The debate about GM food approval is an incredibly important one, and even though many politicians and agro-industry heavy-weights would like it to all go away and just get on with it, it won’t. There’s a couple of points that need to be made here.

First up, I’m not about to tell you that all GM foods are completely safe, but I am going to shout, “Don’t panic!!”” It’s a bit wild to say this is the new asbestos. In some ways, genetically engineering a food is  like adding or removing an ingredient. If you put in a healthy thing – say, omega-3 oils – it’s probably good for you. If you put in a poison, well… people would cark it.

Of course, for ingredients we’ve never eaten before – or eaten before in large amounts, in particular contexts, well, who can say? And could the GM process itself disturb some “natural safety” of foods? Mmm, possibly… maaaaaaybe… although it’s certainly not jumping out from “mainstream” science just now. Science always updates itself, although some things (like Newton’s ideas about gravity, for example) are pretty safe bets for the future. We can do some predictive scientific tests, but just like mobile phones, we won’t know for sure for a long time in the future.

But GM foods are some of the most carefully examined foodstuffs on the planet, possibly in the history of food supply. Australia’s system of regulation is not too shabby on this score. Anyway, put it in context. Crop breeders have been crossing and mutating the genetics of our foods for decades now – genetically, some of this stuff is really brutal, radical stuff – but no-one is regulating those foods like GM.

If you want to panic about food, panic about junk and fast food. Seriously – the way we’re chowing down on that stuff is killing us quickly!

(I’m going to skip right over the question of ecological risks for the sake of brevity, but that’s a big issue too. Huge. It’s such a big jump I should get an Olympic gold in long jump. But I bet pollen can jump further… Canola seeds can go pretty far, too.)

Secondly, you don’t need to be examining your meat for GM just yet. Last week, Crikey listed some GM animal foods that sound dramatic, but since no-one is eating them yet, they aren’t really “foods”. Super-fast-growth salmon are real, but aren’t approved (yet!) to be farmed because of the damage they may do to wild salmon when (not if) they escape from fish pens. GM critters for casein-rich, cheese-friendly cow milk and pork with healthy spinach fat exist, but they’re not in food production right now.

As for spider-silk flavoured goat’s milk, no-one was ever going to drink it! It was an early attempt to make complex biological materials* in an animal in commercially viable quantities, an animal we know how to rear (spider farms, anyone?), and a system where you don’t have kill the poor beast to get what you want from it.

These are pointers to a near future, but there aren’t so many GM animal products around at all just yet. Technically, that’s because they’re very hard to produce, especially enough for a working herd (but keep an eye on animal cloning). The regulatory and public perception issues would make GM animals a brave venture for food producers in many markets.

So, relax? No. It’s very right to be concerned here.

Make no mistake, GM technology is taking us into bold new territory. There is huge potential to address some of our most serious problems, but there also must be large risks in there, too. The controversy over GM foods is good in that it keeps us on our toes, because risks (unlikely or long-term) need to be watched. I hate to say it, but we need to be alert, but not alarmed. To handle this mixed blessing, we need some seriously good governance on this – open, democratic, precautionary, and progressive.

Our GM food regulatory system is good, but far from perfect. There’s a good argument to be made that Australian society has been pretty short-changed on these ingredients when it comes to major new technologies, and biotech is no exception.

God knows corporations are a powerful bunch, and their lobbyists have a lot of sway in high circles – why should we expect GM crops to be any different? Investigate and expose, I say! Vested interests abound here, from market share and spin-off companies through to keeping your public-sector research job in an institution that’s told to act like a company.

If you’re an anti-GM lobby group, you too have a vested interest – it’s hard to be even-handed with the facts at the same time you change the world. And if you’re a government, carefully constructing the terms of reference of your legislation or enquiry is a neat but dishonest way of escaping scrutiny.

Last week’s Brumby deal smacked of dodgy back-room dealings, corrupt in spirit if not in law – although as a society we seem awfully complacent about these things. This is not good democratic governance. But it also says a lot about the culture and system of food in Australia. If choice is going to be left to a market (and in many ways it really should), let’s have one that functions fairly and sustainably! This issue is but one of many that really point to the need for a good hard look at the way food is produced, supplied and marketed in Australia, from sustainability right through to research, fair trade practices and human health.

Personally, so long as there’s good regulation (there’s an argument), I think GM plant foods are probably less of a health worry than, say, poor nutrition from too much processed food. And GM-derived material that’s too dilute to be measured? Please, I’ve got better things to worry about. For myself and anyone that has to suffer my cooking, I try to buy local and/or organics for a whole bunch of reasons – sustainability, flavour, equity, nutrition. That’s an informed choice, my choice, where “GM food dangers” comes so far down the list of criteria it’s not really on it. I defend other people’s right to choose, too.

We live in a democracy, a society, not simply an economy – this is not a corporations’ playground. We deserve better than this!

*Why spider silk? Well, it’s a complex protein that a mammal could make, we can’t make it synthetically, and people are interested in using it for high-tensile strength fibres. It’s one of the strongest fibres around. Unfortunately, it seems too difficult to make into fibres for cloth, so the company involved is looking for nanotech applications.

Ben Gilna has a degree in biotechnology, and did his PhD and a post-doc in a (policy and environmentally-) related area.