GMOs (part II)

Earlier this week I touched on some of the primary concerns with GMOs (both widespread concerns and personal concerns I have ). Here I'm finishing off the last three areas: corporate dominance, laws, and impacts on third world countries/peoples -- plus a bit on what you can do about it all if you decide you share my fears. As I said in my first post, this barely does justice to any one concern, and simply lays a quick foundation that I hope to build on later.

Corporate dominance -- we are seeing a handful of companies dominate what we eat. As I've talked about before, this is becoming a huge and hidden problem. About 80% of beef in the U.S., for instance, comes from one of five companies. We are moving towards a world where a handful of companies will own the seeds to everything that we grow. They will literally own and control the food supply. We need to stop worrying about the Microsofts and Googles and start focusing on the Monsantos and ConAgra's. Why don't we? As The Future of Food points out, the penetration into our government and revolving door by and with BigAgra is simply amazing. BigAgra is essentially governing themselves. And even believing a handful of companies will control our seeds may be optomistic. Some put Monsanto as controling over 90% of the GMO market.

This brings us to laws. Patent law now allows companies to patent seeds and genes. People can patent life. When a patented GMO seed is accidentally mixed with other seeds, it contaminates the entire "population" and the farmer who accessed the GMO seeds through bad luck when it fell off a truck onto his land, is liable to the patent holder. Really. I can't even talk about this one right now. It defies logic so greatly it is upsetting. What we need is a sense that certain things are too important to be "owned" by any company. But instead of fighting for us, the government is fighting for BigAgra, and in some cases taking ownership interests in certain patents.

Third world countries -- all around the world, people grow food for themselves or buy locally from farmers. People in third world countries don't drive to Wal-Mart nearly as often as they eat what is around them. This last topic maybe sounds a bit boring but get this: GMO seeds have a so called "terminator gene" that makes them sterile. Imagine if from now on men were born sterile. A man could still marry a woman and have a baby with her, but to do so he'd have to BUY sperm from a sperm bank. And 5 companies control every sperm bank in the world. Really, imagine that for a moment. That is what we're moving to in the world of food. GMO seeds produce plants that produce seeds that are useless. A farmer in India (or America) who has always grown plants, planted the seeds from those plants and grown more, is inching towards a world where every single year he has to buy his seeds from BigAgra. Can't he just "opt out" of GMOs? It's not that easy. Countless stories are reported of GMO seeds contaminating seed batches, contaminating fields and so forth. This is marketed as a way for a country to control its product. Sort of like if songs bought of iTunes and if it was downloaded to another computer it would require you to pay a fee everytime you wanted to play it. Reasonable enough. But what if that song would automatically jump to any computer within 100 yards of where it was being played -- and instead of making you pay everytime you wanted to play that song, it infected your whole library, making you pay everytime you wanted to play any song? That is more like what we have here. Something that sounds reasonable in a shiny pamphlet but that is incredibly scary and indefensible. Again, we're talking about food here. This isn't just another product for a company to control like online music. And by the way, the US government owns a large portion of the patent for the terminator gene.

What can you do about it? Well I'll talk more about that later, but for starters, eat organic. Organic food cannot contain GMOs. That means buying organic veggie burgers or soymilk is a better idea than conventional. You can also try and avoid processed foods. While whole foods are increasingly genetically modified, you're more likely to find GMOs today used as fillers in hotdogs, margarine, cookies, etc. You may also want to try and avoid fried foods. We think that eating vegetable oil is healthier, but most vegetable oil is from soy or corn, and most of that is genetically modified. There are some serious health concerns that would not be present with much higher fat oils like olive, nut oils, or even animal-based fats. Finally, to all those out there who try to avoid meat, it is becoming increasingly known that health food's dirty little secret is how much of it contains GMOs. Mostly this is in the form of genetically modified soy. Look for brands that specifically say they contain no GMOs.

If you really want to know brand by brand, check out this useful guide here. It will tell you what doesn't contain GMOs, what does (though in more PC terms it claims they "might"). By way of example -- want to know what brands of infant formula are for sure GMO free? It's right there (Gerber, for instance, is one of them). Energy bars (which contain a lot of often GMO soy)? Clif, Luna and Odwalla are all clear. Be careful of Balance Bars, Nature Valley and PowerBars.