Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food Reprint Edition

This is an excellent book written with neutrality, science-based evidence, and clear for everyone to understand. This updated version is very important to read as the world faces many threats, one of them being the sustainable food production and the challenges this represents with population growth and climate change. Dr. Pamela Ronald offers very concrete examples on the safety and benefits of genetic engineering in food production, and the positive outcomes it has had in different parts of the world. She's also a supporter of organic food (her husband is an organic farmer), but she does a smart balance of both food production method as she says we need to evaluate the effectiveness of each on a case by case basis. I like her approach and writing style because at no point I feel she's trying to convince me of anything; the reader comes to their own conclusions based on the evidence presented, which is solid. We do need to support innovation, the safety & benefits of genetic engineering, and politicians supporting scientific evidence. Reading this book has cleared many of the misconceptions I had on the subject of genetic engineering and I appreciate her honesty and tremendous research she dedicated in producing this wonderful book. Highly recommended!

And despite this I'm giving the book 5 stars. Because at the end of the day they manage to take the complexities of food production and bioengineering and communicate pragmatically, passionately and most importantly accurately. Yes there are times when the maxim "show don't tell" is executed with far less skill than I would like in a book. But I forgive the writers for the occasional stilted dialogue or overly florid description. Because I have read plenty of books on these topics by skilled journalists (Michael Pollen for example), who may be better writers, but ultimately get the science confused and mangled. Worse they are far to prone to ignore information that does not fit their preconceived narratives, and in doing so they fail to give a complete picture that tells their largely privileged audiences what they need to know. Journalists like Pollen instead tell his audience what they want to hear. When it comes to food production we need more scientists and more farmers talking, and writing passionately about what they know, and I'm more than willing to sift through a little mediocre writing to get their point of view on such an important topic.And what a fantastically educational and thoughtful source this is. Before you sign that next antiGMO petition, or go to the polls about a labeling law, you need to read this book. You owe it to yourself to be informed, and Pam and Raoul have the unique perspectives of an organic farmer and a biologist that deserve to be heard.

I can only give this book a 2 star rating, as there is only about 2/5th of the book that are worth reading. If that!I purchased the book with the hope of finally finding proof that Organic and GM farming can be combined for the betterment of society and our health.What I did not expect was a book about a married couple, their vacations, their fights with family, what they taught in class on any given day, what they ordered from seed catalogues, or their favorite recipes. I have enough recipe books, I can look through my own seed catalogues, and quite frankly I don't know them well enough to care about what goes on in their lives.This is a very important topic & they do have some good ideas. But they buried it in superfluous fluff that was boring to the average reader, making it difficult to ferret out the real topic at hand. Not too technical by any means. It was just boring and the majority of it not to the point at all.I wanted to give up on the book several times and consider it money wasted. I came back here and reread the reviews to see why it got such a high rating and noted all the reviews that said it didn't get good till at least halfway through, or the last chapter. So I tried again, skimming through page after page, skipping page upon page of recipes, looking for the "good part" to finally arrive. It finally did, but it was a lot of work to get to that little bit of true information.The previous reviews are dead on about not getting good till about halfway through or even only the last chapter. So if you feel that paying the price of the book to read about their lives but actually only get some good information out of less than 20% of the book is worth it, by all means go for it. Personally I wish I'd saved my money.

I made it through the book in a day or two. It is not overly technical; it is an excellent introduction to biotech and organic farming. I did not really get into the book until the last chapter; I guess I kept wishing for more technical information, for the authors to drive home their point of view.However, the point they are trying to make cannot be more important. That is that biotech has a place in organic farming to make it more "sustainable". RoundUp ready crops have made it possible for farmers to stop using much more damaging and toxic herbicides and to go to no-till farming to preserve topsoil. It is the only answer for some problems sometimes, such as virus resistance. It would allow conventional farmers of sweet corn to stop using a slew of really noxious insecticides.Like Dr. Savage said in his review, I do not think that the organic farming movement is going to "hear" this message and see the wisdom in it, but if they could I think they would have to redefine the way they think of organic vs. sustainable.

Usually, enthusiasts for organic farming come down against genetically modified foods, or to be more precise, genetic engineering. Genetic modification has been done for millennia, with growers deliberately bred and selected plants for desired traits. This was and can be done without one having to know anything about genetics. Genetic engineering works to alter the genetic make-up of the crop. The former is considered natural and the latter not. This distinction is false. There is nothing natural, on a strict definition of this word, about most of what we grow and eat. But the issue is less to do with science nowadays than the culture wars. This book steps into the crossfire.It is written by a husband-wife team: one an organic farmer, and the other a plant scientist who has created flood-resistant variety of rice. This is an interesting combination, and presumably as a rare a combination as marriage between an Israeli and a Palestinian. The authors argue for the benefits of organic agriculture as well as genetically-engineered technology but go further than that: they argue that GE crops complement the ideals of the organic movement.Critics of GE foods claim that the technology is no panacea to the problems of population and food supply. So it isn’t. But neither is organic farming or simply cutting down on waste or redistributing consumption. There is no magic bullet. But the authors convincingly show that GE can be one of the tools we can use to deal with the problem. Crops that can be bred to require less pesticide and water, than can survive greater extremes of heat and cold, and produce better yields and nutrition, are all good things. They can be done and should be done. Such things can be done and the technology has proven benefits elsewhere. Because of GE, we no longer have to kill calves to extract rennet from their stomachs to make cheese. This can be synthesised using a fraction of the energy consumed to raise and kill a baby cow, and without having to harm anything.The potential benefits of the technology are easier to demonstrate than the potential risks. The positives are certainly based on better evidence than the negatives. But all is to take a cost/benefit analysis of the issue. Unfortunately, given that the opposition to GM is often less to do with the science and more to do with values and culture, which belong to the realm of absolutes which are not up to negotiation or trade-off, the authors’ judicious, rational and cool-headed attempt to engineer (so to speak) a meeting of minds is unlikely to be heeded by inveterate opponents of GE.

Having sat on the fence with regards to the GM foods debate for many years, this helped me.Well written and informative. Theory and examples from all over the world. My knowledge on this subject went from anacodote to fact in short order.

I read this book to add more arguments to both sides of an exam essay on GM crops, and it was very helpful. It is a good book for people who do not know much about the subject in detail, and can be used for oneself to balance those chinese whispers that are heard when topics of such controversy are discussed online by anonymous people with no solid knowledge. There is a nice balance between scientific detail and storytelling, making it easy to read. A controversial connection between two technologies (organic and GM agriculture) is suggested, and by reading about it, much is learned about both pro-GM and anti-GM arguments. Read this!

very interesting, however I really dislike the diary-like style of the book, full of emotional meanderings, descriptions of wheat fields flowing in a sunny afternoon etc. Grates after a while, however the content is interesting and informative. Lots of info on methods of both organic farming and GMO production and thoughts on the prejudice and fears ingrained in people.

I found this book easy reading. It addressed most of the major questions I had about genetic engineering (e.g. about human health safety, copyright issues, cross pollination, genetic diversity). An important point for me was that the information provided was reliable, with citations back to the scientific literature (one small criticism would be that many of the citations are quite dated). The information is also well balanced - partly thanks to the combination of the authors being a scientist working on GE and an organic farmer. Both authors come across as level headed, wanting to create a farming system that maximizes environmental sustainability and safety for farm workers and consumers. Refreshingly, they are not dug into the common ideological positions of being outright for or against GE (or conventional/organic farming). Interestingly the scientist (Ronald), does not come across as a raving techno-optimist that thinks GE can solve all the worlds problems. In the same vein her husband, the organic farmer (Adamchak), also comes across as very pragmatic and grounded, simply looking for the best solutions to the challenges of organic farming. Ronald's chapters are a sober look at some of the potential uses of GE, but include good discussion of the drawbacks too. As some mention, the book does describe the author's day-to-day family lives. For me this was actually interesting and useful, because it provided perspective on what they thought, how they lived and some of their values (e.g. being vegetarian). That said, I did find some of the "conversations" in the book sounded slightly contrived, in order to try and bring across a given point, and they do acknowledge having done this in the front-matter, but it wasn't too bad. As a non-biologist I learned a lot of interesting new information in the book, both about GE techniques, history and practice and about organic farming, heirloom varieties and so on. It's not the most in depth, but was easy reading as I mentioned, and the most accessible source of balanced information that I have read so far. For me it was absolutely worth it.