THE ONLY REAL question about any given set of social arrangements is whether they well serve the interests – physical, political, cultural, psychic, economic – of the people who live within their ambit. I find myself, yet again, asking that question about these United States after reading yet another ominous book about the American food industry.

The book is Eating in the Dark: America's Experiment with Genetically Engineered Food, by Kathleen Hart (Pantheon, $25). In many ways it's not a very good book; Hart is a journalist in Washington, D.C., and her prose is duly littered with cliché: "nerve center," "firestorm of controversy," and other such staples of hackdom. But forget the stale prose, and the sense of marching through the world's longest Sunday-magazine article. What matter here are the facts, and the main fact is that large American corporations, for a number of years and with the approval of the government, have been quietly introducing genetically modified agricultural crops into the food stream.

Why do they do this? Because they can, of course. Because the genetically modified crops are generally more resistant to pests and therefore produce greater yields – and profits. Because science, our holy faith, has so far shown that genetically modified crops are "safe." Of course, thalidomide too was believed to be safe, at least until it was found to be unsafe.

There is a clash of worlds here. The European Union spent much of the 1990s fighting to keep U.S.-produced genetically modified foodstuffs out of its markets on the ground that (as Labour M.P. Alan Simpson told the British House of Commons) if "[American] society is willing to offer its entire population as a human laboratory," that was our business, but leave Europe out of it. Leave Europe to its old, tried-and-true ways.

But the clash is deeper than a transatlantic political dispute. It has to do with a basic view of human beings' relation to the earth. Are we to be rulers or tenders? Will we insist on having our way, or will we mind the natural order of things? It is odd to find conventional political understandings inverted by these questions, for it's the left, really, that takes the more conservative position in favor of traditional crops and farming methods ("organic" means, in essence, "old-fashioned"), while the right champions "science" and "progress" and the high-tech horn of plenty that will feed the ever-multiplying masses of people crowded onto our small planet.

Alas, you don't have to have read much history to predict the likely outcome of this controversy. And, as usual, America the Dominant proudly leads the way.

Paul Reidinger