GMO food (redux)

 GMO stands for genetically modified organism. Example: A purple tomato created by inserting a snapdragon gene into it, making the tomato high in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds. (Cancer-prone mice lived longer than mice fed the same quantity of ordinary tomatoes.)

I have no problem with GMO food, but plenty of people do. Even though a 2016 report by the National Academy of Sciences declared that GMOs were safe, the market for products certified to be non-GMO has increased more than 70-fold since 2010. Because of fear of the unknown, consumers are willing to pay 20 percent more to avoid them. Of course, through crossbreeding, almost everything we eat has had its DNA altered extensively. But it takes much longer to alter foodstuffs this way—150 years in some cases.

Monsanto introduced the first GMO in 1996. It was an herbicide-resistant soybean. Clever. Now farmers could slather their soybean fields with Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup without harming their crop. Monsanto became the largest producer of genetically engineered seeds, including corn, sugar beets, and canola. By the way, farmers are not allowed to save seeds from these crops. At one time, Monsanto had a 75-person team dedicated to investigating seed-saving farmers in order to prosecute them on charges of intellectual-property infringement. 

Unfortunately, this sleazy beginning tarnished the whole GMO technology, which has the potential to improve food production where it’s most needed. For example, Golden Rice was created by a pair of university researchers hoping to combat vitamin A deficiency, a devastating ailment that causes blindness in millions of people in Africa and Asia annually. In the Philippines, anti-GMO groups destroyed the crop. Nevertheless, a few crops, such as disease-resistant papayas, have been successfully introduced. (See my earlier post on GMOs for more information on this.)

Because of FDA and USDA regulations, only big conglomerates have the means to go through the GMO approval process—a process costing millions of dollars. Lately, because the USDA has updated its regulations, some universities have managed to get through the process, and seeds for the purple tomatoes will be on the market next spring. I’m going to get some.

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