Debate About GM Food
The successful act of selective breeding crops for a reliable food source has been in place for several decades now. This involves using only the best plants that display the most desirable characteristics, to make try and make a superior food product when the plant breeding is successful. Yesterday’s selective breeding has evolved into today’s genetic modification, which involves physically manipulating the genetics in plants and animals to yield exactly the desired outcome. Common plants that are subjected to the genetic modification evolutionary cycle include: corn, soybeans, canola, and cotton seed oil. The genetic modification of plants and animals also consists of taking genes from one species and adding it to another, thus creating new hybrid species in the end.
Genetically modifying food has many advantages and they all are intended to make a tougher strain of crop or animal. Some experts believe that with the population growth that this planet will see in the coming decades, maintaining adequate supplies of safe and nutritious food will be a challenge. Crops see benefits with pest resistance, herbicide resistance, disease resistance, cold resistance, drought tolerance, and improved nutrition. Plants that are naturally more resistant to the woes that plague huge staple crops, like corn and beans, are going to save everyone money from the farmer to the end consumer. This is a result of minimizing crop losses and reducing the amount of pesticides and water that are needed to bring the plants up to maturity. The improved nutrition advantage will go a long way to saving lives in third world and impoverished countries because of the abundance of vitamins and minerals that are essential for life.
Concerns about producing genetically modified foods are present in great numbers by those who would rather see the world’s population pursuing a safer option than Nutrisystem deals. A bulk of all concerns fall into one of several categories, which are human health related risks, environmental hazards, and economic concerns. The major human health related risks include potentially fatal allergies and also unknown health risks that may result from genetically altering food products. Examples of critical environmental hazards include, negatively impacting other species of life, reducing the effectiveness of pesticides on insects, and finally the possibility of transferring genes to non-target species of plants or animals. The transfer of genes could move from pesticide resistant beans to a common weed that the pesticides are supposed to target, in the bean fields. This would cost more money to treat the weeds and require a larger amount of chemicals to be dumped into the fields.
Mankind’s experimentation with genetically modifying foods, which include both plants and animals, has proven to be a double edged sword, due to creation of both new problems and solutions to existing challenges. Farmers have grown the most pest resistant crops in the history of the world and pigs are more nutritious than ever, but these advantages come with a price. The collateral damage reveals punishing blows to the health of humanity, the environment, and our precious economy with new unknown health risks and unforeseen changes in various non target organisms. Every benefit that is discovered in this radical field has a risk or consequence, so for now the debate over genetically modifying food continues.