photo of heirloom turkey from http://www.offalgood.com/

Thanksgiving is now a day of turkey and feasting.  Originally, turkey may not have been part of the first thanksgiving meal, or if it was, there was no resemblance to today's Butterball.  And while the thanksgiving feast is widely considered a carry-over of Britain's harvest festivals and feasts, that time in early colonialism in the Americas was most likely characterized by food shortages, and not a time of plenty.

Thanksgiving gets me thinking about the amount and variety of food that we currently have on earth.  Overpopulation (Ref 1), climate change (Ref 2), and modern industrial food production (see a more specific post on this coming soon) certainly play a role in diminishing the food supply.  But the staggering statistics on world hunger and malnourishment (Ref 3) warrant a closer look at how our own food choices can have a lot to do with the type and amount of food we have available on a global scale.

 Much of the genetic engineering of food is done with the goal of increasing food supplies, growing food in areas otherwise inhospitable to a given plant's growth, or increasing the nutritional content of food.  Despite the promise of this technology, the process of genetic engineering of food crops is controversial and not conducted with much oversight.  Therefore, it is questionable whether these altruistic goals will be met, however research is still ongoing and public knowledge of realistic pros and cons are increasing (Ref 4). 

Genetic engineering of existing food crops also does not address that we have lost much of the diversity of plant and animal foods we once had on earth.  There have been periods of mass extinction across the earth's history, at least five that are well studied (including the well known K-T mass extinction), and it is under debate whether we are currently undergoing a 6th mass extinction (Ref 5).  Extinction itself (and subsequent disruptions to the food chain), coupled with agricultural practices that favor crop uniformity, have vastly limited the types and variety of foods humans can consume .  However, while we have lost 6000 of the 7000 apple varieties that once grew in the US (Ref 6 - just one example of many), we are also experiencing globalization which introduces ethnic cusines to our hometowns, enhances global trade of food products, and increases farming of invasive and non-invasive exotic species.  Clearly, there are numerous pros and cons to these seemingly opposing changes in the food supply.

Nutritionists believe the loss of genetic diversity in our food supply may also have a negative effect on our health.  Some suggest  'eat it or lose it', maintaing a 'rainbow diet', and promoting heirloom varieties at grocery stores and home or school gardens.  Consumer awareness is also key.  For example, the commercially available banana in the US is now comprised of only five major varieties, all from a single ancestor.  Therefore, this banana supply could be endangered by a single disease (Ref 7).  Information like this can go a long way in encouraging consumers to seek out a variety of plant and animal products at their grocery stores, or to favor heirloom seeds in their gardens.

One solution to the dwindling variety in the food supply, is a seed bank, or a storage system for preserving seeds representing the current variety of plants on earth.  The best example of this is the Millennium Seed Bank, the largest plant conservation effort in the world, headquartered at Kew Gardens in England (Ref 8).  However,  seed banks like this one are in dire need of financial support, according to a recent Reuters article (Ref. 9). 

The increased risks of losing plant diversity worldwide coincides with an all time high in world hunger levels worldwide (Ref. 10).  In looking to the science, it seems clear to me that these two issues could be tackled together with some combination of the approaches discussed above: supporting seed banks, understanding and addressing causes of extinction and loss of diversity worldwide, educating the public to encourage their support of rare and heirloom varieties of food products, and optimizing farming and agricultural practices to increase both global food production and nutritive value of foods (including the use of genetic engineering where beneficial).  These are just a few of the possibilities (Check out the resources at the end of this post for more ideas and possible solutions).  And hopefully next Thanksgiving as you stuff your turkey, you'll pause to think about the heirloom turkey and world hunger.

 References from this post:

1. http://www.springerlink.com/content/k362553815992811/

AND

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/03069192/2002/00000027/00000001/art00002

2. http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/effects/agriculture.html

3. http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats

4. http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/science_and_impacts/impacts_genetic_engineering/impacts-of-genetic.html

AND

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002432.htm

AND

http://www.who.int/foodsafety/publications/biotech/20questions/en/

AND

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/gmfood.shtml

5. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V6R-4GJM53H-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1113309923&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=933b2119dcaa54a5ce951edee441085b

AND

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/extinction/massext/discuss_01.html

6. http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/books/BID143.htm

AND

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7753267.stm

AND

http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2004/obv445.doc.htm

AND

http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2007/1000650/index.html

7. http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/humandiet

8. http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/conservation-climate-change/millennium-seed-bank/index.htm

9. http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE5AH03620091118

10.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/world/22food.html?em

Ideas and Solutions for ending world hunger:

http://www.smallplanet.org/action/item/world_hunger_solutions

http://www.wfp.org/our-work

http://www.globalpolicy.org/social-and-economic-policy/world-hunger/links-and-resources-on-world-hunger.html

http://ethics.sandiego.edu/Applied/WorldHunger/index.asp

http://www.un-ngls.org/spip.php?article1399