GMOs: Are they the Devil?

GMOs, aka Genetically Modified Organisms, are defined by Dictionary.com as, "An organism or microorganism whose genetic material has been altered by means of genetic engineering." According to Seeds of Deception (Ooh! Scary...), "The methods used to transfer the genes of modified DNA of a genetically modified plant are imprecise and unpredictable.  These unintended changes are possible differences in the food’s nutritional values, toxic and allergic effects, lower crop yields and unforeseen harm to the environment that cannot be recalled." There are 537,000 results for "GMO poison" that come up on Google in a fraction of a second, and 7,600,000 results in the same amount of time for "March Against Monsanto." Add to that scary images like the one above, and you've got a recipe for mass panic about GMOs on your hands. What are they injecting into that poor tomato with that insulin syringe? Chemicals? Therefore, GMOs = poison!

Um, no.

What exactly is a GMO? Are they really toxic, poisonous plants disguised as food, being used by the lizard overlords who run Monsanto in order to exterminate humanity? Or are they simply just a different type of food? It's 100% the latter. If you believe in lizard overlords, I recommend a good psychiatrist, although the resistance to GMOs isn't as crazy as I just pretended. I'm just fond of hyperbole. Most of the resistance to GMOs comes from soccer moms and those living in urban areas, who only want to keep themselves and their families healthy. For example, consider Mary Sue, who lives in the suburbs of Houston, TX, and has two boys in elementary school, and John Doe who works as a Starbucks barista in Hollywood, CA. To them, how food is grown is a foreign concept. The stuff they learn about food comes from what they see in advertisements at the grocery store, commercials on TV, and the internet, including social media (incidentally, this is why people also think large scale farming is bad too, but that's a story for another day). Here's where many pro-GMO folks go wrong. Instead of explaining with carefully thought out arguments and accurate research why GMOs aren't actually bad, they just say, "Do your own research, Mary Sue, and educate yourself," or, "You've never set foot on a farm before, John Doe. Go see what real farmers do before you pass judgement on them." Both these arguments irritate me because they help no one. Mary Sue is a soccer mom! Do you really think she has the money to subscribe to hundreds of scientific journals, which is often the only way to get access to peer-reviewed studies? And supposing she does try to educate herself, she'll likely turn to Google, where there are 537,000 results for "GMO poison" and 7,600,000 results for "March Against Monsanto." In John Doe's case, he has to work at Starbucks to help fund his acting career. When he's not on the job, he's at auditions, trying to become the next Leonardo DiCaprio. He doesn't have time to visit a real farm because traffic in L.A. is awful. One night, he's perusing Netflix (he's actually kind of a science/history geek who loves documentaries) and he comes across a documentary called Food Inc., which seems to be about where food comes from. "Perfect!" he says. "Instead of driving all the way out of L.A., I can learn about where food comes from without even leaving my couch!" so he pops a bag of organic popcorn and relaxes on his couch to learn from a documentary funded by organic food companies that GMOs are bad, and Monsanto is mean to farmers. By the end of the documentary, his mind is made up. GMOs are awful, and now that he thinks conventional farmers are just spewing propaganda, he won't listen to them ever again. The same with Mary Sue. Mary Sue and John Doe both tell everyone they know about what they learned (GMOs are bad), and eventually, the number of people believing GMOs are bad rises from two to two hundred.

If you're like Mary Sue or John Doe, then congratulations! You've come to the right place! This blog post will be about what exactly a GMO is, and will discuss some arguments surrounding them, as well as why so many people think they're bad.

What's a GMO anyway?

The first thing you need to know about GMOs is that there are only ten kinds of GMO crops commercially available in the U.S.: Corn (field & sweet), soybeans, cotton, alfalfa, sugar beets, canola, papaya, squash, apples, and potatoes. This means if you're paying more for GMO free peaches, stop. Because there aren't commercially available GMO peaches on the market in America.

And moreover, genetic modification literally has nothing to do with injecting food with chemicals, as the picture at the top suggests. Instead, the process is extremely complex, and most definitely doesn't involve an insulin syringe, or even a whole plant for that matter, until the very end! According to the Ag Biosafety division of the University of Nebraska, the first step is extraction. Scientists take a sample of the plant they wish to modify and extract the DNA. DNA extraction is actually extremely easy. I extracted DNA from a strawberry in my 7th grade science class with ethanol and dish soap. It looks like snot. You can watch Bill Nye perform that same procedure on Netflix if you look up Bill Nye Saves the World. He did an awesome episode on GMOs. Or, you can just watch this video. It's a cool thing to do with your kids to get them interested in science.

The second step is where things get a little more complicated. Scientists then use host organisms, such as cultured insect cells or a certain strain of E. coli, and lab equipment to clone specific nucleotide sequences within a DNA strand, so that only the specific gene they need is isolated. This article by Oklahoma State University explains this process in greater detail.

Third, scientists must make the gene compatible with the organism it will be inserted to. This is accomplished by using enzymes to cut the promoters from DNA (this is also an easy process. I did it in my biology lab freshman year of college) and replacing cut sections with new promoters.

Step four is the insertion of the new gene into a plant. This is the most complicated process of all, yet it is still relatively easy. To change the genome of a plant, you would have to change the genetic makeup of every single cell, which is impossible. That's why simply injecting a tomato with these cloned genes as the picture implies won't do anything at all. Luckily, plants have their own version of stem cells, which are cultured in a lab to form a mass of undifferentiated tissue known as "callus." There are a variety of methods to place new genes into the callus without killing the cells. These include a device called a "gene gun," agrobacterium, microfibers, and electroporation (the same type of technology used to clone animals). The new plant cells are then manipulated to grow into plants, and the seeds of these new plants, which contain the genetic material, are collected and handed off to plant breeders for testing and patenting. In the fifth and final step, the transgenic plants are crossed with normal breeding lines to produce a hybrid, which has a commercially sustainable yield, and also carries the new gene. Interesting, no? I love science!

So why do people think they're bad?

Great question! The simple answer? Economics. Consider this graph.

I'd be really interested to see today's numbers, and how much of a drop in sales the 2008 recession caused.

Also, I made a B in my college Agricultural Economics class. Probably would have been an A if I hadn't slept so much.

As you can see, demand for organic products has skyrocketed. This is partially due to advertising organics as being "healthier" and "pesticide free," neither of which are true, and you can find more information about organics in my blog post here. But this is also partially due to intentional fear-mongering from organic sellers, who are spreading the falsehood that GMOs are bad. When there's that much money to be made in organic food, competition between organic corporations and conventional food corporations gets ugly. Remember how John Doe chose to watch Food Inc.? A bunch of stuff in there is lies, such as the legal cases brought against Moe Parr (who's a dishonest crook, and not actually a farmer) and Troy Roush. The terms of Roush's settlement with Monsanto were confidential, but basically, he violated his contract with Monsanto, and was more than likely turned in to Monsanto's lawyers BY HIS FELLOW FARMERS. Roush is also an extremely vocal critic of GMOs, and of Monsanto. He's someone who cannot be trusted to be impartial. Yet he's present in a documentary kids are being forced to watch in schools to "learn about the food system." I should know. I was one of those kids. And I'm definitely not alone in saying I was forced to watch it, not given a platform to express the side of the story I knew to be true, and we were definitely not shown anything where farmers explained their side of things. Who funded this documentary? The Organic Consumers Association, and a company called Stonyfield organic, among others. Read all the debunks of that film here. I'm also planning on rewatching it (shudders) and doing a debunk on that documentary as a blog post to be published on an unspecified date.

My point with that example is that this is how organic companies are most effective in their advertising. They make conventional crops look bad. How do they do this? By the use of fear mongering. Some false truths they've spread include: "But the poor farmers! They're forced to grow GMOs!" (Food Inc. helped made this one a part of pop culture by using people like Roush and Parr, who actually broke the law by violating contracts), "GMOs aren't safe! We need to test them more!" "Roundup is so awful! They spray GMOs with it, while organic crops are pesticide free!" "But muh cancerz!" "The poor farmers aren't allowed to save seeds because of Monsatan!" and my personal favorite, "Monsanto is an awful company with an overwhelming monopoly on GMO seeds, and they enslave the poor farmers who work for them!"

The fact of the matter is, farmers aren't forced to grow GMOs, and economically speaking, Monsanto isn't a monopoly. Economically speaking, the market for GMO seed actually resembles something sort of like monopolistic competition, meaning there are several large companies that sell the bulk of the seeds, but smaller, more local companies can also impact the market by selling a differentiated product. Here's what the market looks like:

You can find a copy of the image, as well as the sources for this data here, along with two bar graphs that prove Monsanto really isn't nearly as large as the anti-GMO crowd would have you believe. They barely make 1/4 of the revenue that Wal-Mart does, for instance.

So as you see, farmers have options. And this pie chart doesn't even include a section for local sellers. And yes, they exist. Therefore, farmers can't be forced to use Monsanto seeds because such a thing is illegal in America. Can't speak for the rest of the world though, because I don't know how you guys roll, legally. But in America, we have laws protecting the free market.

But what about the safety of GMOs? Roundup? Pesticide use? I can sleep easy at night telling you GMOs that are on the market are 100% safe. I visited the Norman Borlaug Institute for Sustainable Agriculture once, and had the opportunity to listen to a plant geneticist speak. He told the group I was with that it can sometimes take as long as thirty years for a particular GMO to be approved for the commercial market. This is because many different agencies, both government and private, run tests on them, all regulated by the USDA, which also regualtes organic varieties. There's also no proof, other than a shamefully retracted rat study, that says GMOs cause harm, including cancer. There IS, however, peer-reviewed evidence that GMOs are safe. Literally dozens of studies from well-respected places, in fact. You can find them here. And as for Roundup, well, the dose makes the poison. You're a lot bigger than a bole weevil, and Roundup is a heck of a lot safer than the stuff that was around in the 60's and 70's. Since its LD50 value is 5600 mg/kg, it's actually less toxic than table salt! This includes that Himalayan pink salt people are so fond of nowadays. I wonder how the organic foodies would react if I told them their $15 bottle of salt was more toxic than Roundup? And consider that pesticides are diluted. The amount of Roundup sprayed on an area the size of a football field is only about as much as would fit into a soda can. Plus, many organic pesticides like Copper Sulfate are even more toxic than Roundup. And do you want to know what the most hilarious part of this "pesticides are evil!" outcry from the anti GMO community is? They were extremely adament that Bt Cry proteins in GMOs are going to kill them (have a look at this loony article Doesn't it just make you want to buy the author's detox products?) and yet, Bt is the single most widely used pesticide in organic farming. They've been eating it all along.

The Bottom Line?

Don't let the hype scare you! GMOs are safe. The scientific consensus is that they are. And I would HIGHLY HIGHLY encourage you to do some further reading in all the sources I've linked above. All of them are quite interesting, to say the least. Me? I'll throw my support behind Monsanto, especially after learning that they take the money they win from court settlements and give it as scholarships to college students who are interested in careers in the agiculture field. College ain't cheap, and it makes me happy that they want to help out. I would also encourage you to read up on Norman Borlaug, who was nicknamed, "The Man who Saved a Billion Lives," because of his work in the Green Revolution, that dealt with GMOs. You can access the website for the Borlaug Institute by visiting borlaug.tamu.edu, or by clicking the embedded link. GMOs aren't scary. They reduce pesticide use, and help ensure that the word gets all the nutrient-rich food it needs.

I'm a full-time college student at Texas A&M University, where I'm in the process of getting my Animal Science degree, with eventual aspirations to go to law school and work as a consulting lawyer for agriculture corporations. I grew up around animals, and currently manage an operation that breeds show-quality boer goats for 4H and FFA exhibitors. My family also raises commercial cattle in south Texas.