Ten years ago, Nebraska farmers worked their way through corn harvest, hauled off 1.15 billion bushels to sale or storage, and put their grain-gathering equipment away for the winter.

It all seemed normal enough.

But normalcy started to unravel the next summer, when a genetically modified variety of corn called StarLink turned up in Taco Bell taco shells and then in loads of corn delivered to grain elevators and other delivery points in the state.

The trouble, in the early days of biotechnology, was that StarLink was not approved for human food use. It was not supposed to be in food-processing plants and it was not supposed to be co-mingled with the supply of conventional corn.

And trouble quickly rolled up to the front door of the Lincoln Inspection Service, licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to do grain quality tests in Southeast Nebraska.

Corn purchasers scrambled to find corn not contaminated with StarLink.

"It was a complete fiasco here, you might say," said Carolyn Buckmaster, now in her 29th year in a Garfield Street laboratory. "It was a very terrific workload."

Traces of the footprint left by one of the biggest food-safety stories of the decade remain in 2009.

It's been nine years since StarLink was pulled from the seed-corn market and five since the last StarLink-contaminated corn turned up in Lincoln.

And it's been more than a year since the Food and Drug Administration gave what amounted to an all-clear signal on safety concerns.

Yet Buckmaster and her peers are still doing the $8 tests for its presence. They're grinding up corn samples, adding water and dropping test strips into the solutions.

Mark Fulmer, manager of the inspection business, said grain buyers still seem to want the sense of assurance that goes with negative results.

So far this year, that's been the case 400 times.

"It's something to protect themselves," he said, and it may say something about the sensitivities that go with food safety scares.

"All it takes is just a rumor of something bad," he said.

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Back in 2000 and 2001, fears were fed by the possibility consumers with potentially deadly food allergies would eat taco shells made from corn that might, because of its altered gene structure, trigger a severe reaction.

Dave Schneider, now general manager of the Farmers Cooperative Company at Waverly, has equally painful memories from the time he worked at the Plymouth elevator in Jefferson County at the start of this decade.

Schneider said farmers and elevators were not ready to deal with an unprecedented situation in which federal regulators had decided to allow a corn product genetically endowed with insect resistance to be used for feed, but not for food.

"It was nearly impossible to prepare for that in so short a period of time," he said of the government expectation that StarLink would be segregated from other corn.

"The other thing is that it becomes the local elevators, all of a sudden, who are expected to do police work."

It was hard to make order out of so much disorder.

And there had to be an element of trust about whether farmers had any StarLink corn in the loads they brought to Plymouth.

"Our primary function was to simply ask the producer," Schneider said. "And we did the best we could."

The StarLink debacle triggered lawsuits and tens of millions of dollars in payments to farmers and others in the grain-supply pipeline. The objective was to get the bio-tech corn into channels where livestock consumption, rather than human consumption, was assured.

Over time, the allergy worries proved unfounded. And as Nebraska farmers finish out a decade of corn production this year, an estimated 91 percent of all corn is grown from genetically modified seed.

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Kelly Brunkhorst of the Nebraska Corn Board said farmers recognize the value that comes with insect and herbicide resistance.

"Those efficiencies have led to greater production."

A record corn crop of 1.55 billion bushels is expected in 2009.

In hindsight, the contamination risk that went with approving corn for feed use and not for food is seen as a huge mistake.

"I think we've learned a lot about the regulatory approval process," Brunkhorst said, "and being sure we have full regulatory approval versus a split release."

Konstantinos Giannakas, an agricultural economist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, continues to do research on the market and welfare effects of genetically modified products in the agri-foods system.

"What we do know is that StarLink was at some point in the past," Giannakas said. "Ten years ago, most of the time, feels like three years ago."

There is little to suggest lingering and deep concerns about gene alterations of grain and other food basics among U.S. consumers, he said. That is not the case in many European countries, including his birthplace of Greece.

Much more common in much of Europe, he said, is talk about "Frankenfoods" and "playing God."

He cited a lack of trust in the food safety inspection system, in general, plus a very strong pro-organic movement in Greece.

Grain inspection official Fulmer agrees there's no widespread evidence of that on this side of the Atlantic.

"Here in the United States, people don't have a concern for food safety," he said. "If it's USDA-approved, they take for granted that it's safe."

Giannakas thinks European attitudes will soften as U.S. consumers show no ill effects from eating foods with a genetically modified organism link and as the next generation of food biotechnology moves from farmer benefits to such consumer benefits as Vitamin A-enriched rice and high-protein wheat.

He's not one to pass judgment on what happened with StarLink 10 years ago. At minimum, "there was a failure in the system."

Beyond that, "did they overreact? I don't know."

Reach Art Hovey at 473-7223 or ahovey@journalstar.com.