Excerpt from Eating Tomorrow
As the Cardinals gather in their Vatican Conclave to select a new Pope, the mostly anonymous members of the World Food Prize Selection Committee may be sequestered as well. They are to announce this year’s laureate next week. I attended the 2013 World Food Prize ceremonies in Des Moines, Iowa, the first stop in my five-year worldwide journey to research my 2019 book, Eating Tomorrow. The World Food Prize committee, fresh off a largely unacknowledged donation by Monsanto to refurbish the lavish WFP Hall of Laureates, was to present its annual award to three scientists credited with inventing the genetic modification of agricultural crops. For the controversial occasion, WFP president Kenneth Quinn also invited Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson, who had just led a Vatican commission that had recently determined that genetic modification did not violate Church doctrine by inappropriately tampering with God’s creations.
The WFP Board and its GM laureates no doubt expected a blessing for their controversial technology. Cardinal Turkson, who is now mentioned as one of the candidates to replace Pope Francis, instead gave them a stern lecture in a luncheon keynote speech that I was lucky enough to attend.
I closed the Iowa chapter of Eating Tomorrow with a report on that luncheon, which I excerpt below. It seemed the perfect counterpoint to the chapter’s opening, excerpted as The Gospel According to Agribusiness. The finely cultivated reverence for agribusiness, and Iowa’s claim to “feed the world,” suffused the WFP with near-religious zeal. The full transcript of Cardinal Turkson’s speech is well worth reading. The cardinal, who also spoke at an Occupy the World Food Prize event that year in Des Moines, would no doubt make an interesting Pope.