TWELVE-YEAR-OLD James Lam Chi-lap has never heard of genetically modified food, but he has almost certainly eaten it. And one day, when he is older, he could be sorry about that, say the doomsayers. If they are to be believed, genetically modified food could be a greater threat to the survival of James' generation than any bomb or virus.
Or it could be the miracle that saves us all, say its proponents, mostly biotechnology companies, who claim the hi-tech sustenance could deliver the world from starvation, plagues and pestilence.
Either way, and without knowing it, James is already part of a global human experiment with our daily bread - and cakes, biscuits, crisps, any food cooked in American corn oil or any processed food. How much of these foods are genetically modified? No one seems to know. Certainly not the retailers who sell them, the importers who bring them into Hong Kong, the government regulators who control them - not even the farmers who grow them.
The food we eat now goes through so many different stages and processes, and contains components from so many different parts of the world, it is almost impossible to find out exactly where it comes from and what has happened to it. Take for example the European dioxin scare that had parents scouring Hong Kong for safe baby formula. It took months to trace the contamination to a food-fats recycling plant in southern Belgium. The complexity of that chain of suppliers, manufacturers and retailers revealed to frightened consumers around the world how little we know about where our food comes from and what is done to it.
Which is precisely why so many people in Europe - consumers, green groups, scientists, politicians and even Prince Charles - are concerned about genetic modification. So far, interest in GM food in Hong Kong has been relatively low-key, and its supporters are keen for it to remain that way. There is no reason for Hong Kong's consumers to worry, the biotechnology companies say, because genetically modifying food is merely a quicker, cleaner, more efficient way of producing disease-resistant plants and animals with higher yields of meats, oils, proteins and nutrients. It is a matter of selecting the best pigs, cattle, wheat and rice grains to breed from, they say, which is what man has done ever since farming began.
But it is no longer a process of painstakingly selecting grains that seem to survive insect attacks and interbreeding them with those that do well in dry climates, or putting the best pigs together in a stud pen. Scientists are now isolating the genes that make the plants and animals better commercial food producers, then splicing them into the DNA, the genetic material, of the grain or animal they wish to change. It is often called genetic 'cutting and pasting', because scientists simply find the gene they want in one species - be it a pig, cow or bean - and transfer it to the DNA of something entirely different. Arctic fish, for example, carry a gene that prevents their blood freezing, a useful characteristic for plants whose fruit is killed by sudden frost. So US scientists have transferred the fish gene to tomatoes, and are thinking of doing the same to strawberries. Arctic fish and cream, anyone? Theoretically, they could even use human genes if they had a useful, unique characteristic - thereby turning us all into unknowing cannibals. No wonder the anti-GM movement likes to call it 'Frankenstein food'.