Food Biology - Playing God

For thousands of years mankind has tried to manipulate food biology. The earliest methods was so called selective breeding, today our scientists can control and alter life itself.

Selective Breeding
This method goes back thousands of years, humans have made certain strong specimens of livestock reproduce to create strong and healthy off spring. This method was also applied in agriculture where seeds from the biggest and strongest plants where kept for sowing of new plants. Although the process is quite slow, over thousands of years plants and animals grew bigger and stronger.

Cross Breeding and Hybridisation
Cross breeding is when you mix two different breeds while hybridisation is between two different species. Although it has existed in nature for a long time, an example would be the mule. It wasn´t until the late 19th that it started to be controlled by humans. It was scientific discoveries like those made of Darwin and Mendel that led to an understanding in certain inheritance functions in genes. This developed into a literal green boom where new plants were sculptured to give higher yield, be stronger and more resistant, food biology became big business. Crops were modelled to be resistant to certain poisonous substances, like DDT, which resulted in eliminating pests and weeds almost completely as problems. Of course this created environemental problems for the eco systems surrounding the exposed areas.

Cross breeding and hybridisation with animals has been customary as well, though nature gives much less options. Today cows are bigger, give more milk and are in other ways stream lined to fit our needs, much of the livestock we have today are results of these practices. There is a big drawback in this because the actual gene pools get exhausted.

Genetic Modification
Since the 1980´s the knowledge to manipulate the breeding of plants has reached such a high levels the we can talk about "genetic modification - GM". This means that actual genes are added or removed from plants. Humans are manipulating the nature´s own building blocks. These methods has not only been criticised from moral aspects but also from health aspects. What is driving the gene modification is largely company profits and not the good of mankind, in many studies it has been proved that our new food is a lot less healthy and nutrious than the precursors. They are actually known to even be downright harmful.

This is not an easy topic since without a doubt the scientific approach has guaranteed huge yields from relatively small areas. Some scientists argue that if we went back to organic farming an enormous part of our population would starve. Food biology is a hot potato to say the least!

An area that has been much discussed is when these techniques are applied on animals. The DNA is manipulated to create species perfect for the food industry. Many time the arguments for argue it is for creating medicine and organs for transplants, though quite certainly if allowed it would be applied in large scale on livestock. It is quite easy to understand reactions to these sciences from several aspects, one is that we are not really certain what the results will be and the other is just simply that we shouldn´t play God.

Food Microbiology
This is an area in food biology much less controversial than animal and plant breeding. This is the study of microorganisms that reside in our food. They can contaminate and be harmful but at the same time even create food, like yeast bacterias in bread. The studies of this has led to many advances in our way to treat food. On of the first methods applied was "pasteurization" where food is heated to a temperature that kill mots harmful bacteria, and then cooled again.