No No GMO

Here is a great Rap song to illustrate the points in my article below.

(The original video from 2010 is no longer available.)

It’s true that humans have been tinkering with genetics, both in plants and animals, for probably as long as we’ve been on the planet. It’s nothing new. Perhaps you could say it’s part of our god-complex manifesting itself as an innate desire to improve upon what’s already there. Or perhaps it’s just that we really love a challenge and want to see if we can create something new that’s never been done. We all like a good challenge, right?

However, I’ve been looking at the issue of genetically modified foods (GM)- both pro and con- for a long time and I’ve been getting more and more concerned as time has gone on.

I honestly thought that since we’re all on this planet together and everyone has to eat the food that is grown, experiments in gene splicing and tinkering with plant and animal genetics would be well regulated by safety commissions of some sort, so that even if the scientists working on these modifications were not thinking about possible unforeseen human health effects or changes to ecosystems (since that isn’t what they are being paid to think about), others in charge would be sure to have well controlled testing done before allowing the modified foods into mainstream usage.

I now know that I was foolishly optimistic and things have gotten out of hand.

Yes, yes, I was naive.  I figured it wan’t much different than what we’d been doing for centuries in tinkering with plant genes. Botanists would always experiment with genetic traits from one plant and breed them into another plant to make a new variety.

However since the late 1990’s it’s been biotech engineers and chemists, not botanists that have been doing the tinkering, and not with other plant genes but with animal and insect genes, splicing them into plants.

So when our legislators allow a huge chemical corporation like Monsanto that specializes in killing things (as in herbicides and pesticides) to control the very seeds that grow the crops we rely on for life, well, I guess we just plain get what we deserve.

But my rant is not about Monsanto, it’s actually aimed at the misguided people appointed to government positions that have allowed this GM food situation to become reality.

Was it simply short sighted thinking? Perhaps. 

Was it greed?  Most probably. 

Or maybe these people were simply not given all the facts when they made their decisions – that’s a possibility too. 

But the bottom line now is that things we used to take for granted in life, like safe food and clothing, have become something you have to go out of your way to find. You can no longer just pick up a box off a supermarket shelf and assume the ingredients in it won’t harm you. Or buy a pair of socks that don’t make you sick.

 Big cash crops like cotton have been modified to produce their own insecticides so they don’t have to be sprayed. Now that sounds like a good idea, it really does. Less poison being sprayed and, it’s not something we consume so why should it matter?

Well, I’ve seen film footage of the people in India that make their living by picking that GM cotton and how they are getting bad skin rashes (among other health problems) that they never used to get. Now translate that to corn, soy, and canola some of the most genetically modified food crops on the planet, making their own pesticides and ending up in your stomach.  Yummy, right?

I’m not against new scientific breakthroughs in healthy food production – i love science. But with no true safety criteria for testing in place this is a game of roulette that we won’t win.

Our only way to fight back is to become smarter shoppers. By using our pocketbooks wisely in the grocery stores to vote on what we want our families to eat we can change the bottom dollar in the GMO industry. That’s what happened in Europe and they don’t have to eat this stuff.

Do you really think the food companies in the US use a more expensive healthy organic corn syrup in those cheap and tasty snack foods they sell, or is it the the cheaper gmo stuff?  The FDA seems to be run by former corporate heads of the same companies pushing through this stuff and have made it so that gmo products do not have to be labeled as such.

Can you guess why there is no gmo labeling? Because when market testing was done it showed that people will totally avoid GMO ingredients when the product labeling shows it! So of course those companies lobbied not to have the labeling disclose their gm ingredients and they got what they wanted.  And now here we are, in a time where we’re all so busy trying to make ends meet that we don’t have extra time to think about this kind of stuff, and we are being forced to have to take the time in order to stay healthy.

Because GM ingredients are now mainstream in so many things, and since there is no labeling to disclose which products contain gm ingredients, the only way I know to avoid them is to go organic whenever possible. If you live in an EU country you probably don’t need to concern yourself but in the US we’ve been eating this stuff for quite a while.

Unless you go to a local farmer’s market, buying organic usually will cost more, but until things change it seems to be the best option, unless you grow your own food. Especially avoid the vegetable oils because they are definitely made from transgenic or gm crops and are heavily sprayed with pesticides. Buy organic oils instead.

The point of this entry is that we all need to become more aware and realize that it has now come to a point where having organically grown or at least non genetically modified fibers for clothing and feed for livestock and grain and vegetables for human consumption are vitally important. Between the gm crops and the heavy use of pesticides and chemicals we are causing untold damage to our bodies and our environment.

The only way to change the dierction things are heading is to let the big food manufacturers know that using these ingredients in their products will hurt their sales. Let them know that we want healthy unadulterated food to feed our children and clothing that won’t make us sick.  We can do that by making better choices in what we spend our food money on. When sales drop, businesses pay attention. Next time you pick up that bag of gmo corn chips think twice.

If you want to know more click here and scroll down the page to see a great video on the situation. It will make you change your buying habits.