On October 18, 2017 I attended a screening of Food Evolution, a documentary about the issues surrounding genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the difficulty that scientists face when trying to combat the misinformation and fear that has been spread. The screening was followed by a Q&A session with Dr. Alison Van Eenennaam, an Animal Genomics and Biotechnology Cooperative Extension Specialist at the University of California, Davis. The screening and Q&A session was sponsored by the OSU Food Science Club and Citation Needed.
Food Evolution Screening and Discussion with Dr. Alison Van Eenenaam
The movie started with a quote from Mark Twain: “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” Watching this movie I, as an Agricultural Communications major, felt a rising sense of dread as I saw just how much truth that quote holds. I’m glad I went to this event because I think it has given me a clearer idea of what some of the challenges I’ll face in my career are and what some methods of addressing those challenges are.
The food evolution website states that “GMOs had become a metaphor for almost every issue we have with food and our food system and we wanted to explore if that metaphor had any merit or scientific truth to it. And perhaps, by better understanding the GMO debate, we would be able to make more informed decisions about science and technology in general. No matter the topic.”
My biggest takeaway was something that Dr. Van Eenannaam said during the Q&A session. She said that the urge a lot of scientists have is to simply provide people with more data and more facts and information, because that is what scientists find convincing. I tend to be a very analytical thinker, so I share that same urge to just beat people over the head with hard facts until they are dazed, confused, and slightly afraid. However, the best way to communicate with a wider audience with less scientific inclinations, Dr. Van Eenannaam has learned through years of trial and, according to her, a lot of error, is to emphasize shared values. In the instance of GMOs, that value is the shared desire to feed the world nutritious food in a sustainable way.