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Organic Food Controversy

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Congratulations! You have just won a trip to Earth in the year 2050, when Scientific American writers Michael Moyer and Carina Storrs predict that the world will be in dire need of resources. Buildings are crumbling, and more people are becoming cold and hungry by the hour. Cows have been extinct since 2030, and oil and coal have been wiped from the people’s memory. A skinny man glances at you from a crowd with a sad look in his eyes, and you can see the hunger within him. You wish that you could give all of these people something to eat, but your tour guide just keeps walking along like he sees the same image all the time. This time traveling vacation is just a glimpse of what the future could be, however, the field of synthetic biology could …show more content…

The first of these is that foods with ingredients that were created synthetically could be labelled as natural because they are identical to natural foods. Another controversy comes over whether synthetic food production will actually save farm space. Because the organisms are modified to ‘think’ that they feed on sugar, the world’s demand for sugar will increase dramatically. If synthetic biology becomes a mainstream process for food production, it would put an enormous amount of pressure on sugar plantations to expand, which could lead to the destruction of many endangered species of trees and creatures (Colwell). Another controversy that arises when talking about synthetic biology, usually synthetic meats, is that most people do not find it comforting to know that they are eating something that was created in a lab. It makes people ask what they are really eating if it is not beef. Along with these social concerns, ethical concerns surround this issue as well, as some people believe that this technology could lead to some sort of mutated organism escaping from a lab and spreading a disease that harms humans (“New”

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