Food is where sentiment rubs shoulders with science. What we eat, how we prepare it and how we sit around a table sharing it touch on the deepest of emotions; it is no accident that anniversaries and reunions take place around a groaning board. Yet food is also a product of scientific agriculture, a triumph of productive effort that has been multiplying Man’s ability to feed himself since grains were first harvested and animals domesticated 10,000 years ago.

This juxtaposition of mind and spirit means that food has become the focus of many modern anxieties. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the long and anguished debate about genetically modified crops. Yesterday Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, gave clearance for the commercial planting in Britain of GM maize, after five years of consultation and farm-scale trials. Logically, there was little else she could do, as GM maize had passed the test of the trials by showing that its cultivation did not damage wildlife and may confer a small benefit by allowing more weeds to grow. It is an animal food, so issues of human health did not directly arise.

Mrs Beckett surrounded the go-ahead with as many caveats as she could muster, and turned down the planting of two other GM crops, beet and oilseed rape. Her decision, despite its caution, will offend many people who see in GM crops the intrusion into their lives of an alien technology; Frankenstein foods, as they are vividly described.

How can opponents be persuaded that the Government is right? First, by avoiding strident claims that GM is the wave of the future and that by turning our backs on it we would be opting out of modern life. It may be that GM crops will one day fulfil the promise of boosting output — especially in dry and salty soils — while cutting the use of chemical fertilisers. But these first products promise less. Only in the eye of faith can herbicide-resistant crops, such as the variety of maize approved yesterday, be said to herald a new dawn. It is a pity that these products offer such intangible benefits, and understandable that many people feel that we could manage perfectly well without them.

Critics may also reflect that “traditional” plant breeding is a long way from the rustic leaning over the farm gate with a straw in his mouth. In the past, new varieties were often created by blasting seeds with radi-ation to induce a host of mutations, in the hope that one might be beneficial. This is akin to a bash on the head with a baseball bat compared with the brain surgery of GM. Cross-breeding, another traditional technique, introduced hundreds or thousands of new genes, not just one. GM is a more precise, more controllable way of doing what plant breeders have always done. This is why it is such a tragedy that organic farmers — happy to grow the traditional varieties — have turned their backs on it.

What of the fear that GM will deliver farmers everywhere into the hands of Monsanto and other global giants? If supplies of non-GM products were to disappear, consumer choice would be eliminated. But should a demand for non-GM maize exist, there is nothing to stop farmers planting it. The market will inevitably and ineluctably provide diversity, if that is what consumers decide they want.

Mrs Beckett was right to be cautious in her announcement yesterday. But she was also correct to give the go-ahead for GM maize. Supporters can feel that the principle of acting on the evidence has been satisfied, while opponents still have the opportunity of opposing other GM crops case by case. The argument has entered a new and, let us hope, more productive phase.

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