I've noticed that many environmentally conscious eaters have a knee-jerk reaction against using genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food.  In my opinion, our food system is severely broken and the current GMO system is broken too.  But I think it's a mistake to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Humans have been selecting plants and animals which suit our needs for thousands of years.  Take a look at the teosinte ear on the left compared to the modern ear of corn (or "maize" as the plant is known in the rest of the world) on the right.  By simple selective breeding --- choosing the plants which produced the biggest ears and sweetest kernels --- Native Americans were able to develop something resembling the latter from the former seven thousand years ago.  In my opinion, producing GMOs is merely an acceleration of this process.

Which is not to say that I'm on board with the policies of the big GMO companies.  The notion of suing a Canadian farmer for patent infringement when his canola crop was pollinated by a neighbor's GMO canola is astounding.  On the other hand --- did you know that that Canadian farmer knowingly seeded his entire field with the offspring of the few plants which had been pollinated by the neighbor's plants rather than with seed from the many other plants he'd grown? 

In my opinion, GMO food has potential to cut back on pesticide use and other environmental catastrophes associated with our current agricultural system.  In a perfect world, I'd rather see everyone using organic, permaculture techniques in a food system based at the community level, making pesticides irrelevant.  But I think that carefully regulated and tested GMO foods could be part of that picture.  All of us environmentally conscious consumers owe it to ourselves and the legitimacy of our cause to carefully weigh the pros and cons before swearing off GMO food.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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