevented 600,000 to 1.2 million cases of blindness, and about 180,000 deaths of children.” Likewise 129 nobel-laureates “have joined in a campaign to convince the Green Parties and the public that they should support the use of GMOs, especially for the sake of the developing world”,

Fortunately, after millions of dollars and years of effort, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have all recently approved golden rice as safe for consumption. Golden rice is in now front of regulators in the Philippines and in Bangladesh, where it is expected to be approved by the end of 2019. There it will have the opportunity to benefit many poor children, each of whom have parents who I am confident are equally anxious and concerned about addressing  the preventable blindness of their children. Perhaps emerging developments in food engineering with such profound beneficial health implications are worthy of their own miniseries!

I have been fairly consistent about my concern that the 2017 FDA’s draft guidance to regulate “intentional genomic alterations” in food animals as new animal drugs will preclude the use of this technology in livestock breeding programs in the United States. The webinar that was held today by the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) did little to assuage my concern. For two hours, various speakers from the FDA CVM explained how they were going to regulate IGA (intentional genomic alterations). That is a lot of 3-letter acronyms (the scariest of all acronyms!).

There was lots of discussion of frightening sounding off-target effects, small to large-scale alterations, unintended biological consequences, unknown long term effects not apparent in early generations, deletions, insertions, inversions, lesions, translocations, mutations being deleterious regardless of whether they occur in a coding region, and challenges to addressing unintended on and off target effects. What there was not much discussion of is biology and context. And the fact that there are literally millions of “insertions, inversions, lesions, translocations, and mutations” in every plant and animal on Earth.

As we argue in this open access 2019 paper entitled “Proposed U.S. regulation of gene-edited food animals is not fit for purpose”

To put this in perspective, one study of whole genome sequence data from over 2,700 individual cattle in the 1000 Bull Genomes Project revealed more than 86.5 million differences (variants) between different breeds of cattle. These variants included 2.5 million insertions and deletions of one, or more, base pairs of DNA, and 84 million single nucleotide variants, where one of the four nucleotides making up DNA (A, C, G, T) had been changed to a different one. None of these naturally-occurring variants are known to produce ill effects on the consumers of milk or beef products. In fact, every meal we have ever consumed is genetically distinct from every other meal in terms of genomic DNA sequences. Genetic variation per se does not pose a unique hazard as it relates to food safety. All non-processed foods harbor DNA as a natural component and that DNA is different in every individual of every food species (both plants and animals).

Visual representation of the magnitude of DNA sequence variation (i.e. naturally-occurring mutations) that exists between different individuals within a species. Image from Van Eenennaam et al. (2019)

A number of other countries have come out with their regulatory approaches to genome editing in food species, including the USDA opinion regarding genome edited plants, and the FDA is alone in considering a genetic alteration in a food animal to be a drug. And while under proposed U.S. law it is technically not the animal but the IGA (not the grocery store but the “intentional genomic alteration”) that is the drug, short of a centrifuge it is pretty hard to disassociate an animal from its genomic DNA! Animals carrying IGA effectively become unapproved animal drugs that are not allowed to enter commerce in the absence of a multigenerational safety and efficacy evaluation and FDA approval, analogous to the types of studies that are required for the approval of actual new animal drugs.

All of this comes about because 10 years ago the FDA announced its intent to regulate all genetically engineered animals modified by rDNA techniques, including the entire lineage of animals that contain the modification, under the new animal drug provisions of the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (decades before the discovery of the structure of DNA).  In that act, a new animal drug is defined as “an article (other than food) intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of … animals.”

The 2017 FDA draft guidance on gene edited animals doubles down on this approach by proposing to regulate all genomic alterations introduced into animals by gene editing as new animal drugs. This includes many of the same nucleotide insertions, substitutions, or deletions that could be obtained using conventional breeding. No longer is it the presence of a transgenic rDNA construct that triggers mandatory premarket FDA regulatory oversight prior to commercial release, but rather it is the presence of any “intentionally altered genomic DNA” in an animal that initiates oversight.

What concerns me, after listening to the webinar, is that it was really not stated what unique risks are feared to be associated with IGA, that are not also associated with UGA (unintentional genomic alterations), aka de novo mutations that are very basis of evolution. We do not regulate the millions of spontaneous genetic variations that are in our food because DNA is generally regarded as safe to consume, and it is a routine ingredient of food obtained from any species, irrespective of its sequence. Referring to a DNA sequence variant as a “drug” is likely to confuse or frighten consumers who might infer that there are biologically active substances in their food.

I am of the opinion that this proposed regulatory approach for genome editing in animals will effectively make it cost prohibitive for both U.S. researchers and livestock producers to use and potentially benefit from genome editing in food animal breeding programs. I am not alone in this concern. Over 300 scientists supported a petition calling for  the Harmonization of US gene-edited food regulations which was launched in January at the 2019 Plant and Animal Genome meeting. Signatories include over 260 US scientists from more than 40 academic institutions throughout the nation including members of the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), and a Nobel prize laureate. When scientists are riled up enough to emerge from their laboratories and express an opinion about something as arcane as a regulatory guidance, perhaps it is worth listening.  The petition concluded with the following ask:

“We call for a harmonization of the U.S. regulatory approach to gene editing in food species so that both plant and animal breeders have access to gene editing innovations to introduce useful sustainability traits like disease resistance, climate adaptability, and food quality attributes into U.S. agricultural breeding programs.”

Recently at the Davis Farmer’s Market, I was approached by a volunteer who was collecting signatures for a new initiative for the 2018 CA ballot. These ballot initiatives are a part of the California landscape and in 2016 posed questions to voters ranging from marijuana legalization (it was approved) to use of condoms in pornographic films (it was defeated). California allows measures to be placed on the ballot through citizen-led signature petitions. For an initiative to be placed on the statewide ballot in November 2018, proponents need to collect 365,880 signatures within 180 days.

This particular initiative would impose new standards for confining certain farm animals. The proposed title is “”The Prevention of Cruelty to Farm Animals Act”. Needless to say, most people would be hard pressed to come up with a reason to refuse to sign on for a proposal with such a title. It would be like refusing to sign an act that requires parents to love their children. But unfortunately, this innocent-sounding initiative does little to inform voters of the nuanced tradeoffs associated with the wording contained in the proposed initiative. And further questioning revealed the signature-gathering volunteer (who probably in retrospect wished they had asked some other than me to sign) had very little understanding of hen housing systems, or the likely impacts of the initiative.

This proposed measure sounds eerily reminiscent to Proposition 2, an initiative that was passed by California voters in 2008. In 2008 the initiative was to “allow these animals to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely” which was judged to be 116 square inches of floor space per bird. According to HSUS, the new initiative, “will require housing systems by 2019 that are impractical for cage confinement. And by 2021, it’s an absolute cage-free requirement.”

The L.A. Times reports the new 2018 initiative sets the standard for egg-producing hens initially at 144 square inches per bird — one square foot — which is the level at which a hen is considered by activists to be cage free by December 31, 2019. By 2022, the hens and other animals will have to be actually cage free, and allowed to roam inside barns.

The initiative’s language, submitted to the state by the Humane Society of the United States, states also prohibits businesses in California from buying or selling liquid eggs, pork, and veal that were produced from animals confined in more restrictive enclosures that would not comply with the measure’s requirements. This prohibition applies to both in-state and out-of-state production of these livestock commodities. Violation of the measure would be a misdemeanor punishable by a fine, imprisonment, or both. The measure also requires CDFA and the California Department of Public Health to issue regulations to implement its provisions.”

One thing that the large $6 million Coalition for Sustainable Egg Supply (CSES) study on hen housing systems showed clearly, was that cage-free egg production systems, which are effectively mandated by this new initiative, are not without their drawbacks, specifically this hen housing system was “the most expensive in terms of egg production costs and had the greatest hen mortality, the worst indoor air quality (with consequently greater risks for worker respiratory health related issues due to inhalation of dust and endotoxins), the greatest dust emissions, the greatest feed usage and hence carbon footprint, the greatest nutrient losses, and the greatest potential for microbiological contamination (aerobic organisms and coliforms) of eggs.”  It was also “substantially worse” in terms of cannibalism relative to conventional cages (CC) and enriched colony (EC) cages (Mench et al. 2016).

For some people, providing hens with the most freedom of movement and opportunity to perform natural behaviors (flight, foraging, and dust bathing) may outweigh these other considerations, however for others different considerations like environmental footprint of food production, food safety and cost may come into play. Especially given eggs constitute a valuable and inexpensive protein staple for low-income families. Currently those choices are available in the marketplace – if this image is representative of current choices evidentially not all California consumers are interested in choosing to purchase cage free eggs – but the proposed initiative will mandate an absolute cage-free requirement for all hens producing eggs for California.

It is estimated that Californians now pay between $0.48 and $1.08 more for a dozen eggs as a result of existing Proposition 2, and that was for the CA SEFS Compliant (California Shell Egg Food Safety Compliant) 116 square inches of floor space per bird. Presumably 144 square inches per bird and then cage free will result in even higher prices.

According to HSUS, “Since Prop 2, the HSUS has led a national campaign to convince food retailers to phase in cage-free purchasing practices and to stop buying any eggs that come from hens in cages.” A number of food retailers including, Nestle, Subway, McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Walmart, Target, Costco and other businesses have said they will make a transition to eggs from cage-free hens by 2025. HSUS keeps an updated list here. According to HSUS senior director of food policy, Josh Balk, “McDonald’s announcement in September [2015] started a landslide from the rest of the food industry”. According to Balk, “There’s nothing more powerful in talking about this issue to a company than stating that its competitors are doing it and they are not.”

And to add a little salt to this evidence-based wound,  McDonald’s USA was member of the CSES study that showed there were clear hen welfare drawbacks to the cage-free egg production systems, and that in many of the metrics the enriched colony (EC) cages scored considerably better than the cage-free aviary (AV) systems. In their announcement, Marion Gross, senior vice president and Chief Supply Chain Officer of McDonald’s North America said “We’re proud of the work we’re doing with farmers and suppliers to advance environmentally and socially conscious practices for the animals in our supply chain.  This is a bold move and we’re confident in our ability to provide a quality, safe, and consistent supply.”

So what are the environmental implications of cage-free egg production systems? Well according to the CSES, of which McDonalds was a member and so presumably aware of its findings, cage free (AV) was worse in terms of carbon footprint, indoor air quality, manure management, particulate emissions, and natural resource use efficiency. And it rates consistently worse, in many cases “exceptionally worse”, for all food affordability metrics than enriched colony (EC) cages.

And then there is the sticky issue of worker health and safety – rarely considered but again substantially worse for  metrics like ergonomics and worker exposure to endotoxins and particulate matter for the cage-free aviary (AV) system. How do companies rank hen welfare versus consumer, farmer, and worker welfare in” socially conscious” decisions?

In the food companies’ rush to promise buying only cage-free eggs in the years to come, I wonder if anyone is paying attention  to animal, consumer, farmer, and worker welfare implications of  cage-free aviary (AV) systems. One would think groups portending to be interested in animal welfare, rather than perhaps dissuading animal protein consumption, might at least be interested in this. As this piece in the Seattle Times, featuring undercover video footage of chickens in a cage free environment warns,

“The egg industry has long warned that hens living cage-free in aviary systems will experience higher mortality rates and more disease. Research by the Coalition for Sustainable Egg Supply, which is financed by egg producers and food companies, found “substantially worse” levels of aggression and cannibalism in cage-free systems, also known as aviary systems, compared to caged systems. It has also found more damage to the birds’ sternums.”

It is too easy to paint a simplistic story that portrays one production system as bad using undercover video and selected imagery, and an alternative as idyllic by using terms like “allowed to roam inside barns” while ignoring the substantially worse rates of keel damage and cannibalism, but the inconvenient truth is that all production systems have pros and cons, and those that appeal emotionally to humans as being the most natural, are also associated with real welfare concerns and big sustainability tradeoffs.

So we have a dilemma. Who gets to define animal welfare parameters of agricultural production systems? One could argue the consumer and that might be appropriate if tradeoffs are clearly communicated, and different production systems that provide that choice are allowed to coexist. Another might legitimately be the animals. My UC Davis colleague who studies chicken welfare, says her job is to look at production systems from the viewpoint of the chicken, not as how humans might imagine a chicken might perfer. Dr. Temple Grandin famously did something analogous in terms of slaughterhouse facility design.

I have a feeling that choice as it relates to the production system used to produce the eggs for California consumers will soon be limited to only cage-free options if  the initiative “The Prevention of Cruelty to Farm Animals Act” is on the 2018 ballot, despite the sustainability concerns around the environmental, economic and other implications of this proposition.

I hope that rather than ignoring the very real impacts of this proposition, there will be a transparent public discussion of the evidence-based tradeoffs and interplay among food safety, environmental, animal health & well-being, worker health & safety, and food affordability implications of this proposed initiative. Perhaps we could also include producer welfare in there as well. And that this time around public sector scientists won’t get sued for trying to give California voters an objective assessment of the likely impacts of passing the initiative.

Proposition 2, an initiative passed by California voters in 2008, required that egg-laying hens (and calves raised for veal and pregnant pigs) be confined only in ways that “allow these animals to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely”. Unfortunately no further clarification was given to guide producers as to how the needed to alter their production systems to be compliant with the law.

Some voters might have interpreted this initiative to mean “cage-free”, however in 2013 California Department of Food and Agriculture issued regulations stipulating the minimum number of square inches of floor space per laying hen, effectively requiring less hens per cage or bigger cages  to be CA SEFS Compliant (California Shell Egg Food Safety Compliant).

So by January 1, 2015 producers in California, and those out of state producers seeking to export their shell eggs for consumption in California had to comply with this law. Strangely, liquid eggs (whole, yolk, or white), frozen/dried eggs, hard-boiled eggs (in shell or peeled), cooked eggs (e.g. breakfast sandwiches), and shell eggs that are pasteurized in the shell are exempt from the law. The chickens producing these eggs are exempt from the Proposition 2 standards.
The question I think many might be interested in knowing, is whether this initiative has helped hen welfare? And the answer to that is complicated, as there is no agreed upon definition of “good” welfare. All production systems come with their own set of pros and cons and tradeoffs.

To help answer this question, the Coalition for Sustainable Egg Supply (CSES) was formed to support research evaluating the sustainability of laying hen housing systems. The CSES members represented a variety of stakeholders, including food retailers and distributors, egg producers, universities, and governmental (USDA ARS) and nongovernmental organizations. According to their FAQs members include the American Humane Association; Bob Evans Farms; British Columbia Egg Marketing Board; Burnbrae Farms Limited; Cargill Kitchen Solutions; CCF Brands; Cracker Barrel Old Country Store; Daybreak Foods, Inc.; Egg Farmers of Canada; Egg Farmers of Ontario; Flowers Foods, Inc.; Forsman Farms; Fremont Farms of Iowa; General Mills; Herbruck Poultry Ranch, Inc.; Iowa State University; McDonald’s USA; Michael Foods, Inc.; Michigan State University; Midwest Poultry Services; Ohio Egg Marketing Program; Poultry Science Association; Purdue University; Sparboe Farms; Sysco Corporation; Tyson Foods; United Egg Producers; University of California, Davis; and University of Guelph.

The goal of the CSES was to provide scientifically based information on the trade-offs related to the sustainability of egg production by conducting holistic research on a commercial farm that had 3 different hen housing systems. This $6M study examined “various laying hen housing systems and potential impacts on food safety, the environment, hen health and well-being, worker health and safety and food affordability, providing food system stakeholders with science-based information on sustainability factors to guide informed production and purchasing decisions” (Mench et al. 2016).

The three hen housing systems that were evaluated in the study were: conventional caged (CC), enriched colony (EC) and cage-free aviary (AV). According to the CSES “the conventional cage system was chosen because the vast majority of eggs used by the U.S. food system at the time the research was planned and today originate from this system. The enriched colony and cage-free aviary systems were chosen as the most modern alternative types of systems that were available at the time and that were also beginning to be adopted by U.S. egg producers. The conventional cage system was comparable to other conventional cage systems widely used in the industry. In this case there were six hens per enclosure, with each hen provided 80 square inches.” This is less than the “minimum of 116 square inches of floor space per bird” for an enclosure containing nine or more egg-laying hens to be CA SEFS (Proposition 2) Compliant .

The CSES did a nice job of presenting the data in a comprehendible format for the general public, and their graphical interface is particularly useful. There you can find drop down menus looking at different attributes of sustainability: Food Safety and Quality, Animal Health and Wellbeing, Environment, Worker Health and Safety, and Food Affordability. This image from the Animal Health and Wellbeing dropdown is a useful example of the fact that no system is all good or all bad.

Results demonstrated the complexity of addressing sustainability problems, in that each housing system had negative and positive aspects. According to Mench et al. (2016), “The cage-free aviary (AV) provided hens with the most freedom of movement and opportunity to perform natural behaviors (flight, foraging, and dust bathing) and was also associated with some hen health benefits (best leg and wing bone strength, good feather cover, and low overall incidence of foot problems), but it was also the most expensive in terms of egg production costs and had the greatest hen mortality, the worst indoor air quality (with consequently greater risks for worker respiratory health related issues due to inhalation of dust and endotoxins), the greatest dust emissions, the greatest feed usage and hence carbon footprint, the greatest nutrient losses, and the greatest potential for microbiological contamination (aerobic organisms and coliforms) of eggs.”  It was also substantially worse in terms of cannibalism. The term “hen-pecked” and “pecking order” are in our vernacular for a reason.

So which is the most sustainable system? Well that depends upon what attributes of sustainability you value. Is it the one that best protects animal health/welfare, the one with the lowest environmental footprint per unit of product, or the most efficient, or the best one for worker health and safety, or that system which increases affordability, or some combination of the above?  Often there are direct conflicts between what “feels” like the best system from a purely emotional standpoint, and the objective data quantifying the impacts of that system. As with all dietary decisions there are tradeoffs among the various pillars of sustainability, and consumers will need to make the choices they consider to be best for their particular family values, budget, and circumstances.

Unfortunately, marketers or special interest groups will sometimes focus on a single sustainability component of a production system that is of particular interest or value to them, without holistically addressing the accompanying food safety, environmental, animal and worker health and safety, and food affordability implications and tradeoffs. This presents the public with a simplistic binary choice, avoid this production practice or buy my product that does not contain antibiotics/hormones/GMOS/gluten/etc. and does not objectively represent the complexities and nuances associated with imposing production system requirements on producers. That is the importance of choice in the marketplace – to allow consumers to purchase products that align with their values. However, groups are increasingly working to remove that choice and impose their unique set of values on the general population. More on that next.

An academic colleague of mine recently tweeted that Netflix’s Okja was worth watching. He is not an agricultural scientist or breeder, but he is a geneticist, and I was surprised that the image of Okja did not trigger his scientific angst. I realize Okja is a science-fiction fantasy movie – but the science makes no sense. The most glaring problem for me is that for some reason, the movie makers who had a budget of $50 million, decided to reimagine a female of a litter-bearing mammalian species that normally has two rows of nipples, and give her a random goat udder with two pendulous nipples that appear to be slighly engorged with milk despite the fact she has never given birth to any offspring. Why??

Okja Credit: Netflix

According to an interview entitled “How the ‘Okja’ VFX Team Created the Creature That Turned Us All Vegetarian” with Okja’s visual effects supervisor, Erik De Boer

“Since Okja was designed as a GMO, she had to come across as a believable meat producer. So it was very important for us and for Bong that she had a very healthy and luxurious feel to her skin and her mast. You could harvest a lot of pork from her”.  Erik De Boer

For those of you that have not seen Okja, the premise of the movie begins with an evil biotechnology company that starts with M…..no not that one…..(get it? wink wink). It is Mirando Corporation, and they have been surreptitiously using genetic engineering to breed a special kind of “super pig”. According to Mirando CEO (Tilda Swinton) the “super pigs will be big and beautiful, leave a minimal footprint on the environment, consume less feed, and produce less excretions, and most importantly they need to taste F#$%#@$ good.”

I guess the “F” bomb had to be in there for dramatic effect. Because the rest of those goals are a pretty close estimate of the overall bereding objective of probably every animal breeding company in the world. Probably disease resistance would be in there too. And before you write off this as being irrelevant to your life, what would be the implications of having pigs and cows and chickens that leave a maximal footprint on the environment, consume more feed, and produce more excretions? In other words what would happen if there were no genetic improvement programs for food animal species?

Let’s consider pigs, the second largest provider of meat after fish (wild & cultured).

Over the years selection goals for pig genetic improvement programs have included

• Increased litter size
• Increase the number of litters per year
• Increase the amount of lean meat (pork/bacon) per pig
• Decrease the amount of time needed to get to market weight
• Improve the efficiency of feed digestion (feed conversion ratio)
• Decrease the feed needed to produce a finished pig (increase growth rate)

And as a result of those goals the US industry has improved the pork production per sow more than 5 fold, from 800 lb in 1930 to 4,200 lb in 2015 .

Without these productivity improvements over the past 85 years, it would take an additional 25.5 million sows (approximately 31.5 million in total) compared with today’s 6 million sows to achieve the current level of US pork production. Now you might not eat pork for personal or religious reasons, or even any animal protein at all – but as long as some people on earth do, there is a strong environmental agrument to be made for genetically improving the plants and animal species we use for food production. And the way to achieve this is not 6-ton females with goat udders.

And really this is where Okja loses the plot to me in more ways than one. This so called super pig that was meant to come  across as a believable meat producer took 10 years to reach her 6-ton maturity weight (actual pigs take 5-6 months and weigh around 1/8 ton), and was still barren after a decade. Most sows have more than two litters per year – on average marketing a total of around 22 piglets/sow/year . See the rows of teats on this litter-bearing pig below?

No udder on her – and she has a snout not a hippopotamus face, and a curly tail. That is what makes a pig.  And her feed conversion (feed/gain) ratio is 2.6; down from 3.2 just 25 years ago – making her “consume less feed” which is a good thing – would you prefer a Prius or a Hummer in terms of fuel efficiency and the resultant environmental footprint of food production systems?

According to Okja’s writer and director, Bong Joon-ho in an interview with Vulture

“I don’t think of Okja as a metaphor. It doesn’t have any symbolism of any kind. I simply want to make the audience think that this animal is something that could happen in the very near future, like five years from now. In reality, there are such animals being developed. They’re developing a genetically modified pig.”                                                                                                                       Bong Joon-ho

Yes “they” are developing a genetically modified pig, well actually public sector scientists at the University of Guelph developed the so-called Enviropig, more than a decade ago, a pig that  had a 75% reduction in undigested phosphorus in its manure. It literally was a  pig that “produced less excretions” to avoid phosphorus pollution.  But public opposition to genetic engineering, fueled by activist fearmongering and dare I say the long lasting impacts of science-fiction movies like Jurassic Park, have effectively kept such pigs from commercialization. We have over a billion pigs being reared globally, and they still are unable digest inorganic phytate , and so the inorganic phosphorus pollution problem in their manure still exists. Precluding access to the Enviropig  did not make the pig poop phosphorus pollution problem go away, it just precluded one potential solution.

Recently public sector researchers at the University of Missouri and the Roslin Institute in Scotland, have produced gene edited pigs that are immune to the Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS) virus, a devastating disease of pigs. These groups inactivated a protein that was known to be the gateway for this virus to infect pigs.

University of Missouri research team that developed disease-resistant gene edited pigs

Shockingly the public sector researchers that developed these pigs, academic colleagues of mine, look and behave nothing like the deranged zoologist and TV personality Johnny Wilcox in Okja, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, but rather “they” look more like a group of mundane university professors (apologies Kristin, Kevin and Randy)  trying to produce disease-resistant pigs to solve an animal disease problem. Sometimes life does not imitate art at all.

In the darkest part of the movie – spoiler alert – Okja is taken by Mirando Corporation to be raped by a super boar for no apparent purpose other than presumably to shock the audience, and then a sample of her flesh is taken by plunging a circular probe into her side. Apparently the non-invasive ultrasound examination that is typically done to evaluate back fat thickness and meat quality was not gruesome enough for the movie makers. And then she, and the 25 other genetically modified super pigs that were developed as a new genetic line, are inexplicably placed in what appears to be a cattle feedyard with 100s of other super pigs (not sure where they all came from as there were only 26 to start with) to be slaughtered for food. Talk about eating your seed corn – that would have been the end of Okja’s genetics as she did not produce a single offspring to carry on her super pig line.

Of course at the end of the movie – spoiler alert – Okja is spared from becoming ham and bacon, and goes off to live the life of a 6-ton pet pig in Korea. That is how fairy tales, even science fiction fairytales, are supposed to end.  That  is part of the reason that  Erik De Boer made Okja pet-like stating

“In terms of Okja’s demeanor and personality, Bong and I always discussed it as a very happy, friendly Labrador. I think we can all relate to that slightly older dog that is just happy to tag along, lumbers a bit, with floppy ears, looking up over its brows. That was the personality we wanted to give Okja: just a very content Labrador inside a super-pig body”.                                                         Erik De Boer

I can understand that some people want pigs as pets, but the vast majority of them are grown for food production. Pigs are actually a very important source of meat in Asia, especially China. Over one billion pigs are conusumed annually worldwide, an average of 23 million pigs a week. China, European Union and United States, eat about 12 million, 5 million and 2 million pigs per week, respectively.  That is the source of all breakfast bacon and holiday hams.

So while it is fun to imagine a pet 6 ton pig, it is also important to be seriously cognizant of the 2050 projections shown in the figure below.

Milk, egg, broiler, beef and pork production since 1970 and projected to 2050 (FAOSTAT 2030 report & database as of 2017.

Ultimately, the livestock sector collectively will need to produce more with less while enhancing health and welfare for humans, animals and the environment. Okja can demonize this objective, and promote a pigs as pets fairytale, but livestock play an important role in global food security today, providing essential micronutrients and high quality protein to billions, and they provide important contributions to livelihoods and economic opportunities for many as well as providing draught power, manure for crop production and many by-products.

I wish science fiction movies and fairytales could do a better job of “sciencing the shit” out of agriculture and food production, in the way that Mark Watney was able to use innovation to get off Mars in The Martian. With no apparent sense of irony, towards the end of the interview regarding the complexities of shooting Okja, visual effects  supervisor, Erik De Boer emphasized the importance of pushing technology to try to do better in his chosen field.

“From a technology point of view, we’re always trying to push ourselves further and try to do better.”                Erik De Boer

There is probably no more pressing problem facing humanity than climate-smart agriculture to feed projected population growth, and it disappoints me that Okja yet again perpetuated the tired old story of scientists as disturbed, money-hungry corporate sell outs. As long as agricultural research continues to be painted in such a negative light, it will be difficult to obtain public support for agricultural technology and the importance of “sciencing the excretion” out of problems facing agricultural production systems.

My first BLOG for 2017, and in fact all 9 of this year’s BLOGs, were triggered by either bad science or blatant misinformation about agriculture. Typically the only way a topic raises to the level of justifying me writing a BLOG is that the balance of my annoyance at the erroneous material that is being put out there outweighs everything other thing that needs to be accomplished that day, and so it tends to be I blog more in the early half of the year than in the later part of the year when reading theses, and chapter deadlines loom heavy at the end of year approaches.

This has been a busy #scicomm year for me and despite my best intentions to be a frequent blogger, I have not been able to keep up with that in addition to my “day” job which also tends to be an evening and sometimes night job as well. This map gives you some idea of my speaking schedule in 2017 – some 46 cities, 23 US states, and 9 countries. Typically I speak at producer or allied industry meetings, or scientific conferences. Sometimes I even get to tour the farms in conjunction with speaking engagements which helps me keep current with farmers and the issues they are facing in different areas. In that regard I think extension educators are a unique segment of academia. Fly geneticists who study the nervous system probably don’t get out into the applied end of neuroscience in clinics in the same way as often.

Most people do not know the realities of the job of a Cooperative Extension specialist, we translate public land-grant university research into application. It is our job to get out and talk to people applying science in farming and in the food production industry and to hear about the problems they need help solving. Extension has literally be doing #scicomm “for the average person” since the Smith-Lever Act was signed into law in 1914. Historically audiences have been farmers, as the US was a nation of farmers.

Today, less than two percent of the population engages in farming. There is now an urgent need to translate the intricacies and science of farming to the “average person”, because there is no use translating technology to a farming audience, if the general public is just going to turn around and reject the use of that technology in their food production systems based on misinformation they obtained on the internet or social media! This to me is the #scicomm challenge of the 21^st century – how to counter the whack-a-mole of alternative facts as it relates to food and agriculture production systems. Extension needs to extend further now.

There are too few people with expertise in agricultural science addressing the discussions around “food systems”. It seems like everyone gets asked their opinion by the media, or to serve on panels about agriculture and food production – chefs, actors, book writers, celebrity bloggers, journalists, mommies, activists – everyone except farmers and agricultural scientists.

Just for fun I googled “what percentage of the population are agricultural and food scientists?” According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics there were only 43,000 of us in 2016! That is 0.013% of the US population working as “Agricultural and food scientists research ways to improve the efficiency and safety of agricultural establishments and products”! We are literally like hen’s teeth. There are actually more Yoga instructors registered in the US. By way of comparison in 2016 there were 1,028,700 “Farmers, Ranchers, and Other Agricultural Managers” That is about 24 researchers for every farmer. That is a relatively small number of agricultural practitioners and researchers compared to the  US population of 323 million people.

I sometimes think that because there is such a small proportion of the population involved in fulfilling the most fundamental lower order needs of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, having those basic needs met becomes assumed in the developed world, somehow devaluing the professions that enable that privilege.

Maslov’s hierachy of needs – image from https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

But I digress, back to #scicomm.  I realize everyone is busy, yoga teachers, farmers and agricultural scientists alike. But those with agricultural experience and expertise have to become involved in discussions around food and agriculture, or the future of agriculture will be decided devoid of objective-information and more importantly without a nuanced understanding of the various pros, cons and tradeoffs associated with any production system. We need to become very proactive in telling the stories of farming and food production.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower famously quipped, “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.” More and more I am making time to be involved in these public discussions, so I apologize in advance to my 2018 manuscripts, graduate students, grant reports and of course committee meeting obligations (I am a faculty member after all), but this agricultural #scicomm challenge is too important to ignore.

Perhaps the most unique #scicomm experience I was involved with in 2017, was Food Evolution, a documentary by director Scott Hamilton-Kennedy, producer Trace Sheehan, and narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson. In his words

“….the film explores all the ways science has been used and abused in public discourse surrounding the genetic engineering of food. In a world of misinformation and disinformation, nothing could be more timely.”                                      Neil deGrasse Tyson

Agricultural scientists are not often involved in documentary movies. That is probably an understatement. They are almost never involved in documentary movies might be closer to the truth.  Entertainment does not really align well with the patience and dispassion required by science, most days in the laboratory are not exactly riveting watching, nor are most scientists.

What was amazing for me, working with these film makers over a three or so year period, was watching how their product came together. Not in the logical, chronological, methodical, boring way that I would have crafted a movie, but in a narrative, storytelling, emotional, entertaining way that was miraculous to behold. Like making cinematic sausages. But more interesting were the parallels between science and movie making. Both are creative processes, borne out of passion, but with a completely different set of constraints and objectives.

This film was a proactive and narrative way to tell the side of the story that has not been well described so far– about how scientists saved the cherished papaya industry in Hawaii, and how Ugandan scientists are trying now to save a culturally important food crop they call matoke. Watching audience reaction to Food Evolution has been the #scicomm highlight of my year. I have gone to screenings around the US and in a couple of other countries, including at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

Trace Sheehan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Scott Hamilton Kennedy and I doing Q and A panel following screening of Food Evolution in New York City

In addition, the film has been screened in many cities around the world with local discussion panels to help address the issues. The discussions following the movie have been encouraging. Rather than repeating tired old fallacies, many of which were debunked in the movie, questions were elevated to more nuanced conversations about agriculture or science communication. The best screenings for me were those at film festivals with an urban audience, totally naïve to the fractious GMO debate. These are the target audience, the silent majority that it is hard to reach with agricultural #scicomm, and the response was so positive.

Apparently critics liked the movie too as it has an impressive 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It has really been a privilege and an honor to be associated with the movie, and I got to meet Neil deGrasse Tyson too! I encourage anyone that has not seen it to check it out on Hulu, or rent it on  itunes,  Amazon, or YouTube. And hats off to the Institute for Food Technologists (IFT) for funding to take food and agricultural science to the movies!  We need more of this – Hollywood does not have a great relationship with agricultural facts. And there are a number of terrible food documentaries that are not helping the public discourse. Reacting to them is tedious, but important given the powerful influence of film.

OK that is it for 2017. I have actually been working on a series of BLOGS over this holiday break ‘cause that what #scicommers do during quarter breaks, and so to start the New Year right  I am going to try to publish one BLOG a day for the next week on topics that have been sticking in my craw, some bad science, some bad policy, and some bad cinema before the quarter gets rolling. To start the series – I am coming for you Okja – tomorrow.