For the longest time, we, as a species, have looked to improve the types of food and flavors to which we have access. From the ancient selective breeding practices that reshaped the remarkably large Aurochs into today’s modern-day cows to the globe-spanning flavor trade that animated the “spice routes” of the Roman empire and beyond, we have always been, if one puts it indelicately, led by our tongues and our stomachs.
Today, however, the scale of our ambition poses unprecedented challenges. Biodiverse ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest are cleared for grazing land. Animals raised in factory farms often endure unsanitary conditions that can foster pathogens such as avian influenza. Our need to feed ourselves is increasingly entangled with environmental degradation and global health risks.
This is nothing new, though. We have long known that change is necessary to secure a stable food supply; whether to ensure food security or, more cynically, to secure greater profits. In the 1990s, this came in the form of genetically modified (GM) foods. Scientists, farmers, politicians, and business owners argued that if we were to continue to meet the demands of a growing global population, we would have to supercharge our food systems to better meet the challenges of the 21st century. As a representative for the bioscience company Zeneca said back in 1996, “Everybody wins; the farmer has a longer window for delivery, there is less mould damage, the tomatoes are easier to transport and they are better for processing.” Yet public resistance was fierce. In the UK, especially, media backlash against so-called “Frankenfoods” halted the rollout of the technology (it even featured as a major storyline within the farming-centric continuing drama The Archers). Indeed, in the aftermath, the Office for Science and Technology commissioned a report into the widespread rejection. And while countries such as the US went on to incorporate GM products into their agricultural systems, others rejected them outright or imposed strict regulatory limits.
The pressures that gave rise to GM crops, however, have not disappeared; if anything, they have intensified. As a result, new methods of accelerating agricultural improvement continue to emerge. The latest iteration is the development of “precision-bred organisms” (PBOs).
As described in a recent article in The Times, PBOs are created using gene-editing techniques to introduce traits that an organism might plausibly have acquired through natural mutation or selective breeding, but within a dramatically shortened timeframe. This distinguishes them from GM organisms, which have genetic material spliced into them that they would have never been able to incorporate through sexual or asexual reproduction, such as material from other species. Whether this distinction without a difference is something that I leave up to the reader: does opposition to GM food stem from the mere fact of alteration, from the introduction of “foreign” DNA, or from a broader discomfort with human intervention itself?
My concern, for the purposes of this piece, lies elsewhere. What interests me is what these technologies betray: not simply a desire for mastery over nature, but perhaps a failure of mastery over ourselves.
I should say that I have previously written about humanity’s efforts to control nature and how those efforts erode the giftedness of our embodied existence (you can find that here). Here, I want to focus on something slightly different: what might be called, for want of a better word, a kind of moral laziness.
By laziness, I do not mean that scientists, farmers, or supply-chain workers lack diligence or discipline. Rather, I mean an absence of collective aspiration. As a species, we possess unparalleled power. We reshape landscapes on a planetary scale; by some estimates, humans now move more earth each year than all natural processes combined. We are not merely inhabitants of the planet but one of its most transformative forces.
Yet for all this power, we often hesitate to change those things we find convenient. We know that demand for products such as palm oil contributes to rainforest destruction. We know that fossil-fuel dependence drives climate change. We know that high levels of meat consumption are linked to ecosystem degradation and animal suffering. Still, we persist along the same path. We both work hard to shape the world around us, but do so in ways that satisfy our most basic (perhaps animalistic) desires.
This, however, is not inherently a bad thing. Better access to nutrition and transport brings heightened economic prospects and lifts people out of poverty. Economic opportunity brings health, education, and security. The destruction of ecosystems is rarely driven solely by malice; more often, it is motivated by the pursuit of better livelihoods and prosperity in response to consumer demand. When meeting that demand is the clearest route to economic survival, resistance becomes difficult, even self-defeating. In other words, we can’t blame people for doing what they must to survive.
It is here that virtue ethics offers a useful lens. For Aristotle, moral virtue is like a muscle: it grows stronger through deliberate practice. As he writes in Book Two of the Nicomachean Ethics: “Men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts.” Virtue is not an abstract principle, but a habit cultivated through repeated choice and dedication. Much like the desire to get a six-pack, we don’t reach our goal of being good by taking the easy way out. Virtue requires taking the path of most (or at least, substantial) resistance. If we simply do what feels right in the moment, before we train ourselves to distinguish the good, then we’re being nothing more than morally lazy.
My worry is that each technological attempt to satisfy our expanding appetites, however ingenious, risks weakening that moral muscle. Instead of exercising restraint, reimagining consumption, or reshaping demand, we are once again looking at an innovation that allows us to continue down the same path we’ve been on. PBOs may be scientifically sophisticated and address economic, agricultural, and environmental needs, but they could also signal a deeper problem: a preference for altering our food rather than altering ourselves.
The question, then, is not only whether PBOs are safe or efficient. It is whether they represent progress in the fullest sense. Are they going to provide nutrition for the body while being yet another instance of us impoverishing our souls? I don’t have the answer. But, much like my fellow Brits, I reserve a lingering unease at the thought of food engineered in a lab; even if, as I readily admit, that unease may not be entirely rational.
