Walking the floor of the National Restaurant Association Show that just ended in Chicago, the claim I saw most often about new products on display was that they didn’t contain genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
That made me sad, but it was a symptom of a lot of what I think is wrong in our conversation about food these days.
GMOs are foodstuffs that have been grown from seeds that have had their genetic makeup altered using advanced technology.
It sounds creepy, I know, and I’m sorry about that, but there’s literally no significant evidence that the GMOs on the market today have any ill effects on the animals who eat most of them, nor on people who eat the rest. Jon Entine laid that all out clearly last year in Forbes, and at a panel discussion at the NRA conference, Gregory Jaffe of the Center for Science in the Public Interest even came out in defense of GMOs.
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Jaffe, director of the CSPI’s Project on Biotechnology, pointed out that only eight crops on the market are genetically modified — corn, soybeans, cotton, sugar beets, canola, alfalfa, papaya and squash — and that most of them are in animal feed or processed ingredients in which the protein (which is the part that’s genetically modified) are removed anyway — things like high-fructose corn syrup.
It’s another distraction that keeps us from focusing on real food-related health problems we face in the United States, the overwhelmingly most serious of which is obesity.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: GMOs and other distractions
