Genetically Modified Crap

And the great business cycle goes on.

If you study the history of goods, you notice a sinister trend. Take clothing for example. The shirts I inherited from my uncles (who last wore them in the 1980's) are in perfect condition, while the shirts I purchased as a young adult in the late 1990's long ago fell apart. Clothes I've purchased in recent years lasts about 2-3 years before seams come apart, buttons fly off and the fabric itself wears thin. This is perfectly planned by businessmen and businesswomen. The idea is that if you design products to break people will have to buy more of those products. We've seen this happen with cars, computers, cell phones, and...food.

The way in which it happens with food, however, is a little more notorious. As my boyfriend recently explained after having read Bittman's In Defense of Food, the only way to get people to buy more food is to make the food less nutritious ("broken," in a sense; incomplete). This creates two lucrative, self-perpetuating cycles: 1) the food you eat fills you up less and your body, ever wiser than your mind, says "eat more so we can get all our nutrients" so you buy more food and 2)this makes it possible for a host of vitamin and supplement industries to fill the nutrition gap not just by selling vitamins, but also by putting vitamins into our food (usually these products are labeled "fortified"). So you buy cereal and it's fortified with vitamin D and B12, but you still won't feel full because the cereal is devoid of most other nutrients, so you buy more food. You eat more. We eat more.

It's no surprise, then, that the businesspeople responsible for genetically modified (GM) foods like corn, soy beans, (and on and on) are in fact providing a substandard food while spending millions convincing the world that GM crops are superior.

Recently, one of the "benefits" of GM crops--that they increase food productivity and can therefore help end world hunger--has been proven untrue. GM soy is less productive than conventional soy. In one recent study conventional soy produced more than GM soy. That's the bottom line, so why do we need GM crops? Well, we consumers don't, but the men and women at the top of companies like Monsanto want to be as rich as possible. Making GM soy that's resistant to Monsanto's weed killer, RoundUp, is a smart business strategy. They make the chemicals AND design the plants that depend on those chemicals.

Still, it becomes more and more clear that conventional crops are better (and less expensive in the long-run). In the study the GM crops needed way more fertilizer. Apparently, when you make a soy plant resistant to a weed killer, it becomes less able to draw nutrients from the ground. Over the course of many years, GM crops cost farmers more money than conventional crops...and who finally pays for the added expenses? Consumers.

Companies like Monsanto are spending millions to convince farmers and consumers that GM crops are better. In fact, GM crops decrease harvest yields and make farmers dependent on a specific brand of weed killer and/or pesticide AND force farmers to spend more on fertilizers. Hmmm.

In light of this study (which Monsanto tried to bury): The study shows that rats fed GM food developed smaller kidneys and variations to the composition of their blood (problems that rats eating non-GM food did not develop). What benefit is there to supporting the GM industry?

What to do? You could buy organic products, for starters, and you can NOT buy GM fruits and veggies. Although the US does not require GM food to be labeled as such, there's a way to tell if your fruits (and some veggies) are genetically modified by looking at the numbers on the stickers (known as the PLU code):

Conventional Fruits (those grown with pesticides and fertilizers) have a 4 digit code.

Genetically Modified Fruits: have a 5 digit code, starting with the number 8

Organic Fruits: have a 5 digit code, starting with the number 9

Conventional Apple: 4283
Genetically Modified Apple: 84283
Organic Apple: 94283

Know what you eat.