So I went to a church tonight to see the movie The Future of Food....
Yeah, I stepped foot inside a church....
The movie is a documentary mostly about GMO foods that are currently threatening our country and the world...
What are GMOs you ask? Some of you, may think you know, like I did, (some of you may really know,) but most of the public has no freakin' clue. Why? Because Monsanto and a few other smaller corporations don't want you to know, 'cuze chances are, once you know you'll get really freakin' pissed off, like the group of people I watched the movie with tonight where...it was really great to see a group of your typical church ladies getting pissed off about food...
Ok, so back to GMOs. GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organism...you know, gene splicing and all that fun stuff. What I didn't understand about GMOs is that in order to get the gene or genes they want in say, corn, they have to use a "carrier gene" which usually ends up being a virus or bacteria....
Ok, hold it! So not only are we changing the very genes of our food, but we are using either a virus or bacteria to introduce the new genes into our food...and get this..the most commonly used one is a strand of e-coli....to me, this doesn't sit very well...
So I'm probably being irrational for wondering this, but does anyone else wonder if the rash of food allergies we have these days has anything to do with the foreign genes being added to our foods? Could autoimmune diseases, such as lupus, which have recently become prevalent as well, perhaps be blamed on the genes being added to our food? Well sure...that's kind how the immune system works right? It looks for freakish things to destroy...and if the freakish things happen to be our food, wouldn't it make sense that the American public overall has very bad health? I started to wonder, as I watched the movie, if the Lupus-like symptoms I have have anything to do with GMOs I've consumed.
Because get this; our government has repeatedly overturned consumer requests to clearly label which foods are GMO containing and which aren't. So anything you eat; barring things you grow and harvest yourself, or things from a local farm you trust, could potentially have GMO products in them. And we are one of the few countries in the world that does not have clearly labeled foods. In fact, the Japanese are so skeptical of GMOs, they made a public announcement that they would be "watching American children" for the next ten years to see how GMOs affect us, before deciding whether or not they want GMOs introduced into their food system. That is a pretty scary statement, but it is also very telling. We have basically turned our country into a giant biotech experiment...and if that doesn't freak you out, there will be a part two to this article which will..
Love ya,
Carrot
ps. "Don't Panic, Buy Organic" is one of my favorite bumperstickers...it is more true now then ever...
E coli?! Who thought that up? Wow...I knew that modified food couldn't be all that great for you, but knowing that a serious virus is used to modify these foods makes it all the more scary.
You have a good theory there about this being the possible cause of lupus and food allergies. It sure does make some sense. Hopefully our food won't mutate to the point that it wants to eat US!
~ *~
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Mind Control is Easier Than You Think
I wish I knew how to type the sound I made when reading about the virus/ bacteria thing. Way to hit the squeem-button. :-!!
Many people think this recombinant DNA technology is how AIDS really got started but the government conspiracy will never be told;)
At first I was totally disgusted but then I was thinking how one would regulate GMO and distiguish it from naturally accuring recombinants. Virus' inject their DNA into cells and that is their reproduction method..if you wanna call it that. Bacteria do a similar thing invovling F factor and a sex pilli. Basically if you compare this to a man and a woman it would be like sex were only some of the DNA is transfered. The diffrence would be that instead of having a baby the woman would change...maybe become resistant to PMS. If the right fragment of DNA is donated, then the woman could become a man AND resistant to PMS then return the favor to some poor unresistant woman. They can do this as a lateral or vertical transfer ...its really weird. But this happens all the time every where...these mad scientist just figured out how to do it to their advantage.
Still, it is really gross to think about and I try my best not to;)
Looking forward to your food series.
Going to start my own farm/ garden now unless doing that within fifty miles of where they dropped those test nukes is a bad idea eh
~T
All truths are easy to understand once discovered; The point is to discover them ~Galileo
you explained recombinant DNA technology in a way I could understand....I need the soap opera explanation of microbiology, otherwise, it doesn't make any sense to me...I've been picturing all the different microbes we learn about in my micro class as different personalities on a TV show in order to get it...thanks for putting it into layman's terms for me...
Love ya,
Carrot
Oh my, I thought I knew about GMOs, but I had no idea about introducing strands of e-coli... Carrot, aren't there certain foods that are more processed and more genetically modified than others? I remember hearing a lot about GMO corn in tortillas and snack foods.
www.progressiveu.org/blog/americangirlinchina
Right now, GMOs seem to be mainly in our junk foods, corn that goes into high furtuose corn syrup for example (well I guess that is in everything, so never mind.) But yeah, you are more likely to buy genetically modified tortilla chips then say, tomatoes at this point. But they are quickly working on making more foods GMO foods, so watch out.
I think, what consumers need to do in response is do what folks in Europe did...call for labeling. I think it is completely unfair that we don't currently know which foods are GMO foods and which are not...this is specifically done so people are unable to sue food companies...
Also, with organic foods you can always be sure they won't be GMO foods, that is part of the standard organic foods are held to. Unfortunately, organic foods can be very expensive, especially if you aren't lucky enough to live in a town like I do, where food co-ops exist in every neighborhood, and organic is the standard, not the deviation...when everyone around you eats organic, it is a lot easier to eat organic too...
If you can grow some foods yourself, that is a great place to start making sure the foods you are eating are safe as well...even if all you have is a little window ledge or balcony, you'd be surprised how much food some folks have been able to grow in that space...there are even people here in Portland who have garden boxes on wheels now which they move from parking lot to parking lot...mobile gardens, a great new concept for those without lawn/garden space!
love ya,
Carrot
Growing them yourself doesn't necessarily get you away from GMOs... the seeds being packaged could be GMOs as well.
And it might not be a bad thing. In the strictest sense, 'breeding' plants is genetically modifying them. You may not be doing it with a viral or bacterial vector, but that doesn't mean you aren't modifying them. In this sense, the long eared corn we're used to eating is genetically modified, because it is nothing like the maize that was originally here when only the Native Americans inhabited the land.
Additionally, a plant's natural mechanism for survival is to absorb other genomes into it. In this way, many plants, instead of being diploid like humans, are tetraploid or more. That means that they have 4 or more (usually in pairs) copies of all their DNA (humans only have 2... one set from each parent).
I wrote a blog about this forever ago (literally in internet terms... February 2007). Check it out, if you want.
~C
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