I read today that Chipotle has phased out the last GMO ingredients so that they are now 100% GMO free. Too bad, I really liked Chipotle and I’m really going to miss eating it.
I see a lot of parallels between anti-vaccine and anti-GMO advocates. It is quite the luxury to live in a place where food is plentiful and disease is rare.
I agree and disagree. I agree that it is easier to be anti-GMO when you live in a place where food is abundant and you can chose between GMOs and GMO-free anything you like. I disagree about parallels between anti-vaccine and anti-GMO unless that parallel is that both are opinions. Being anti-GMO and anti-vaccine might be easier when you live someplace without disease and food scarcities but that’s true of being anti-anything. It’s easy to be anti-war when you’re not angry, it’s easy to be anti-taxes when you have enough money to pay them, anti-pink when you’re purple, anti-ignorance when you have an education. Being anti- is a luxury. Opinions are time- and education-expensive and very few people get the luxury to adequately form them. Why do I see the anti-vaccine movement and the GMO-free movement as being entirely different? One has legitimate concerns, the other doesn’t. GMOs is too broad of a term to make a blanket-statement about being all good or all bad, but some GMOs that have herbicide resistance have selected for “superweeds” and I would say contribute to resistance problems much like irresponsible drug use contributes to drug-resistance. There’s also concerns that lack evidence but are concerning enough to demand research. A concern I have: what are the consequences of cross pollination or transgenes spreading outside of agricultural fields? Consequence of insect-deterrent genes in crops on pollinator communities? Nature had a special issue on these topics: http://www.nature.com/news/case-studies-a-hard-look-at-gm-crops-1.12907