Waiter! There’s a Gene in My Bharta

The US, where seeds for GM crops are made, hasn’t allowed the sale of raw GM veggies. So why must we eat it here?

We Indians do have an appetite for brinjals. We eat 8 million tonnes of this cash crop a year. Here, in the home of this fruit that we eat as a vegetable, as many as 2,500 baingan varieties have been grown on our land. It’s been part of our thalis for the past 4,000 years. It’s offered as prasadum at the hyper-holy temples in Tamil Nadu, no Maharashtrian celebration is complete without vaingi bhaat and Bengalis live for their beguni. Even then, the Government seems determined to stuff BT Brinjal down our throats, complete with its bacterial gene.

Back in the country Obama inherited from Bush, where the mother company of Mahyco (the source of these GM eggplant seeds) is headquartered, the US government hasn’t permitted the sale of raw GM veggies. Yet, our sarkar wants us to eat them without any health fears?

While brinjal’s been used as a home remedy for Type 2 diabetes, no one knows what health hazards this aubergene with a double ‘e’ will cause. Worse, if approved, there’ll be no escaping this born-in-a-test-tube vegetable. It will be sold without any labels, which means buyers won’t be able to spot or spurn this freak-food. 

Why was brinjal chosen as the GM debut crop? Here’s a possibly inaccurate posit. Is it because they know that baingan doesn’t arouse deep passions among us? That it’s just a humble food? Imagine the outrage if Mahyco had tried to mangle with mangoes? We’d have to mute our TVs to silence the screeching.
As for market supply, have you ever been to the bazaar and returned without the brinjals you need? The balloon-like ones that are oiled, poked with garlic and singed before being turned into bharta… The small ones, suitable for stuffing with dry masalas or spiced coconut filling.

We don’t even have enough recipes to match our bounty of 2,500 brinjal varieties. We’ve only seen the ones coloured purple and lime green, striped ones and baby eggplants swaddled in shades of pure white. We’ve only heard of yellow and orange kathrikai, as its known in Tamil Nadu. If our Government gives in, this GM freak will contaminate the gene pool and kill desi varieties. That happened with BT cotton.  ’Scuse me, am going home to make bharleli vaingi (stuffed eggplant) with non-bacterial brinjal. While it’s still available, uncontaminated by foreign bodies.

bhartabrinjalvegetable