I really like this skit but I will admit that upon hearing it the night before its premiere air time I realized it may be one of the weirdest skits I’ve written for Sagebrush as well as the most difficult to understand without any background. So here’s the deal:
A company called Ventria really is developing a genetically modified rice that will be grown, not as a food crop, but as biological laboratories for medicines. The idea is the rice will produce two human proteins found in mother's milk, saliva and tears, which help people hydrate and lessens the severity and duration of diarrhea. The proteins are extracted from the rice after harvest and sold as medicine. Diarrhea really is a very serious problem in developing countries, where it is a leading cause of child mortality but as some of the characters in the skit point out there are cheaper and more sensible treatments and preventions already available such as sanitation and the cultures commonly found in yogurt.
Meanwhile, new studies have recently come out pointing to evidence that genetically engineered crops may produce herbicide while they are in our intestines. The health effects of this are unknown but some pretty terrifying possibilities have been put forth by credible scientists (although I’m the only one talking about people spontaneously exploding).
All this made me imagine a piece of fiction where the theoretically well-intentioned company rushes this dangerous product to market as a profit-generating solution to a global problem but it winds up creating new problems. For some reason, rather than thinking in terms of plausible speculative fiction I imagined it more as cheesy science fiction. Then we constructed it in "featurette" format with just the highlights telling the story - kind of like the audio version of a movie trailer.
For facts on the true stories this flash fiction are based on I recommend reading this article on Genetically engineered rice threatens safety of crops. A link to a piece on Genetically Engineered Crops May Produce Herbicide Inside Our Intestines. And, an overview on the GM industry that recently caught my fancy Seeds of Deception.
