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Test Tube Food
What you need to know about GMOs
By Steven A. Luff
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It looks like corn, it tastes like corn but what's that lurking inside?
Could it be something you're allergic to?
LaDonna Redmond was always a label reader, but it wasn't until her young son Wade exhibited food allergies that she started to read between the lines. What she found disturbed her. Or rather, what she didn't find. "Wade is severely allergic to dairy, eggs, peanuts, and shellfish," says LaDonna, a mother of two who lives in Chicago, "I need to know exactly what's in something before I give it to him." But when Wade had a reaction to soy milk, which didn't contain any of these allergens, LaDonna and her husband Tracy were perplexed.
Then a friend introduced them to the term "genetic modification," or GM. "We found out that more than two-thirds of the soy in this country is genetically modified," says LaDonna. "Obviously the food labels weren't telling us everything we needed to know. That's when we started to become very concerned that we as a community of people are really in the dark about our food supply."
Genetic modification is the altering of an organism's genetic makeup to enhance or eliminate certain characteristics. In the case of corn, scientists have managed to fabricate crops that are resistant to common pests, to the pesticides that kill the pests, and to most herbicides. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 68 percent of the soy and 26 percent of the corn grown in the United States in 2001 was genetically modified.
What's often ignored is that when the genetic make-up of an organism is altered, it's no longer that same organism. GM corn may look, taste, smell, and feel like its natural counterpart, but it's technically not what we've always considered corn to be.
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This is an excerpt of an article featured in a past issue.
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