For decades, Vandana Shiva has been an outspoken activist against genetic engineering and the products that result from it, such as crops that could greatly reduce the incidence of blindness and help farmers feed their communities in an era of uncertainty due to climate change.
Impossible Foods is transparent about its use of genetic engineering, so we’ve grown accustomed to reflexive attacks from anti-genetic engineering absolutists. But this latest call for a boycott of the Impossible Burger is particularly illogical and ironic, given that its author seems to genuinely share Impossible Foods’ mission — to make the world’s food systems sustainable.
[Editor’s note: Rachel Konrad is the chief communications officer of Impossible Foods, which makes ‘Impossible’ burgers containing soy protein produced with genetic engineering.]
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If you care about the impact of pesticides on wildlife and biodiversity, as we do, you will applaud the fact that the Impossible Burger has a pesticide footprint 8-fold lower than the same, conventional burger made from cows. The Impossible Burger also has a 25-fold lower land footprint ….
The overwhelming majority of the corn and soybeans in the United States and the world is fed to livestock to produce meat. It’s precisely our appetite for meat that drives most of the mono-cropping and pesticide use that Ms. Shiva blames as the biggest threat to biodiversity.
Read full, original article: An Impossible response
