Genetically Modified Foods: Friend or Foe?
There is a little spot where I work where people leave their excess food. It is the repository of left-overs, the recipient of random acts of generosity (as someone is driving in to work and just thinks it might be nice to pick up a dozen bagels), and the destiny for gardens that overfloweth. Every place of employment has this spot, I suspect. Ours is on top of an innocuous microwave .
A while back, this space housed some two-dozen or so really lovely tomatoes. I commented to a colleague that someone's garden must be doing really well. He replied that he initially thought so too, but then learned that Employee X had a spouse that worked for Large Agribusiness Company, and these were just some GM (= Genetically Modified) tomatoes. He spoke the term "GM" the way that people tend to whisper words like "cancer", or "drug dealer."
His reaction to the GM potential got me wondering...I mean, I know there is hype out there. But, I did not think that most scientists were on that bandwagon, and he and I are both scientists. After all, GM is just a fancy way of doing what we have been doing with our food and meat stocks for a long time. Breeding them for bigger, faster growing, stronger stock. The old way was to pick a bigger cow and a bigger bull and hope for bigger offspring. Now, we're just doing it a little more directly. And, for the most part, GM foods offer a number of potential outcomes that should thrill even the strictest environmentalist: reduced water use, reduced pesticide or fertilizer use, use as bio-remediators (species bred to take up heavy metal pollutants from the environment, for example). There is of course the economic advantage: increased cold resistance, increased growth rates, increased shelf lives. Plus, there is the possibility of producing foods with increased nutritional value. Seems pretty good.
A little research led me to the bad. For some, there is an ethical dilemma with GM foods. Others worry that eating GM foods can somehow harm us. And, there is the fear that the production of GM foods can harm the environment. The last one seems to be the most well-researched. Theoretically, GM foods could interbreed with other stocks and pass on traits such as chemical resistance to nuisance species such as weeds, thus creating Super Weeds. GM foods could also harm the species indirectly, such as the monarch butterfly. The butterfly consumes pollen from "insect-resistant" corn, (insect-resistant means it kills insects that try to eat it, much like a pesticide would), as the pollen from the corn is landing on the milkweed eaten by the butterfly (corn pollen + milkweed = dead butterfly).
So, should you eat GM foods? The reality is you probably already are. The Grocery Manufacturers of America estimate that 75% of all processed foods in the U.S. contain a GM ingredient, mostly in the form of the insect-resistant corn, and soybeans that are herbicide resistant. GM foods should be safe if they are produced sensibly, such as producing strains that are reproductively sterile. I suppose this is the biggest issue of all, as people often just don’t trust large corporations or the government to behave sensibly.
