Slow Food Adobe Horno Style

FIRST CHICOS ROAST AT RANCHO DOS ACEQUIAS

San Acacio, CO. The slow food movement brings together several major elements crucial to a resilient, ecologically sound, and socially just agricultural and food system: First, the food is produced locally by community-based farmers; second, the food is organic, natural, and grown from heirloom seed stocks; third, the crops are harvested by local farmers, families, and friends - this involves mutual aid, cooperative labor, and a strong sense of interconnected communities; and fourth, local families have access to the food produced by farmers representing an investment in local sustenance and support for culturally-appropriate food ways and heritage cuisines.

Devon and his farming partner, Joe Gallegos, wait for the embers to reach the right heat before feeding their heirloom maiz de concho for the chicos roast in their home-made adobe oven or horno.

This past week, we engaged in the first chico corn roast at Rancho Dos Acequias, the 200-acre home of the Acequia Institute located in San Acacio, Colorado, in the San Luis Valley at an elevation of about 8,000 feet above sea level.

The production of chico, or roasted white corn, is an ancient practice that Indo-Hispano farmers developed by adopting the Pueblo Indian practice of cooking in adobe ovens. The production of chico corn is a very elaborate, labor intensive, and slow process. There are fifteen major steps involved in producing roasted chico corn:

1. planting,
2. irrigating,
   
3. cultivating,
4. harvesting,
   
5. stripping half of the corn husks to promote even cooking and prevent scorching,
6. soaking the corn in water,
7. building the fire,
8. feeding the corn into the horno,
9. steaming the crop overnight in the sealed horno,
10. removing the steamed corn from the horno,
11. stripping the remaining husks from the steamed corn,
12. laying out the corn on drying racks for 3-5 days,
13. stripping the kernels from the cobs (a process called desgranando),
14. cleaning the chicos on a windy day, and
15. finally, packaging the chicos for sales or storing them for future use.

Of course, we do not harvest all the corn and a good portion is left on the stalks to dry out for use as seed for the next season.

The roasting of chicos is the epitome of slow food. The entire process takes about 7-8 weeks. Our maiz de concho is a 60-75 day variety. We planted our two-acre field in late June and our harvest started on day 74 after planting. This is a rapidly maturing maize land race variety and is adapted to the high altitude, arid, and short-growing season environment of Colorado's high altitude San Luis Valley.

Our friends and neighbors, Victor Nelson Cisneros, Joe Gallegos, Rick Olguin, Mario Montano, and Karen Mendoza, assist with the shucking of the husks before corn is fed into the horno.

Growing and harvesting the corn, however, is only the beginning of the process. The roasting of the corn is another all day and overnight affair. Removing and preparing the chicos for the drying racks (or in some places the lacing together of the corn cobs in ristras) takes another full day. Desgranando and cleaning the chicos is another all day task. There can be no rushing of chicos production.

More significantly, the process is not just an agricultural production task, it is a cherished and time-honored social event. Our work this year proceeded because we had so much help. A dozen youth from the Sembrando Semillas (Planting Seeds) project of the New Mexico Acequia Association, Las Comadres de San Luis, and The Acequia Institute, joined us in the harvest and prep work before the roasting. Friends and neighbors also pitched in. It was an example of the labor of love and the love of collective labor. The process engages the entire community in the production of our local heritage food ways and provides a means to mentor and educate local youth on the knowledge, skills, and virtues of slow foods.

"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more."

FRANKEN-RICE BIOFACTORIES IN THE FIELDS

El Rito, CO. This post is about rice. I like mine estilo arroz con pollo, a traditional Mexican dish from the borderlands that I learned to prepare from my abuelita. I also like it starchy as in some Asian cuisines or creamy as in Italian risotos.

I am deeply appreciative of biodiversity so the amazing varieties of rice are something to behold, like the wondrous varieties of maize. With rice, there are multiple wild, hybrid, or land race forms. For example, there are rice varieties that have been kept for thousands of years by Asian farmers; some that grow in lowland marshes and other varieties that persist as mountain meadow land races. Many out-produce the so-called high-yield (and high input) varieties associated with the Green Revolution as the Chinese found out some five years ago with their own native land races.

Remember Frankenstein, the monster created by a mad scientist in a rush to mish-mash different humans' body parts to create a living organism? Well, please meet Franken-Rice: a genetically-engineered variety currently being grown in experimental plots in Kansas. We might want to start developing a taste for this newly-fangled rice that recombines the rice genome with human genes involved in the production of certain proteins. Okay, you won't eat the rice directly, just the recombinant human protein supplements produced by these nifty little biological factories.

First some background to the events that set us on this path from the invention of "innocent" Rice Krispies to genetically-engineered Franken-Rice.

The long shadow of Chakrabarty's patent

We are approaching the 30th anniversary of the first patent for a genetically-engineered organism (GEO), the infamous Chakrabarty patent for an oil-eating bacterium. The patent was initially rejected by the USPO (Patent Office) but reversed in favor of the patent-seeker under a decision by the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals.

In a 1980 ruling, the Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court, opening the floodgates to the ownership of living organisms as "human-made" patentable objects. This ruling initiated the slippery slope toward "patents on life" in all areas of life from agricultural and food systems to biomedical and pharmaceutical applications over the past three decades. All these endeavors involve the commercialization and corporatization of the science and technology of recombinant DNA. It is an enclosure of our genomic commons.

I am drawn to the part of the text of the appellate court's ruling based on the logic that "the fact that micro-organisms are alive is without legal significance for purposes of the patent law." Life, according to this positivist logic, cannot object to being treated as an object.

This is "Borg" ethics: Resistance is futile. Not all living organisms are worthy of rights. They can be treated as a commodity for sale to the highest bidder; they can be subjugated to the profit-making cyber-machinery of the biotechnology corporations.

In its 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Chakrabarty, approved the patent (and the underlying faulty logic). The language of the Supreme Court held that:

A live, human-made micro-organism is patentable subject matter under [Title 35 U.S.C.] 101. Respondent's micro-organism constitutes a "manufacture" or "composition of matter" within that statute.

Enough commentary on the case exists so I will not dwell on the principal objections to the logic of an argument based essentially on the idea that the genomic mapping or modification of an organism constitutes enough of an innovation to be called a human creation.

What is even more problematic is that we seem as a society to be willing to accept Frankenstein monsters in our midst if it means we can fulfill the promises of eradicating hunger, poverty, illness, and crime through the control of genes and proteins.

Everything in existence is already in existence; only its "state" can be altered. Recombining these elements is not an act of creation but of subjugation.

I turn then to the problem at hand which is the development of a new genetically-engineered rice variety with human transgenes in its modified DNA. Please note that I use the term "transgenic" or "transgenes" to refer to the crossing not just of boundaries between different species but across the divides of phylla, a process exceedingly rare in nature but common in most commercial agricultural biotechnology applications.

Rice as biofactory

Kansas is home of the disappearing aboriginal perennial prairies that once encompassed the entire High Plains bioregion of what is now the Midwestern USA and "Prairie Canada." The prairies that were long ago reduced to monoculture crop plantations are now the site of an ongoing experiment in "pharming," a word hatched from the combination of "pharmaceutical" and farming.

The advent of the new transgenic biotechnologies has been on the horizon for some time. It is based on the notion of a promised new golden era of crops bioengineered for medical or nutritional properties or the use of crops as biofactories to produce "nutraceuticals." This we are told will eliminate hunger and reduce disease.

Instead of taking medications, we will now eat our medicines through the foods we consume (as if somehow this was not already the case if only people could have access to organic and safe foods for a balanced diet). Only, of course, we have already been engaging in a very similar experiment ever since our bodies were exposed to the antibiotics used in livestock feedlots under a perverse and immoral system of industrial farming known as CAFOs, confined animal feeding operations, or also simply as "factory farms."

The Center for Food Safety, a food safety advocacy organization, reports in its April 8, 2008 press release that the case at hand involves a California-based company, Ventria Bioscience, Inc., that is developing, planting, and attempting to market rice that has been genetically engineered as a "biofactory" for the production of recombinant human proteins with putative pharmaceutical properties.

According to an exhaustive report by the CFS, "Ventria hopes to market the rice-extracted pharmaceutical proteins for use in oral re-hydration solutions to treat diarrhea, and as nutritional supplements in yogurt, granola bars, performance drinks and other products." This is an on-going development and California recently forbade Ventria from planting commercial- scale fields of the transgenic rice/qua human protein biofactory anywhere in the state.

A significant turn in the case was a recent decision by Cera Products, manufacturer of performance drinks for athletes and oral re-hydration solutions, to reject use of Ventria's rice-derived compounds in its products. The Maryland-based company recently declared its position in a letter responding to a 2007 CFS report entitled "A Grain of Caution: A Critical Assessment of Pharmaceutical Rice." For a link to the report, go to http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/VentriaPR4_09_08.cfm.

The concerns over Ventria's pharmaceutical rice are similar to those that led to the withdrawal of the StarLink and Prodigy transgenic varieties used for a spell in Nebraska farms a few years back: These concerns include the lack of independent third-party predictive ecological modeling to estimate and mitigate potential environmental impacts including genetic contamination of non-transgenic crops and wild relatives of cultivars. Genetic contamination of conventional rice crops would be a serious problem. Moreover, the pharmaceutical benefits of the human proteins involved in this transgenic experiment have not been independently determined.

These "pharming" biotechnology start-ups have not yet been subject to substantive independent scientific scrutiny or effective citizen participation and education in vetting the mass-marketing of these transgenic crops or biofactories. The deregulation ideology of neoliberal politics has been at work like a wrecking crew leading the way to a "biological Chernobyl," to borrow a phrase from bioengineer and bioethicist, Mae Wan Ho.

Testing Frankenstein supplement on indigenous children

Ventria has, of course, already patented these "inventions," which reinforces the corporate goal of creating new markets to profit from the widespread panic and angst over hunger, malnutrition, and spreading disease.

However, while Ventria has not received approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to market its transgenic protein supplements, it has gone offshore with its Frankenstein experiment and specifically to Peru, where it conducted experiments with indigenous children, allegedly without the informed consent of all the parents.

The CFS reports that some of the children treated for diarrhea with Ventria's transgenic protein supplements developed serious allergic reactions. The out-sourcing of human testing to unsuspecting "third world" countries and their infants and youth seems more than unethical. It should be seen as criminal and even genocidal and is by any basic and decent measure surely a fundamental violation of indigenous rights, tribal laws (cosmologies), and sovereignty.

This blog opposes the commercialization and environmental release of all GMOs. I do not oppose plant genomics research as a useful resource for traditional heirloom seed savers and plant breeders. However, I am opposed to: (1) commercial-scale planting of transgenic crops as pharmaceutical biofactories, even in contained facilities with the aim of (2) producing recombinant human protein supplements and (3) engaging in "nutraceutical" field trials among indigenous populations or any other marginalized communities. This is a horrid act of environmental racism and bio-colonialism.

On the front of ecological integrity, of course, the "gene-ie" is literally out of the bottle and it is now more difficult to resort to the "precautionary principle," which calls on governments and communities to err on the side of caution and do no harm to humans, other living organisms, and the environment. This biosafety protocol now seems like an inadequate response to an unknown and uncertain threat that has already crossed the line.

My friend and colleague, Ignacio Chapela, once told me that the captains and generals of the agribiotech industry have long bragged about how it is too late for consumers, scientists, and environmentalists to recall transgenic materials since these have already long ago been released into the environment. The Frankenstein experiment is underway and none of us can opt out; we can't recall this modified DNA, even in the case of the transgenic crops produced in the allegedly "closed-loop" and "zero release" containment systems like Ventria's biofactories in Kansas and Missouri.

The corporate interests believe this makes our quest for a predictive ecology of GMOs a moot point. From my vantage, it only means that these corporations, with governmental complicity or at least tacit approval through incompetency, inattention, and an anti-science administrative culture, may have committed high crimes against humanity, against the general public welfare, the rights of future generations, and the cause of environmental and economic justice.

Biohazard level research facilities can certainly pursue scientific work but the thresholds posed by the incomparable values of ecological integrity, environmental justice, and public safety demand an end to unregulated profit-making via Frankenstein "inventions" tested on indigenous peoples without informed consent which is not a simple matter of "individual choices" and involves community-wide participation in decision-making. This ethic appears to have been systematically violated as well.

It is time to call for an end to governmental subsidies and other support for the commercialization of transgenic foods and "nutraceuticals," the processed foods that include ingredients like recombinant human protein supplements alleged to have medically-beneficial properties.