I was at the office the other day and a co-worker of mine, Chris, asked me that very question. “Why do you hate GMOs so much? You’re not typically one of those anti-science wackos”.
Chris is a good guy. He’s one of the people that I bounce ideas off of regularly at work. On a regular basis we’ll have conversations about our software and we’ll cover entire whiteboards with ideas and different ways that we can approach a problem so he was pretty shocked when he found out that I took a pretty hard-line stance against GMO crops.
I think that Chris is like most people, though. They’ve read about some of the awesome things that GMO crops can do. They can reduce pressure from pests , droughts, and blights. They can allow farmers to grow crops that wouldn’t normally be able to grow in extreme environments. These are all great things, things that I fully support. The problem is that these beneficial uses for GMO crops aren’t what GMOs are really being used for on a large scale.
The large-scale agriculture movement is using GMO corn, wheat, and soy so that they can spray the crops with poisons and it won’t kill the crop. They are able to spray chemicals like Glyphosphate and Atrazine several times throughout the season. Folks, these chemicals are bad stuff… They’re nasty, cancer-causing, harsh chemicals, and they’re going INTO your food. That’s right, they’re not just going ON your food. They’re going INTO it and no matter how much you wash your produce, you’re not getting rid of it.
There is a huge difference between genetically modifying a crop vs selective breeding of a crop. Humans have been doing selective breeding for thousands of years. In this practice, we take the best (the heartiest, the largest, or the most pest-resistant) from each generation of plant and we breed it to other varieties that result in a stronger, larger crop.
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are something totally different, though. GMO crops have been modified on a genetic level with genes from different species of plants or even animals like frogs, lizards, or fish. Scientists have been able to figure out how to develop a plant that can withstand having herbicides or pesticides that would normally kill the plant sprayed on it.
And so they’re sprayed… And sprayed… And sprayed…
The plant takes up the herbicide into its leaves and it becomes systemic throughout the entire plant. It’s in the leaves and in the fruit. It’s not just on the crop, it’s IN the crop.
To come back around to Chris’ question about why I hate GMOs so much- it’s easy… I don’t want my wife or my children to eat poison with each meal, every day.