People give humans too much credit. Sure, we discover and invent great things. We can work hard to cultivate our environment in a number of ways. But that’s just it. To do so we have to work pretty hard. Once we stop working, even for a few days, our little patch of influence devolves to what we call “wild.” It happens with everything from laundry to our bank accounts. If we don’t put energy into it, it has ideas of it’s own. Even when we do put energy into things, there is often a point at which the earth systems that have been set in motion simply take over, like they are saying, “Enough is enough. We know how we are programmed to work and you cannot keep us from it.” There seems to be something about the earth and it’s characteristics that is out of reach of our ultimate control. If we don’t weed our yard for a week, the weeds overtake. The weather is a force we live in fear of. Millions of wild animals, plants, and bugs thrive without our help. It is truly beyond our capability to monitor them all. We don’t even know for sure what our own human bodies need, so how can we presume to say what is best for animals?
Thus, when it comes to plants, I find very little to convince me that any human manipulations of the plant world will be long lasting. In fact, there has already been news that GMO plants are not exhibiting the superiority that they once held. They revert to something else or the forces that they are meant to resist are no longer the dominate concern. Like bacteria do when the weak ones are killed off, there is always some segment of s population that is not affected by our manipulations, so there is always a pool of genes ready to expand into the space that is made available.
I also suggest to you that most people do far more harm to themselves by a myriad of bad habits than anything that will happen to them from some GMO produce in their diets. For instance, many people are ingesting so many prescription medicines, how could we even know how they might be affected by GMO food. They have already altered their systems so much.
I am still evaluating the whole GMO thing. I see that there are factors in the battle that have little to do with food value and much to do with politics. It is a tangled web created by government interference. It is hard to know how much to blame the companies for trying to play by the only rules that allow them to prosper. That is one reason I doubt asking the government to be further involved with “labeling” will really do any good. The government will write things to have the appearance of protecting us, when really they are usually giving themselves and their cronies power to regulate competitors and small start-up businesses. If you have ever read the governmental regulations about what can be called organic, you know that it is not leading to the purity most people think it does.
Once again, I fall back on basic nutritional principals (as I discuss here). If you eat a varied diet of minimally processed foods (i.e. cook from scratch using basic ingredients), you greatly reduce the likelihood of being adversely affected by something that might be harmful. This is just good dietary practice and can save you a lot of money and heart palpitations about GMO food.
Leave a Reply