GMO? OMG!
To quote the great British author Douglas Adams,"It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem." Of course, Adams was talking about mice being from another dimension, but times have changed and now the same goes for food.
For many years people just kept quiet and forgot what we're really eating. But now a lawsuit filed in a Florida federal court by school teacher Lisa Leo against Pepperidge Farms, the makers of Goldfish, has reignited the debate over genetically modified food. The suit claims that Leo was lied to about Goldfish's ingredients by the 'natural' label on Goldfish boxes. She wants all Floridians who bought Goldfish since June of 2009 to be reimbersed.
My opinion of the case is that she has the moral high ground here, but in the American food industry, morality is a thing of the past. As far as I know, Pepperidge Farms has a platoon of lawyers going against Ms.Leo, so in my humble opinion, she cannot win. Though her legal goals most likely will not be achieved, her moral goals might. Her suit has brought back the discussion about the GMO.
GMO stands for genetically modified organism. It is a way, often cutting costs for big food makers, of making something taste like something else when it really is nothing like what it supposedly is. Imagine your bag of Goldfish, supposedly made of cheddar cheese, is actually made of heavily modified soybeans. How this works is that corporate farmers breed the soybean to the point where it is no longer soybean, it is some unidentifiable hunk of matter. If you are eating processed food, there is a good chance that you are actually eating what you think you are.
These people breed whatever animal or plant until a horse would taste like a cow. And the reasons for this is that as we progress into the digital age, where everything is built to the highest standard, we become so stuffy that we can no longer tolerate what the earth provides for us, and the big food companies, moving with our march towards universal snobby-ness, set to work.They modify the food to the point where it is acceptable to us, mixing a number of things to make it taste better than the real thing. Our standards are too high for what we eat. Despite this, there are people who hold fast to the belief that GMO's are not unnatural, just a different way of making food. Really? The name gives it away straight off, Genetically Modified Organism. Modified, as in changed, not natural.
Of course all the people who say this are in the pocket of the food industry. Some people who argue this are not corporate slaves, their arguments are grounded in a belief and not greed. What they say is 'Well, how is what Pepperidge Farms is doing to their goldfish different than what Monsanto did to their foods 20 years ago?'
It is true that genetic modification of food has been around for years: the ancient Native Americans, the Anasazi, who lived in the American southwest genetically modified their corn to make it resistant to frost and extreme heat. What the Anazasi did is not really genetic modification, it is cross breeding- like a labradoodle. Because if anyone has ever been to Arizona and experienced the climate,they know that the Anasazi were smart. There is a lot that we can learn from the ancient peoples, but food modification is not one of them.
As I said earlier, we have become too snobby to accept what we shouldn't or can't change. After all, we live in a world where anything can be revolutionized, and the one thing that can't be changed safely is food. But of course who cares, so we changed that too.
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