GMOs: Safe?

[Pokemon Trainer Sarah]

First let me say I have no issue with GMOs at all. Anything made available to the public is going to have to have gone through SO many trials that it's gonna be just as safe as any other food (that is, as safe as we can make it, but of course there are still risks with everything).

Now. Every food we currently eat from tomatoes through to wheat look, taste and behave NOTHING LIKE their wild ancestors. All these foods were selected for by humans to be bigger, have more fruit/grain, grow in certain areas etc. etc. They will have different DNA to their wild/original counterparts. So technically, all the foods we eat are genetically modified from what they were originally. Did you know original corn was purple? Humans selected and grew the "mutant" yellow corn, which we now all eat. This is genetically different to wild, original corn. And we eat it. It's fine.

Here is an image of tomatoes we eat today (left), compared with wild/original tomatoes (right).

Over time, humans have picked tomatoes with new mutations which made them bigger. By continually selecting the biggest tomatoes with new mutations and breeding those plants, we have created a plant that looks entirely different and has thousands of genetic changes compared with the original plant.

Genetic modification therefore isn't really the right term, since it also applies to basically every food we eat these days.

When genetically modifying things in a laboratory, we are basically doing the same thing that humans have done for thousands of years, but instead of having to grow thousands of generations of tomatoes, we can directly put in the gene that makes them bigger, which we have already discovered by studying and comparing ancient and current foods. It's not making new crazy experiments that no one has ever tried, but putting in genes (or even just more copies of genes) that are already there.

There is a lot of panic about this sort of thing because people don't understand what's actually being done. As soon as they hear "genetic" and "modified" they start thinking of weird mutant cancers. The media makes GMOs sound scary even though there's nothing to fear. So everyday people automatically associate it with bad things without giving it a chance and without understanding what's happening.

With an increasing population, the only way we can continue to survive into the future is to use the space and resources available to us more efficiently, and modifying our food to survive in harsher environments or to have resistance against diseases and bugs (which are the two things that are generally modified in GMOs) are some of the ways we can accomplish this.