"We will restore science to its rightful place". Oh what sweet words. Has Obama lived up to his vows? A recent story suggests that a change of administration at the White House does not necessarily mean that the best science will be of high priority when informing the public. Karl Haro von Mogel recently posted that a USDA Report by Cyndi Barmore, The Unexplored Potential of Organic-Biotech Production, has been pulled from the USDA website after complaints from the organic industry. An excerpt from the report: "The divide between organics and biotechnology is an artificial construction…
Hello all, Biofortified is in the running to win the Ashoka Changemakers contest, GMO Risk or Rescue. But Karl Haro von Mogel needs your help, dear readers. The contest entries close on October 21, and the voting will continue to the 28th. The grand prize is a $1500 grant and a conversation with Michael Pollan. I look forward to hearing Karl and Michael discuss GE and the future of food. If you read Biofortified and have enjoyed some of the stuff written there and want to see bigger and better things, please take a couple minutes to register for changemakers and enter your vote. This is how…
Until his favorite heirloom tomatoes died on the vine after succumbing to late blight disease, Chef Dan Barber believed that science when applied to agriculture was "suspect, a violation of the slow food aesthetic". Unfortunately, this distrust of science hurts farmers, consumers, and the planet. It also ignores 100 years of scientific progress. In 1905, Sir Rowland Biffen generated disease resistant wheat varieties, demonstrating for the first time that Mendel's laws of inheritance could be applied to plant breeding. Today most of the fruits and vegetables that we eat (including those…
After a short blogging break, Tomorrow's Table is back at its new home here at ScienceBlogs. On this weblog I will discuss topics related to food, farming and genetics. I am a Professor at the University of California, Davis where I study the response of rice to diseases and flooding. For more on my research, please see my lab website here. You can also take a look at series of posts called "Blogging from Bangladesh" that I wrote about one of my rice projects. I teach a class called Genetics and Society that aims to educate students in the basic concepts of genetics and the process of…