The Truth about the Truth

One obvious good about the whole GMO (transgenics) debate is that it’s gotten people more informed about what they are eating. More and more countries are putting in place legislations that are forcing food producers to label their food products.

This means as consumers we are getting more and more educated about the food we eat, which will ultimately lead to us eat more healthier food. And by health we are not only referring to non-GMO food, but all food choices that will enrich our bodies. Governments should hasten up the process of putting in place such legislation, so that we can all know what exactly we are eating. Who knows maybe we may find that almost all the food we eat contains ‘transgenics’.

Cereals, snack bars, snack boxes, cookies, processed lunch meats, and crackers all contain large amounts of ingredients that might contain transgenics. 85% of the food that we eat may already containing ingredients from transgenics. We have been consuming these foods for decades now, but there aren’t any side effects that can be reliably attached to consumption of such food. To be exact, no one can safely say that they have been avoiding genetically engineered food and had success in that. They can not also claim to say that they are much healthier than the rest of us who have been proudly consuming GE food. So what there to really point out about the danger of GE food? Simply NOTHING.

Despite the European public's overwhelming distrust of GM foods, the European Union, as part of its Europe 2020 initiative, did spend a decade (and hundreds of millions of Euro) investigating the safety and efficiency of GMO products and found they posed no threat to its citizens' health. This includes the direct consumption of GM plants as well as their use in processed foods and as a livestock feed. "To date," Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale University, told Mother Jones, "the reviews conclude pretty universally that there's just no health risk."

What people are afraid of is that reliance on GE food may have not so desirable consequences on the so called ‘organic’ food market. Then there are those hippies who afraid of change. Well only change is constant. Bio-technology is the way and the future for the agriculture industry, it is time we consumers play our part, stop fighting the inevitable, and persuade our governments to invest more in bio-technology research and how it can be improved.

Instead of focusing all this energy on trying to go against progress, we should be looking at critical issues such as food shortages, unhealthy eating, and malnutrition. We should be lobbying governments to provide more food for the poor, and it’s only through transgenics that we can seriously and practically solve the problems we are facing now.

In the end, as Novella argues, GM "is not the panacea, nor is it a menace; it's just one more tool that has to be used intelligently." Just as nuclear technology can be used to both power countries and obliterate cities, genetic modification can be immeasurably valuable (or detrimental) to society, depending on how we use it. So how shall we use this powerful technology we have?