Steam cooking can preserve the nutritional value and flavour of delicate vegetables such as mushrooms

The ancient art of steam cooking has gained new impetus with the revolution in healthy and mindful cuisine. Lisa Jayne Harris looks at the artful kitchen innovations from design-led German luxury appliance maker, and chefs’ favourite, Gaggenau

Alice B. Toklas, the celebrated 20th-century literary salon hostess, had one golden rule for cooking: “one must respect the quality and flavour of the ingredients”. Steaming is the most direct way to achieve her objective; it is an efficient way to cook that leaves the food tasting exclusively of itself. Just consider the simple excellence of steamed asparagus with French butter, one of Toklas’s stand-by dishes for entertaining.

Phil Fanning, the executive chef and owner of restaurant Paris House in Woburn and Gaggenau culinary partner, agrees: “You’ve got nowhere to hide with steam: It’s all about the quality of ingredients.” This is essential when you are working with delicate seasonal vegetables like asparagus, new potatoes or peas, but it is just as significant with good quality meat, baked goods or pastry.

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However, healthier eating is another powerful motivator behind the steamed food trend. Boiling vegetables reduces much of their nutritional qualities, such as vitamins C and B1, and other mineral salts readily dissolve in water. Lightly steaming does not disturb the food’s cellular structure or its aromatic compositions the way boiling does, so you preserve more vitamins as well as the colour and texture for a more health-conscious cuisine. “Gentle steam cooking can actually improve the nutrient status of food like asparagus, spinach and tomatoes,” advises registered nutritional therapist, Catherine Arnold, “It makes their nutrients more bio-available to the body.”

Gaggenau’s 400 and 200 series combi-steam ovens are ideal for the precise cooking of seafood

Gaggenau has pioneered steam cooking in the home for the past 20 years and continues to do so, including combination steam ovens: “Whether you’re cooking in pure steam, or in combination with traditional heat, you’re getting the health benefits of steam cooking, as it maintains food’s nutrients, colour and shape,” says Gaggenau’s category manager, Simon Plumbridge. Steam can improve other healthy eating habits such as juicing, too: “Our juice extraction setting gently steams hard-skinned citrus fruit such as oranges, so you get a much higher juice yield without impacting nutrients.”

Steam cooking is also gaining traction with chefs and home cooks because of the innovations in steam-cooking technology. For all its benefits – puffed soufflés, sumptuous bread, those crisp layers in a croissant – mastering the technique used to require an intimidating level of precision. Today, keen cooks are investing in internal temperature probes, gadgets and state-of-the-art appliances to emulate high-end restaurants at home. “The UK’s food scene has massively improved in the past 30 to 40 years, and this growth in skill and quality is reflected in passionate home chefs’ kitchens too,” Fanning reflects. Our private kitchens are becoming more technologically advanced, and ovens that enable amateurs to cook like professionals are both a luxury and an enabler of creativity.

Embracing both the old and the new makes us all better cooks. “Lots of traditional techniques benefit from having precise control over the humidity,” says Fanning. “Take bread for example. For the perfect crusty baguette, you need about 30 per cent humidity for the first five minutes and then very little for the remaining bake. In a traditional convection oven that requires guesswork, but it’s easily and consistently achieved in a combi-steam oven.” Brands like Gaggenau are making this trend for precision steam cooking more accessible. Their combi-steam ovens can be controlled to within one degree, which continually revises the estimated cooking time based on temperature-probe readings from three different sensors. There is no more guessing: “Steam in its basic principle is an ancient way of cooking,” says Plumbridge. “But controlling the level of steam in combination with a fan is only achieved by modern technology – and that’s what brings professional results into the domestic home.”

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Steam is also about convenience; rather than waiting for an oven to preheat, a good steam oven heats to temperature immediately. When you combine that with smart, Wi-Fi-enabled technology that lets you control the oven remotely from your office, or even set the bread to prove whilst you’re watching TV, you have all the benefits of ancient cooking just a voice command away. “Connectivity in the home has a lot of momentum at the moment,” Plumbridge observes, “But we’re more interested in future-proofing, so our ovens have the capacity to integrate with apps on any system such as Alexa or Cornflake smart homes.”

As much as new food trends are about keeping pace with technology, steam cooking also allows you to take your time. Next generation combi-steam ovens can sous-vide for up to almost 24 hours on a mains-connected water system or 11 hours with a tank, and cooking meat low and slow with a good level of humidity means it won’t be subjected to heat expansion and contraction, allowing for a more tender and juicy dish. Chefs also use steam to impart more subtle flavours into a dish, laying herbs under a piece of salmon to infuse the fish or steaming couscous in a traditional couscoussier, in which spices, onions and meat cook in the lower compartment and impart their flavour to the grains above.

“Remember that with a combi oven, steam doesn’t have to be 100ºC,” Fanning advises. “You want to cook vegetables as quickly as possible at that temperature, but steaming a piece of turbot at 60ºC or even lower will give you a much more delicate result. Oxtail or lamb shanks can be very gently cooked sous-vide in a combi-steam oven for hours with virtually no chance of overcooking, and duck legs, pork belly, haricot beans or lentils – if vacuum packed with a fat or oil – can be very gently and accurately made as a confit.”

Icelanders have steamed their bread buried next to hot springs for generations and Chinese steaming baskets have been piled with fluffy rice buns and hot dumplings for thousands of years. Steam cooking might be an ancient art, but revolutionary technology, a modern regard for putting ingredients first and a drive to lighten up our diets means that the technique is equally relevant today. True innovation combines the heritage of centuries of steam cooking with precision and performance that inspires. “That’s why Gaggenau ovens are all hand finished,” Plumbridge says. “Only when you piece a product together by hand, the good old-fashioned way, are you actually putting soul into a product. And that’s what really means something to people.”

Gaggenau’s factory on the French-German border

Precision Engineering

Darius Sanai takes a rare tour of the Gaggenau factory, pictured above, on the French-German border, and is struck by the melding of industry and creativity

The huge sheet of matte-silver metal looks, somehow, tempting and edible as it sits on the machine bed, like a giant slice of space-age food about to be sliced and diced. Lasers home in on a pattern of points on the sheet, and an instant later, it has a precise latticework of holes and is being washed clean. A few metres away, an operator is in charge of a machine that bends metal. It bends it a tiny bit, almost invisibly, but the bend makes all the difference, our guide explains, as it allows the finished product a smooth, textured finish with no sharp edges.

There is a lot of this in the Gaggenau factory; a lot of working with metal, bending and shaping it, machining it, turning it from sheets, delivered through an entry doorway in one building, into the slick kitchen appliances so beloved by professional chefs.

Yet metalwork was not what I expected when walking into the factory of a manufacturer of the world’s leading kitchens. It’s hard to know exactly what to expect; my experience of factories is confined to manufacturers of cars and watches. Both of these are very obviously made of metal in a way high-end ovens, cloaked in a kitchen design and so proud of their electronics and technology, are not. Yet there is far more metalworking going on at Gaggenau than in, for example, the Mercedes-Benz factory at Sindelfingen an hour’s drive to the east, or the IWC watch manufacture at Schaffhausen an hour’s drive to the south.

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Perhaps this ought not to be surprising. We are after all in a real factory, rather than a mere assembly plant where components made elsewhere are put together. Gaggenau may now be synonymous with expensive homes, but, as a timeline in the visitor experience centre where we had arrived earlier demonstrated, it has a history in metal. It was founded in 1683 as Eisenwerke Gaggenau, an ironworks which made everything from agricultural machinery to road signs, by Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm von Baden. Gaggenau itself is a town in the Black Forest of Germany, which, catalysed by von Baden, became a significant industrial centre and still houses one of the biggest Mercedes-Benz factories.

Gaggenau also made stoves, and eventually specialised in the high-end, highly designed, highly technical kitchen appliances it creates today, eventually moving to its current site from its original home. From the sloping road leading to the current factory in Lipsheim, you can see the curved outline of the Black Forest clearly. “I live there, it takes 30 minutes to cycle in every day,” one of our hosts tells me cheerily. The fact that he lives in Germany and we are just across the border in France’s Alsace is irrelevant: this is the new Europe, and there is, in effect, no border.

It’s a scenic setting for a factory, and also an interesting one: just down the road is Bugatti’s factory (really, a very chic assembly plant), so you could in theory pick up your Chiron and then watch your new steam oven being made. (Actually, the factory tours are not yet open to the public, which makes it even more special.)

The factory is a series of buildings each of which is filled with numerous sections and stations doing different creative activities. Gaggenau’s production process is still very manual; there are 350 workers, many of them trained in astonishingly particular skills pertaining to components or electronics of particular products. There is an air of extreme concentration among the small pods of workers, but unlike in watch manufactures, you don’t get the sense that you are the nth tour to visit that day. Workers are not slickly trained to respond to your questions; some of them are so lost in concentration in operating a particular piece of hot, huge or smelly machinery that they seem surprised to see you there.

What does remind me of a watch factory, or perhaps a pharmaceutical firm, is a ‘clean room’, which we observe from the outside. The room, which sits in a corner of the factory, and the people inside, assembling delicate electrical components of Gaggenau ovens, look like characters in a sci-fi movie of their own.

There is, in another section of the factory, a testing station, where every creation is subject to testing on its accuracy, function, and so on. I lingered a minute or two here, eager to see a malfunctioning multi-thousand-euro oven chucked on a scrapheap (or actually, returned to production to be corrected), but it didn’t happen.

The tour ended and we walked back to the Experience Centre, with its view of the Vosges and walls of the latest steam ovens, slick and architectural, beauty made out of, if not exactly chaos in the factory but certainly industrial creativity. More interesting than any watch manufacture I have been to.

Find out more: gaggenau.com/gb

This article was originally published in the Summer 2020 Issue, out now.

Portia Antonia Alexis is a leading consumer business analyst, neuroeconomist and mathematician

Portia Antonia Alexis is a neuroeconomist and consumer goods analyst specialising in the luxury and beauty sector. Following the publication of a recent research paper entitled ‘The Global Elite,’ the McKinsey alumnus speaks to LUX about how populism is just another form of protection for ingrained elites, why more women will become entrepreneurs, and how self-made billionaires are not always what they seem

LUX: Recent elections in the US, UK and elsewhere have returned a populist message. Yet US President Donald Trump and UK PM Boris Johnson are part of the elite themselves, and their elections are benefitting the elite more than anyone else. How can this be?
Portia Antonia Alexis: Right-wing populism emerges when the political and economic status quo fails the majority of people. Populist politicians build their base by constructing an in-group – in this case, hardworking white Britons – and pitching themselves as the champions of this “oppressed” group. They then blame the out-group – Muslims, migrants and scroungers – for the hardships everyone else is suffering.

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In doing so, they channel widespread anger away from the powerful – the economic and political elites – and towards the powerless.  They may claim to be tearing up the status quo, but their fundamental objective is to protect capitalist institutions when they are at their most fragile.

This strategy extends into the realm of policy. Johnson’s electoral agenda – from clamping down on crime to ending freedom of movement within the EU – will polarise politics around an opposition between white, working-class Britons versus migrants and welfare scroungers. He will declare himself tough on crime and migration while casting his opponents as out-of-touch elites who don’t understand the concerns of ordinary people.

Right-wing populism must be seen for what I think it is: a symptom of a crumbling capitalist order that no longer promises a better future for most people.

LUX: An increasing number of super-wealthy are self-made. Is this good?
Portia Antonia Alexis: This question reminds me of the controversial Forbes cover story naming Kylie Jenner a “self-made” billionaire.

Critics cited that it was irresponsible for that magazine not to address how Jenner’s family fame helped her amass her fortune. And it’s true, in a way. Calling Jenner self-made connotes a sense of empowerment and a narrative that she lifted herself by her bootstraps. In contrast, her successful company is not so much the result of being self-made but rather an extension of the already successful empire that’s driven by her sisters.

Most bottomless pockets, not just Jenner, consider themselves entirely “self-made.” Rich people are very conflicted about their entitlement. To cope with this conflict, many simply pretend to be self-made. President Trump is a glaring example. Even though he grew up wealthy, he introduces himself as an entrepreneur.

The best evidence of this bias to claim “self-made” status? The annual September release of the Forbes magazine list of America’s 400 richest.

The necessary conclusion from these findings: Forbes is spinning “a misleading tale of what it takes to become wealthy in America.” Most of the Forbes 400 have benefited from a level of privilege unknown to the vast majority of Americans.

Read more: Inside artist Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar’s Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat studio

LUX: When will women start to have a significant presence in the ranks of the super-wealthy?
Portia Antonia Alexis: While women still represent a relatively small part of the billionaire community, they are a continuously growing segment. Perhaps more interesting is that the percentage increase in self-made women was more significant than the rise in the number of billionaires overall, which could signal a change in who will create and control wealth moving forward.

Much of the increase in super-rich women is due to entrepreneurship. These women, like all self-made successes, exhibit several core characteristics. For example, they typically have high levels of self-efficacy, are adept at strategic networking, and are accomplished negotiators.

Women that have created their wealth are different from those that marry or inherit their wealth in several essential ways. They are more willing to take calculated business risks, and they are often motivated to take steps to enlarge and enhance their fortunes through new business ventures, sophisticated tax and investment strategies, and the creation of family offices.

There is unconscious bias in the system, though. I believe many men would like to see more women at the top. I don’t think they’re all actively trying to keep women out, but some discrimination still exists.

I am confident that we will achieve gender parity in top income generation over the next generation. The girl who can dominate a field of robots is a woman who can dominate a field of men.

LUX: As millennials mature, will the nature of consumption change?
Portia Antonia Alexis: Millennials are less wealthy than people were in the past, which makes them very price-sensitive for brands and products that are not differentiated from competitors. But while they have less money, they are very value-focused and are willing – thanks to their parents’ finances – to pay for quality or status.

And they are very tech-savvy, having grown up on the internet and with smartphones. They are well-informed and quick to adopt new technologies. Finally, they are into health and wellness, taking a more active role in physical fitness than keeping to an ideal weight or getting enough sleep.

LUX: Are millennials and Gen Z investing more into the ESG and impact investing sectors, or is it lip service?

Portia Antonia Alexis: When investing, millennials are committed to environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices. They want to be responsible investors.

In the early days, this mainly amounted to the exclusion of investments exposed to industries such as tobacco, alcohol or armaments. Still, it is now turning to broader ESG and sustainability policies. For example, we are increasingly asked about board diversity: millennials want to know how many women are on boards or in senior management.

Millennials are not the end of the generational transformation of consumption patterns. Some 77 million members of Generation Z, also known as centennials, have been born since 1997 – making them as large a cohort as the millennials. They are the most diverse generation, with almost half of them belonging to a minority group.

The potential for higher returns from companies that position themselves to benefit from the changing consumption patterns of millennials and centennials should make them especially attractive for investors.

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LUX: Can you invest ethically and get the same return as investing without regard for ethics?
Portia Antonia Alexis: A common assumption is that sustainable investment is about conscience rather than profit. Almost three out of 10 people avoid ethical funds because they believe the returns will not be as high as more conventional alternatives.

Very often, people assume you have to give up decent returns to do good with your money. But this isn’t philanthropy, and it’s about people, planet and profit. The research bears that out, showing that sustainable funds are often generating better returns than more traditional funds. Some still regard ethical investing as a fringe activity for do-gooders, but evidence shows how wrong this assumption is.

This year, the National Trust announced it was divesting its investment portfolio from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, equity research house Redburn recently removed buy ratings from the biggest oil companies, saying that demand for oil is set to decline as the focus moves to renewables.  Not only is it savvy to maintain a varied portfolio, but sustainable investing is also becoming increasingly mainstream, opening up more impact investing opportunities to all levels of the investment community.

Research shows this type of investment can provide equal, if not better, returns than more conventional funds. And also, the variety of companies financed by impact investment funds – those that score highly on ESG factors – perform better. These businesses typically have lower costs of capital and higher returns.

LUX: Is ethical investing being led by the West, and does the rest of the world need to catch up?
Portia Antonia Alexis: In most Western countries, between 40 to 80 per cent of investors want to invest “ethically”. They desire to make money and create a better society. However, the funds screening investments for ethical conduct usually make up less than 3 per cent of total mutual fund, unit trust, or ETF assets in those countries. These ‘ethically screened′ funds frequently focus on investments related to the environment and sustainability, social responsibility, or are faith-based, and so on.

Investing ethically, for some investors, is essential as they believe it also impacts their personal or spiritual development. They think they ultimately share in the responsibility for the activities of the company, companies or funds that they invest in.

In many Muslim countries, ethical investors invest in Islamic financial products such as Sukuk—Islamic bonds. These assets sometimes represent a significant proportion of total financial system assets in these countries, in contrast to the socially responsible investment (SRI) priorities of many Western investors such as mitigating climate change or regulating genetically modified foods. SRI in developing countries may need to address health care provision, poverty alleviation or food security. The SRI schedule tends to be shaped by a market dogma that can elevate or marginalise issues according to their perceived “financial materiality” to investors preoccupied with finding a business case for acting ethically.

Read more: Boundary-breaking artist Barbara Kasten on light & perception

LUX: How are the children of the super-elite dealing with the wealth created by their parents?
Portia Antonia Alexis: I often describe elite kids as having “well-fed child syndrome.” The idea is simple enough: they’re not made aware of their limits, only of their capacities. They get a sense of the world not as rules and regulations, but instead as an open terrain to be negotiated. Whereas the experience for a lot of disadvantaged kids is that of “you can’t” — of the limits placed upon you, the rules you have to follow, and the punishments likely to be laid down on you, the experience at St. Paul’s is that “you can.” This is an empowering way to treat children. This ethic — this sense of potential and an open world before you — helps with success.

A lot of very wealthy people are not accountable to their community, they’re not responsible to the people they love, they show their power and control through the transaction, and they are unhappy, from what I can tell. The people I know who are very wealthy and are happy are all contributing something to society.

LUX: Are experiences replacing luxury goods as the purchasing focus of the wealthy?
Portia Antonia Alexis: At the end of November of last year, the Savigny Luxury Index, compiled on the stock values of 18 leading luxury companies, reported a drop in average stock prices to reach a lower level than at the beginning of the year.

In the past, luxury was associated with champagne, caviar and designer clothes. Nowadays, with increased affluence, luxury is no longer the preserve of the elite. More and more consumers have traded up as old values of tradition and nobility have become less critical. People are enjoying much more material comfort in comparison with previous generations, and this has resulted in a trend of a cultural shift for cultural fulfilment and aspiration through experience. Therefore, it could be argued that luxury is increasingly about experience and authenticity rather than monetary value.

The focus on aspiration and experience means there is an increasing emphasis on personal transformation through, for example, well-being and travel. Therefore, luxury is becoming more challenging to define because the language has changed. Luxury today is not necessarily expensive. It can be accessible to a mass market, not traditional; it can also be personal, authentic and experiential. However, the old-world luxury of consumption and elitism still prevails.

LUX: Does elite mean wealthy, or does it mean privileged in other ways? Can you be one of the elites without being wealthy?
Portia Antonia Alexis: Elite suggests by definition that it goes for both wealthy and privileged. An elite is a relatively small group of people with the highest status in a society, or in some domain of activity, who have more privileges or power than other people due to their condition. Elitism is believing in or promoting this sort of arrangement, whether that be in the academic world, politics, art, sports, or anywhere else. Almost all the national income gains over the last 40 years have gone to the wealthiest 5 per cent of Americans.

If you think that only the top 5 per cent of American earners have become more productive or been the sole producers of value, you don’t understand how an economy works. Elites have used their power to extract a greater and greater share of the national wealth. And that must be addressed.

I don’t know if you can be one of the elites and not wealthy. But I do know ones who can be against the elite and still be wealthy and privileged.

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LUX: So far, populism in the West has returned right-wing, free-market, nationalist political leaders in the UK, US, Poland, and elsewhere (see Q1). Will high tax/socialist politicians succeed?
Portia Antonia Alexis: The resurgence of populism has abruptly reshaped global politics over the past few years, but what it means for economic growth and financial assets has yet to become apparent.

Although markets are quick to respond to individual events—such as a populist party’s rise to power or the introduction of a tax cut or spending increase—they have not yet grasped how populism could affect the global economy over the long term.

This poses a challenge for investors, as they need to understand the economics of populism to position their portfolios over the years ahead effectively.

The early stages of the policy profile outlined above can be glimpsed in President Trump’s deficit financed tax cuts and the ruling Italian populist coalition’s battles with the European Union (EU) to push through an expansionary budget.

The fiscal accounts of Hungary and Poland have structurally deteriorated after the election of rightwing populist governments, and the market’s price in an economic deterioration in Mexico under the newly elected left-wing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

It is worrying that most of the populist governments that undertake these fiscal expansions lack the fiscal space to do so.

LUX: What is the most exciting trend you have observed among the elites?
Portia Antonia Alexis: The rise of populism has become a global obsession in the last year. Whether it’s Donald Trump or the Brexit movement, the rise of populism has helped crystallise the fact that there are two kinds of elites: those who like to bash populists for being foolish, and those who wish to bash other elites for failing to give populists enough of what they want.

What’s interesting is that the anti-elite elites don’t seem to have policy preferences that differ that considerably from other elites. Everybody thinks the status quo needs changing in one way or another. And I don’t think points based on skilled immigration systems and relocation vouchers aren’t what most anti-immigration protesters have in mind.

Nor do I think a vigorous points-based immigration system, relocation vouchers, or any policy ideas of anti-elites would have done much to stop the current global wave of populism that we’re seeing. Had anti-elite elites been handed the wheel 15 years ago, I think we’d pretty much be right where we are right now.

LUX: You initially trained to become an equestrian show jumper, today you are an economist, mathematician and business analyst. What changed?
Portia Antonia Alexis: I spent an extensive amount of time training to become an international equestrian. Ultimately, I found I loved mathematics more. When I was volunteering as a youth counsellor with the London Metropolitan Police, offering counselling and therapeutic care to youths who had been victims of crime, I witnessed a range of diverse socioeconomic issues. These issues concerned me, and I found it interesting to analyse the problems from an academic, investigative and human lens. I wanted to find a way to research the determinants relating to wealth, income, poverty using a range of the method. And to predict the probability of wealth distribution income inequality and social mobility in detail. The rise of the global elite and the rise of income inequality and the decline of the social movement.

The most important thing I learned as a mathematician is that I can’t explain it all on my models, I must get out and meet the world. I enjoyed the process, and it motivated me: the people and their stories. Economics studies the behaviour of people. There are a lot of variables that can’t be explained in the models. Even if they could, those models would be useless. When I started working as a researcher, I didn’t spend my time thinking about what Keynes or Hayek said, nor did I try to show how the mathematical models work. I just went to the data, applied some statistical analysis and applied them on the real world.

This is the kind of work that counts, the type of knowledge that is useful, because it’s not doomed to stay on a shelf for centuries, and it has a connection with the people out there.

I still love horses and ride and show jump for leisure these days. I take part in equine therapy once a week, which involves activities with horses and other equines to promote human physical and mental health. I also occasionally write research papers on trends within the horse racing industry and the global equine industry.

Follow Portia on Instagram: @portiaeconomics

Art by Grace Crabtree

Genetically modified organisms have courted controversy since they were first developed. Mark Lynas’ new book explores the surprising extent to which politics has trumped science in the GMO debate, says Shannon Osaka

When Mark Lynas slouched onto the stage at the 2013 Oxford Farming Conference, he looked decidedly uncomfortable. After all, the British environmentalist and science writer — known for his well-researched and detailed books on climate change — was about to face his peers in a format best resembling a confession. ‘My lords, ladies, and gentlemen,’ he began. ‘For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops.’

Lynas wasn’t speaking metaphorically. In the late 1990s, dressed in a black hoodie and clutching a machete, Lynas took part in ‘direct actions’ against geoengineering, in which he and his fellow activists dodged police and landowners to destroy GM crops. Their call to action was a milieu of anti-corporate sentiment, anti-capitalism, and resistance to the modification of nature. In advance of one early action, Lynas wrote on a flyer: ‘Huge corporations…are using genetics to engineer a corporate takeover of our entire food supply. There is still time to stop them.’

From the beginning, the producers of genetically modified organisms (GMOs or GMs for short) – including such unsavoury companies as the US-based Monsanto – have been embroiled in a war of attrition against environmental activists. Those ideologically opposed to genetic modification spent the late 90s and early 2000s planning protests and spreading misinformation about the dangers of the new crops. They called GMOs ‘Frankenfoods’. They demonised the scientists and researchers who developed them.

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And they were overwhelmingly successful. In 2005, a Gallup poll found that a third of the US population believed that crops made with biotech posed ‘a serious health hazard to consumers’. By 2015, over half of the countries in the European Union, including Germany, France, and Italy, had enacted bans against the cultivation of GM crops. While GMOs are still grown today in the United States, their spread has been slowed or halted in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

To date, however, the deleterious effects of GMOs remain merely speculative. Ninety percent of scientists think that genetically modified foods are safe. The American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, the Royal Society of London, and many other science organisations worldwide have stated that GMOs are safe or, at the very least, not any more dangerous than organisms developed through conventional breeding methods.

It was the realisation that his position was not only unsupported by, but in fact the antithesis of, the scientific consensus that led Lynas to his emotional confession before the Oxford Farming Conference. It also led him to write Seeds of Science: Why We Got It So Wrong on GMOs (2018), a book that is at once memoir, polemic, and technology explainer; it is at times frustrating and at other times revelatory.

It is also timely. In an age that has been called ‘post-fact’ and ‘post-truth’, trust in science is on a decline amid a deluge of internet-spread misinformation, partisan politicking, and privately-funded denialism. A BBC documentary in 2010 declared that science was ‘under attack’ and the March for Science, founded last year in response to the inauguration of Donald Trump, attracted 100,000 participants in Washington, D.C. alone. On both sides of the Atlantic, doubt has spread on every scientific question from the veracity of anthropogenic climate change to the safety of vaccines.

Amid such conflict and uncertainty, Lynas’ recantation seems hopeful: a triumph of reason over emotion, of evidence over partisanship. But the real story is more complicated. As [Shawn] Otto explains in his lengthy and thorough The War on Science (2016), scientific reasons for supporting one position or another all too easily bleed into ideological ones – whether the issue is conservative opposition to climate change or liberal distrust of GMOs. Yes, Lynas changed his mind: but was he motivated by fact or ideology?

*

The story of GMOs begins with a misnomer. All organisms that we eat are, in one way or another, ‘genetically modified’. We have crossbred similar species of plants and animals to select for particular, idealised characteristics. That’s why carrots are orange, large, and sweet rather than small, white, and woody. That’s also why we have domesticated dogs that range in size and shape from the dachshund to the Great Dane.

But it can’t be denied that GMOs have an extra ick factor. Genetically modified organisms, in the sense that we use the word today, contain genes that have been extracted from some other, often completely unrelated, organism. Donor DNA which codes for a particular useful protein is removed and implanted into the recipient, imbuing it with the superpowers of (in the case of food) pest or herbicide resistance. This type of genetic engineering is cool, but also frightening. As Lynas said in his conference speech, ‘This absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends … We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs, cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life.’ There’s something about modifying the genome itself that smacks of technological overreach.

Art by Grace Crabtree

It doesn’t help that GMOs are a poster child for the corporatisation of farming. Monsanto, a multinational conglomerate formerly based in St. Louis, Missouri, was one of the first companies to produce and commodify genetically engineered seeds. (Monsanto no longer exists as an independent entity: in June 2018, it finalised its sale to German chemical giant Bayer). Lynas traces how Monsanto engineers stumbled upon a highly potent, surprisingly safe herbicide called glyphosate, which the corporate eventually dubbed ‘Roundup’. Combined with a soybean genetically modified to resist glyphosate – aka the ‘Roundup Ready’ soybean – Monsanto could sell farmers seeds and herbicide simultaneously, ensuring a steady stream of profit.

Although the company touted its ethical bona fides at every opportunity, its business practises looked suspect. GM crops had promised to help the environment by removing the need for toxic herbicides and pesticides – but Monsanto’s first big biotech release required an herbicide: one that was produced only by Monsanto. The company had also pledged to reduce poverty in developing countries with its new crops. But it aggressively patented its products to lock out competitors, and seemed to seek a kind of monopolistic control over the world food system

Lynas and his fellow activists exploited this narrative to the best of their ability. Companies like Monsanto, they argued, were ‘playing God with DNA, and using customers as guinea pigs’. In one press release from 1997, Lynas claimed that under the biotech company ‘the natural world is being redesigned for private profit’. In these communications, multiple forms of GMO opposition were intertwined and blurred. Were Lynas and his colleagues worried that ingesting GMOs would cause illness, disease, or death? Were they reacting to the commodification of agriculture, food, and nature – a long-standing environmentalist raison d’etre? Or was it a purely philosophical opposition against human technological hubris?

The answer matters. The recent twist in Anglo-American politics has created an illusion that all science denial emerges from the right. Denial of climate change has become a near-fundamentalist belief from pro-industry conservatives, while right-leaning religious groups and conspiracy theorists contradict evolution and (in some bizarre cases), the fact that the earth is round.

But, as Otto argues, distrust of science is equal opportunity. It affects thinkers on the left and the right, when science conflicts with dominant ideologies. The anti-vaccine craze, beginning in England with now-discredited physician Andrew Wakefield, began as a movement of well-educated liberals who inherited the holistic health fad of the 1970s. Other historical leftist anti-science positions have included fear of fluoride in tap water, or suspicion that mobile phones and microwaves can cause cancer.

One of the mysteries of GMO opposition, however, is how the same left-wing environmentalists who espouse a 97% scientific consensus on climate change ignore – or even criticise – the similar consensus on the safety of genetically engineered foods.

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Lynas was once one of them. Lacking a scientific background and propelled by green values, he wrote blithely in the 90s about the dangers of GM crops, with little empirical evidence beyond anecdotes shared among eco-advocacy groups. But over the next decade his focus changed. Inspired by what he saw as rampant rejection of global warming science (he once pied climate denier Bjørn Lomborg in the face during a book tour), Lynas started pouring over the research on climate change. He wrote two popular books explaining climate science: Six Degrees and High Tide.

In 2008, shortly after winning a science book prize for Six Degrees, he was asked by The Guardian to write an op-ed on GMOs. He was startled to find that he couldn’t locate any legitimate peer-reviewed sources to back up his usual claims that genetically modified crops could contaminate local environments, or that they led to the use of more hazardous chemicals in farming. ‘Facts are stubborn things,’ John Adams once wrote, and Lynas, overwhelmed, felt he was at a crossroads: all his environmentalist colleagues opposed GMOs. ‘I could betray my friends, or I could betray my conscience,’ he writes. ‘Which would it be?’

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In the end, Lynas prioritised his conscience. In the first half of Seeds of Science, he attempts to debunk every wrongheaded GMO belief he ever harboured, from claims that GM crops cause environmental devastation to the moral culpability of Monsanto. In some places, such as in his polemic against ‘fake news’ peddled by the environmental movement, his interventions are long overdue. In 2008, news outlets widely reported that thousands of Indian farmers had committed suicide because they couldn’t afford to pay Monsanto for genetically-engineered cotton seeds. The story was pushed by Vandana Shiva, a high-profile Indian activist who has called GMOs a form of ‘food totalitarianism’ and referred to the introduction of insect-resistant Bt cotton into the state of Maharashtra as a ‘genocide’.

But, as Lynas points out, all available evidence shows that suicides among Indian farmers are no higher than other countries in the developed or developing world – including Scotland and France. Journalists, including Lynas himself and New Yorker correspondent Michael Specter, travelled to Maharashtra and found no evidence of the massive suicide waves Shiva and anti-GMO campaigners pointed to. Lynas writes, ‘The Indian farmer suicide story is a myth, built … by those like Vandana Shiva with an ideological axe to grind and little concern about the true facts.’

In other places, however, Lynas seems blinded by his own enthusiasm. Eager as he is to debunk GMO fears, he conflates the connection between GMOs and health – a question that science can answer – with more philosophical oppositions. We can think GMOs are safe to eat, but still question whether humans should be modifying genomes in the first place. We can believe GM crops are safe for the environment, and still critique Monsanto’s patenting process and its monopolisation of the global food supply. When Lynas writes a chapter lionising the history of Monsanto, he sounds less like a rational man of science, and more like a man who has traded one ideology for another.

And while science itself may not be ideological, its interpretation, and the public’s belief in its findings, certainly is. Otto argues that the role of values and ideology in scientific trust has plagued communication (and democracy) for decades. The British philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon put it best when he wrote, in 1620: ‘…What a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research … [and] things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless, in short, are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour and infect the understanding.’

While Lynas initially wanted to believe that his change of heart was based on cold, hard, scientific facts, modern psychology has proven the opposite. Science communication is often based on an ‘information deficit model’; if only the public were more informed, scientists argue, they would accept findings from anthropogenic climate change to the safety of GMOs.

But the truth is more complicated. For example, on the issue of climate change, studies have found that greater scientific literacy actually increases polarisation. According to a 2008 Pew Research Center Study, highly-educated conservatives in the US are less likely to believe in climate change than their less-educated counterparts. Otto attributes this to an educational model overly focused on critique, combined with never-before-seen political polarisation. He writes, grimly: ‘We are inculcating the attitude of scepticism without teaching the skills of evidence gathering and critical thinking needed to discern what is likely true.’

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The problem is that in the human mind, values run hotter than evidence. Essential knee-jerk moralisms (like opposition to sexual taboos) and partisan ideologies, whether pro-corporate or anti-establishment, take centre stage in the battle for our minds. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind (2012), argues that when faced by evidence contradicting a deeply-held belief, people ‘reason’, but not to find truth. Instead, they reason to support their emotional reactions. ‘If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch – a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion,’ Haidt writes. ‘They will almost always succeed.’

When it comes to the politics of science, a set of ideologies divide the public on controversies. Otto, with a chart that resembles a tuning fork, separates science sceptics into two broad camps. On one side, an odd couple of ‘old industry’ (oil, chemical, and agricultural companies) and ‘old religion’ have banded together to form right-wing anti-science. Otto calls it a ‘marriage of convenience’. ‘The fundamentalists needed access and legitimacy and the business interests needed passionate foot soldiers,’ he writes. Together, this right-wing group doubts the science of climate change, evolution, and reproductive health. On the other side, pro-environment liberals have joined with anti-corporate activists to question mainstream medicine, the safety of vaccines, and worry about the deleterious effects of GMOs.

This is certainly an oversimplification of a problem that is more granular than Otto lets on. Anti-science doesn’t split so neatly along partisan divides. (For example, while liberals tend to be the most active anti-GMO activists, many conservatives are suspicious of GM crops as well.) But his premise helps to unlock the puzzle of why climate change believers like Lynas are often also GMO sceptics. For an environmentalist, belief in science is not the tantamount value, but rather belief in preserving a particular vision of ‘nature’, one that is external to society but vulnerable to human influence. Within this worldview, anthropogenic climate change makes sense, but so do the dangers of genetic engineering. When value-centred beliefs clash with science – and with an increasingly entertainment-focused news media that, as Otto argues, is no longer a ‘marketplace of ideas’ but a ‘marketplace of emotion’ – consensus and evidence take a backseat to more heartfelt beliefs.

That’s a deeply troubling sign for a democratic society. Otto believes that science is essentially anti-authoritarian, that it relentlessly challenges received wisdom through a rigorous system of peer-review and hypothesis testing. What are we to do, then, when research shows that both the left and the right are unable to set ideology aside when facing scientific questions?

In the final few chapters of Seeds of Science, Lynas begins to understand the real reasons behind his change of heart. His polemic against anti-GMO activists gives way to a sincere exposition on the role of partisanship in science belief. His recantation came, he notes, on the heels of his acceptance into a community of scientists and science journalists, and thus into a new ideology (albeit one that placed science first). ‘Deep down,’ he writes, ‘I probably cared less about the actual truth than I did about my reputation for truth within my new scientific tribe … It wasn’t so much that I changed my mind, in other words. It was that I changed my tribe.’ It’s a dark takeaway from a book ostensibly written about the importance of facts and evidence.

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There are still reasons to oppose GMOs. One of Lynas’ friends, the Oxford-based environmental journalist George Monbiot, believes that the consensus that GMOs are safe changes little about the movement against them. ‘For me, it was all about corporate power, patenting, control, scale and dispossession,’ Monbiot told Lynas. In short, many of the villains countered by the environmental movement. Monbiot thus understands what Lynas initially ignored. Science can tell us about risks, benefits, and safety, but the decision about whether to genetically modify organisms (or, for example, whether to geo-engineer the climate to prevent catastrophic climate change), is a social and political one. It can only be made through use of all-too-human values and deliberation.

What is needed, then, is science as a platform, a foundation on which politics can be built. ‘Wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government,’ Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter in 1789. At the end of his book, in a section optimistically titled ‘Winning the War’, Otto suggests science debates, a scientific code of ethics, journalistic standards for science coverage, and much more. He is a cheerleader for an evidence-based democratic society.

In the ‘post-truth’ era, where expertise is scoffed at and fact held in disdain, Otto’s scientific city on a hill seems a long way off. Humans that we are, we prefer narrative to evidence, linear stories to complex truths. We accept science when it aligns with our worldview; we doubt it if it does not. But, despite his flaws, Lynas represents the faint hope that under the right conditions we can change our minds. That, over time, the stubbornness of fact can – and might – outweigh the obstinance of ideology.

Shannon Osaka is a postgraduate student in geography at Worcester College, University of Oxford. She writes about technology, science, and climate change.