新时代研究生学术英语综合教程2unit2课文中英文翻译

B2U2 Food Safety

Reading Text One>Text One

Food Fraud: It’s What’s for Dinner?
David Edwards

Culture Notes
1 What’s for dinner would seem to be one of life’s more straightforward questions. However, if my 36 years of food safety experience have taught me anything, it is that the answer to that question isn’t as simple as it once was. Most consumers would be surprised to find just how complex simple meals have become. For example, pizza is a seemingly simple family favorite in American homes, so how complex could it possibly be? A recent analysis of the components of a pizza, carried out for the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, found that it was made from 35 different ingredients that passed through 60 countries on five different continents.

晚餐吃什么是生活中一个看似简单的问题。然而，要说36年的食品安全经验教会了我什么，那就是这个问题的答案不再像以前那么简单了。大多数消费者会惊讶地发现，简简单单的一餐饭已经变得多么复杂。例如，比萨饼是深受美国家庭喜爱、看上去挺简单的食物，能有多复杂呢？最近，爱尔兰食品安全局对比萨饼的成分进行了分析，发现它是由来自五大洲、经由60个国家的35种不同配料制作而成的。
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2 With ingredients of a simple dish like pizza coming from so many different countries, it’s not surprising that this complexity has given rise to food fraud. Increasingly, what’s on your plate at dinner, not to mention breakfast and lunch, may not be quite what it’s supposed to be. Food fraud — beef that’s horsemeat, salmon that’s rainbow trout — thins the global economy every year by an estimated $49 billion. That’s a lot of fake burgers and suspect sushi. Yet containing the problem is no small task. Some experts estimate that approximately 5 to 7 percent of the U.S. food supply is affected by food fraud. Another study found that about 10 percent of the food Americans buy is likely adulterated. The sprawling, complex modern food industry can be difficult to monitor and regulate — making it an easy target.

比萨饼如此简易的餐食，配料都来自如此多个不同国家，这种复杂性背后滋生出食品欺诈也就不足为奇了。哪怕是晚饭的盘中餐，也可能离它原本该有的样子越来越远，早餐和午餐就更不用提了。食品欺诈，如牛肉换成马肉、三文鱼变为虹鳟鱼，每年给全球经济造成的损失约490亿美元。造假汉堡、可疑寿司层出不穷。然而，遏制这一问题并非易事。一些专家估计，大约5%到7%的美国食品供应受到食品欺诈的影响。另一项研究发现，美国人购买的食品中可能掺假的约占10%。庞大、复杂的现代食品行业难以监管，因此容易沦为造假的目标。
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3 Food fraud, the deliberate substitution, addition, tampering or misrepresentation of food, ingredients or packaging, is not new. For as long as people have sold food to one another and not just grown it to feed themselves, the road to market has been mapped with cut corners. By the 17th century, governments started to act, introducing food purity laws to detect, among other things, watered-down milk and bread plumped up with chalk. But that kind of after-the-fact reaction is not enough to discourage sophisticated 21st century criminals, who are sometimes armed with high tech resources like encrypted websites and who know that they can depend on often inconsistent or ill-defined regulations to raise their odds of getting away with it.

食品欺诈，即故意对食品、配料或包装进行替换、添加、篡改或虚假陈述的行为，并不是什么新鲜事。自从人们开始买卖食物，而不仅是种来自己吃，食品走向市场的道路就被刻上了偷工减料的印记。到了17世纪，各国政府开始采取行动，出台了食品纯度法，对掺水的牛奶和混入白垩蓬松起来的面包等食品进行检测。但这种事后补救的做法不足以阻止21世纪老奸巨猾的犯罪分子，他们有些人拥有加密网站等高科技资源，知道自己可以利用往往不一致的或界定不清的法规来提高脱身的几率。
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4 Much of the challenge is rooted in the extraordinary reach of the global marketplace. When a Chilean summer strawberry can make it to the top of a banana parfait in a Manhattan restaurant in mid-winter, we’re in a new world that demands a whole new level of vigilance. It’s a food supply network with so many links that tampering with just one can easily go unnoticed.

监管的困难主要源于全球市场的范围之广。隆冬时节，一枚来自智利的夏季草莓能出现在曼哈顿餐厅的香蕉芭菲的顶端。我们身处于这样一个全新的世界，警惕性也要提高到一个全新的层次。这是个错综复杂的食品供应网，在其中某个环节作假是很难被发现的。
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5 The 2013 European horsemeat scandal is a good illustration of this concept. By the time French authorities identified a French meat wholesaler as the prime suspect in passing off horsemeat as beef throughout Europe, sales had stretched over several months, across 13 countries and reached into 28 companies. At the same time, Great Britain’s food regulatory agency reported that samples of six horse carcasses tested positive for a horsey painkiller, which may have entered the human food chain in France. Then, almost simultaneously, arrests were made on suspicion of fraud at two meat plants in Wales.

2013年欧洲的马肉丑闻就是一个典型例子。当法国当局认定一家法国肉类批发商为在整个欧洲范围内以马肉冒充牛肉的头号嫌疑犯时，其销售活动已经持续数月，涉及13个国家和28家公司。与此同时，英国食品监管机构报告称，有六具马尸的样本被检测出含有一种马用止痛药，而这些马肉可能已经进入了法国的人类食物链。随后，几乎同一时间，在英国威尔士的两家肉制品工厂内，有人因涉嫌欺诈而被捕。

6 Along with the ever increasing complexity and vulnerability of our food supply chain, the fact is that when it comes to what we eat, most of us want it all — we want what’s on our plates to be affordable, high quality and authentic. That’s not an easy recipe, which is another reason the crooks start cooking up schemes. Consider what’s happened in those seemingly excellent fish restaurants, Boston. Investigative reporters from The Boston Globe found that fish served in local restaurants was wrongly identified about half the time. That means frozen fish declared fresh and lower class fish passed off as top of the line, with prices raised accordingly. Investigations by public interest groups from Florida to California have reported numerous instances of the same kind of fraud, as well as fish shipped from afar labeled as locally caught.

我们的食品供应链已经愈发复杂和脆弱，但现实的情况却是，在口腹之欲方面，我们大多数人都贪求太多──我们希望食物既要买得起，又要高品质，还要地道。这可不容易，这也让骗子们动起了歪脑筋。想想波士顿那些貌似高档的鱼料理餐厅是怎么回事吧。《波士顿环球报》的调查记者发现，当地餐馆供应的鱼有半数时候货不对板。换言之，谎称冷冻鱼为新鲜鱼，以低档鱼冒充高端鱼，价格相应抬高。从佛罗里达到加利福尼亚，各公众利益群体展开的调查也报道了许多类似的欺诈行为，还有的将鱼从远方水运而来，却贴上本地捕捞的标签。
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7 So what is being done to protect consumers? Many companies are developing a food defense plan to limit intentional food tampering and to comply with food safety certifications, seller qualifications and regulation. Many of the world’s largest food retailers are now mandating supplier certification to Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) standards, which emphasize food security and defense. These active strategies require a lot of work in defining and resolving hazards in every aspect of the food supply chain, but they make it much harder for crooks to get their hands into our food.

那么，采取了哪些措施来保护消费者呢？许多公司正在制定食品防护计划，以限制故意篡改食品的行为，保证食品符合安全认证、销售商资质和法规的要求。现在，多家全球最大的食品零售商强制要求供应商认证达到全球食品安全倡议组织（GFSI）的标准，这些标准强调的就是食品安全和防护。这类积极举措虽需投入大量工作，用以界定和解除对食品供应链的各方危害，但也能增大骗子们对食品动手脚的难度。
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8 From a regulatory standpoint, the United States took a step forward in protecting its food supply with the passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act. FSMA provides a science- and risk-based approach for companies to verify their ingredient suppliers, including ways to assure the public and FDA that industry has processes in place to detect food adulteration.

从监管的角度来看，随着《食品安全现代化法案》的通过，美国在保护其食品供应方面向前迈出了一步。该法案为企业提供了一种基于科学和风险管控的方法，来认证原料供应商，包括如何向公众和美国食品药品监督管理局保证行业内已有相应的程序来检测食品掺假。
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9 But more is needed. Increasing engagement and collaboration is also essential to protecting our global food supply. The key is for everyone with a stake in food fraud to work together, sharing data and insight from every level of the food supply network before fraud happens. For example, when manufacturers and retailers pool resources to work in smaller, more robust and collaborative networks, they dramatically magnify their ability to examine their supply chains. That makes it much more difficult for someone to cheat without someone noticing.

但这还不够。加强参与和合作对保护全球食品供应也是至关重要的。解决问题的关键是每个和食品欺诈有利害关系的人都要携手努力，在欺诈发生之前，就将来自食品供应网各个层面的数据和内情分享出来。例如，如果制造商和零售商将资源汇聚在更集中、更强大、更有合作力的供应网当中，就能极大提高对供应链的检查能力。这样一来，神不知鬼不觉作假的难度就会大大增加。
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10 Additionally, partnerships between national and international governments can change the current fragmented, catch-as-catch-can approach to a more comprehensive, manageable regime of continuous oversight and rigorous enforcement. As part of this integration, shared standards and intelligence are crucial to addressing threats that are further magnified by globalization.

此外，各国以及国际政府之间的合作也可以改变目前这种单打独斗、“抓几个算几个”的做法，以建立一个更全面、更易于管理的机制来持续监督和严格执行食品欺诈应对措施。在这种一体化管理当中，共享标准和信息对于应对因全球化而趋于严重的食品安全威胁至关重要。
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11 These are just a few examples of what more can be done to help keep our food supply chain honest. Food fraud is a problem that affects all of us. And, in the end, the most important drivers of change will be — all of us. Heightened awareness of the problem, greater understanding of the challenge and more determined insistence that the food industry and government work together to combat the deception in our diets is how we can all play a role in ensuring that what’s for dinner is for real.

在协助维护食品供应链的诚信方面，我们还大有可为，这里举出的只是少数几个例子。食品欺诈是一个关乎我们所有人的难题，而且，归根结底，推动变革的最重要力量将会是我们所有人。提高对这一问题的认识、加深对这一困难的理解、更加坚定地主张食品行业与政府之间通力合作打击食品欺诈，这是我们每个人为了一顿货真价实的晚餐应当采取的行动。

Reading Text Two>Text Two

Are GMO Foods Safe?

Jane E. Brody

Culture Notes

1 It’s human nature, it seems, to resist change and fear the unknown. So it is no surprise that genetic engineering of food and feed crops resulted in their resounding condemnation as “Frankenfoods” by many consumers, who seem as terrified of eating an apple with an added anti-browning gene or a pink pineapple genetically enriched with the antioxidant lycopene as I am of self-driving cars.

抗拒改变，惧怕未知，似乎是人类的天性。因此，众多消费者猛烈抨击转基因食品和饲料作物，称之为“弗兰肯斯坦食品”，也就毫不奇怪了。这些人似乎很怕吃到添加了抗褐变基因的苹果或富含抗氧化番茄红素的粉色菠萝，就像我害怕无人驾驶汽车一样。

2 Trek down the grocery aisles of any large market and you’ll find many products prominently labeled “No GMOs.” It’s much harder to spot the small print on many other foods stating “Partially produced with genetic engineering,” a result of a 2016 federal law that mandated uniform labeling of all food products containing genetically engineered ingredients.

在任一家大超市的食品通道逛一圈，你会发现许多商品上都醒目地注明“非转基因”。其他很多食品上的“部分转基因”标识则字体很小，可没那么容易看清楚。这类标识源于2016年一项联邦法规的强制要求，即所有含转基因成分的食品必须统一标识。

3 The labeling requirement arose in response to public pressure and a confusing array of state rules. But while I endorse the public’s right to know and honest labeling of all products, in an important way it is very misleading. Farmers and agricultural scientists have been genetically engineering the foods we eat for centuries through breeding programs that result in large and largely uncontrolled exchanges of genetic material. What many consumers may not realize: For many decades, in addition to traditional crossbreeding, agricultural scientists have used radiation and chemicals to induce gene mutations in edible crops in attempts to achieve desired characteristics.

之所以提出统一标识，是迫于公众压力和各州政府那一系列令人困惑的规定。虽然我赞同公众对食品成分的知情权，也认为所有食品应如实标识，但这种做法极易在一个重要的方面引起误解。几个世纪以来，农民和农业科学家一直在通过育种计划对我们所吃的食物进行基因改造，也因此产生了大批的、在很大程度上无法控制的遗传物质之间的交换。许多消费者可能并不知情的是：几十年来，除了传统的杂交育种外，农业科学家们还利用辐射和化学物质来诱导可食用作物的基因突变，以期达到想要的食物特性。

4 Modern genetic engineering differs from crossbreeding in two ways: Only one or a few new genes with a known function are introduced into a crop, and sometimes the new genes come from an unrelated species. Thus, a gene meant to transfer frost tolerance into, say, spinach, might come from a fish that lives in icy waters.

现代基因改造与杂交育种在两方面有所不同：一是只将一个或几个具有已知功能的新基因引入某种作物中，二是有时新基因来自某个不相关的物种。因此，一个旨在将耐霜冻特性植入某种食品（比如菠菜）的基因，可能来自一种生活在冰水中的鱼类。

5 In the decades since the first genetically modified foods reached the market, no adverse health effects among consumers have been found. This is not to say there are none, but as hard as opponents of the technology have looked, none have yet been definitely identified.

自第一批转基因食品投放市场以来的几十年间，并没有发现消费者的健康受到不良影响。这并非说不存在任何不良影响，但尽管反对这项技术的人苦苦寻找，目前还没有任何确切的发现。

6 Although about 90 percent of scientists believe GMOs are safe — a view endorsed by the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the World Health Organization — only slightly more than a third of consumers share this belief.

约90%的科学家们认为转基因是安全的，美国医学会、美国国家科学院、美国科学促进会和世界卫生组织都支持这一观点，但只有略多于三分之一的消费者对此表示认同。

7 It is not possible to prove a food is safe, only to say that no hazard has been shown to exist. The fears of GMOs are still theoretical, like the possibility that insertion of one or a few genes could have a negative impact on other desirable genes naturally present in the crop.

单凭尚未发现风险这一点，还不能认定一种食品就此安全了。目前对转基因的担忧仍是理论上的，比如说植入一个或几个基因可能会对作物中原有的其他有益基因产生不利影响。

8 Among commonly expressed concerns — again, none of which have been clearly demonstrated — are unwanted changes in nutritional content, the creation of allergens and toxic effects on bodily organs. According to an interview in Scientific American with Robert Goldberg, a plant molecular biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, such fears have not yet been quelled despite “hundreds of millions of genetic experiments involving every type of organism on earth and people eating billions of meals without a problem.”

人们的担忧主要在这几方面──营养成分会发生不必要的改变、会产生新的过敏原、对身体器官会有毒性影响──重申一下，这些担忧均未得到明确的证实。加州大学洛杉矶分校的植物分子生物学家罗伯特•戈德堡接受了《科学美国人》的采访，他表示，尽管“已经进行了数亿次的基因实验，实验涉及地球上各种类型的生物体，人们也已经吃过数十亿顿含有转基因成分的餐饭，均未发现问题”，但人们的担忧并没有就此消除。

9 Establishing long-term safety would require prohibitively expensive decades of study of hundreds of thousands of GMO consumers and their non-GMO counterparts.

要确保长期的安全性，就需要对数十万名转基因和非转基因食品的消费者们进行数十年的研究，所需费用之高昂足以令人望而却步。

10 Meanwhile, a number of impressive benefits have been well established. For example, an analysis of 76 studies published in February in Scientific Reports by researchers in Pisa, Italy, found that genetically engineered corn has a significantly higher yield than non-genetically modified varieties and contains lower amounts of toxins commonly produced by fungi.

同时，转基因食品诸多令人称道的益处已得到充分证实。例如，今年2月，意大利比萨市的研究团队在《科学报告》上发表了一篇对76项研究的分析，结果发现，转基因玉米的产量明显高于非转基因品种，并且通常由真菌引起的毒素含量也更低。

11 Both effects most likely stem from the genetically engineered resistance to a major insect pest, the western corn rootworm, which damages ears of corn and allows fungi to flourish. The researchers said that the change has had little or no effect on other insects.

这两个变化很可能都源于为使玉米对一种主要害虫（西部玉米根虫）产生抗性而进行的基因改造。这种害虫会损害玉米穗，导致真菌大量繁殖。研究者称，这种改造几乎或完全不会影响到其他昆虫种类。

12 By engineering resistance to insect damage, farmers have been able to use fewer pesticides while increasing yields, which enhances safety for farmers and the environment while lowering the cost of food and increasing its availability. Yields of corn, cotton and soybeans are said to have risen by 20 percent to 30 percent through the use of genetic engineering.

通过对虫害抗性的基因改造，农民能够在提高产量的同时，减少农药的使用量，从而提高了农民和环境的安全性，同时也降低了粮食的成本，增加了粮食的供应量。据说，通过基因改造技术的使用，玉米、棉花和大豆的产量提高了20%到30%。

13 Billions of edible animals are raised in this country each year on feed containing GMOs, with no evidence of harm. In fact, animal health and growth efficiency actually improved on the genetically engineered feed, according to a 2014 review in the Journal of Animal Science.

美国每年有数十亿只可食用动物吃的是含转基因成分的饲料，没有证据表明这样有任何危害。事实上，根据2014年《动物科学杂志》上的一篇评论，转基因饲料实际上改善了动物的健康，提高了动物的生长效率。

14 Wider adoption of genetic engineering could greatly increase the food supply in areas where climate change will increasingly require that crops can grow in dry and salty soils and tolerate temperature extremes. I continue to be distressed by the resistance to Golden Rice, a crop genetically engineered to supply more vitamin A than spinach that could prevent irreversible blindness and more than a million deaths a year from vitamin A deficiency.

气候变化将越来越需要某些地区的作物能够在旱地和盐碱地生长，并能耐受极端温度，因此，更大范围地采用基因改造技术能够大大增加这些地区的粮食供应。公众对金大米的抵制仍然让我感到苦恼，这种作物经过基因改造，所含的维生素A比菠菜中的更高，而维A可以预防不可逆的失明，避免每年逾100万人因维A缺乏症而丧生。

15 Nonetheless, gene modification scientists are focusing increasingly on building health benefits into widely used foods. In addition to pink pineapples containing the tomato-based antioxidant lycopene, tomatoes are being engineered to contain the antioxidant-rich purple pigment from blueberries.

尽管如此，基因改造科学家们正越来越多地关注在人们常吃的食品中添加有益健康的成分。粉色菠萝中添加的是取自西红柿的抗氧化番茄红素，此外，西红柿中还加入了从蓝莓中提取的富含抗氧化剂的紫色色素。

16 And people in developing countries faced with famine and malnutrition are likely to benefit from attempts to improve the protein content of food crops, as well as the amount of vitamins and minerals they provide.

科学家们努力提高粮食作物的蛋白质含量，以及维生素和矿物质的含量，这很可能造福发展中国家遭受饥荒和营养不良的人们。

17 This is not to say that everything done in the name of genetic engineering has a clean bill of health. Controversy abounds over the use of genetically modified seeds that produce crops like soybeans, corn and cotton that are resistant to a widely used herbicide, the health effects of which are still unclear.

但这并不是说以基因改造的名义所做的一切都是健康无害的。人们对使用某些转基因种子一直争议不断，这些种子培育出的大豆、玉米和棉花等作物对一种广泛使用的除草剂具有抗性，这对人体健康有何影响尚不明朗。

18 The bottom line: Consumers concerned about the growing use of GMOs in the foods they depend on might consider taking a more nuanced approach than blanket opposition. Rather than wholesale rejection, take some time to learn about how genetic engineering works and the benefits it can offer now and in the future as climate change takes an ever greater toll on food supplies. Consider supporting efforts that result in safe products that represent improvements over the original and focusing opposition on those that are less desirable.

最重要的一点是：那些担忧自己常吃的食品中出现越来越多转基因成分的消费者可以考虑采取一种更加变通的方式，而不是一概反对。与其全盘否定，不如花点时间了解一下基因改造的原理，以及随着气候变化对粮食供应的影响逐渐加大，基因改造能为我们的现在和将来带来什么好处。考虑一下能否支持在原有食品的基础上所做的安全改良工作，而将反对的重点放在那些不良改变上。