An Alchemist’s Lunchbox by Mari Eckstein Gower

The food I put in my body is probably the most intimate ecological issue. I’ve come to understand that organic and natural ingredients are good and anything artificial is bad. With that in mind, the case against GMO crops seems pretty straightforward. But then, I’m looking at this from the perspective of a citizen of a first world country. Like most ecological issues, the debate over GMOs is very complex. For the large percentage of the world’s population—for whom insufficient food is a daily reality—the promise of pest-resistant crops with higher nutritional yield sound more like a dream than a nightmare. I don’t pretend to have answers. To explore these issues, I created An Alchemist’s Lunchbox. I see the biologists working with plant DNA as akin to medieval alchemists, searching for ways to transform base materials. But is the end product true gold or some form of Frankenstein’s monster? I used medieval alchemical texts and botanic illustrations as my inspiration to present several different ways of looking at the outcome.