It’s a very short step from agribusiness to agricultural genetics, which Schonwald used to call “Frankenfood.” But no longer: What he has seen has persuaded him to be “pro-agricultural biotechnology” and considerably more skeptical about the ideas of the “foodie mainstream,” some of which he finds “dangerously myopic” and “potentially destructive.” Schonwald would much prefer to eat organic vegetables and free-range chicken, as indeed would I, but he now knows that people able to afford such a diet are a minuscule percentage of the world’s population — albeit a disproportionately noisy one — and that the real issue is not how to make them happy but how to feed the world’s vastly less privileged hungry millions.
Thus the move, still in its tentative early stages, toward in vitro growing of meat and the development of fish farms in immense inland warehouses. Whether meat produced in laboratories ever will catch on is problematic, but “warehouse fish farming” is the “fastest-growing segment” of aquaculture, itself “the world’s fastest growing source of food production.” Yes, I’d much rather be eating ceviche made with fresh Maryland rockfish, but more and more that is going to be a privilege rather than the daily norm. As Schonwald says:
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