Get Real !

Real food or Non GMO is said to be available at health food stores, and online for 'heirloom' seeds. For all of our time on earth we as humans have eaten real food. Now we are seeing a new result form the old vice: greed.

GMO means genetically modified. the controversy is strong. The Book Seeds of Change addresses this whole issue and raises the need to rethink this method. Actually the case is made that Eugenics has been renamed genetics.

Genetically modified (GM) foods are food items that have had their DNA changed through genetic engineering. Unlike conventional genetic modification that is carried out through conventional breeding and that have been consumed for thousands of years, GM foods were first put on the market in the early 1990s. The most common modified foods are derived from plants: soybean, corn, canola, and cotton seed oil. For example, a typical GM Food could be a strawberry that must survive in cold climates. Cultured cells from the strawberry and of a similar plant that is more resilient to cold are grown. Researchers use the Polymerase Chain Reaction method of replication to create millions of the desired DNA fragment safely and accurately. Researchers then insert these fragments, along with RNA "instructions" into plasmids or modified protein capsules, called "protein coats," much like those of viruses. These plasmids, along with DNA ligase and other enzymes, are injected into the cultured strawberry cells. The enzymes sever the DNA of the strawberry at a specific precoded point, and the fragment of 'frost resistance' DNA is placed in the gap. DNA ligase then binds the severed DNA ends. The cells of the strawberry plant grown from culture are now more likely to be resistant to frost.[1][2]

Genetically engineered crops and foods are controversial. These commonly focus on the long-term health effects for anyone eating them, environmental safety, labeling and consumer choice, intellectual property rights, ethics, food security, poverty reduction, environmental conservation, and potential disruption or even possible destruction of the food chain. Proponents claim the technology to be a boon for the human race, while critics believe it to be a potential or actual health or ecological disaster. credit:

William Engdahl's book Seeds of Destruction takes on the hot theme of what is behind the development of genetically altered plants and their imposition by what seems sheer force, on the earth's population. The motives he finds are not something everyone will be comfortable with, but since we are the guinea pigs and the eventual target of the foods so produced, we better start looking.

You may have heard of Arpad Pusztai, a scientist of Hungarian origin who, working in the UK, discovered that genetically modified potatoes, when fed to laboratory animals, caused pathological changes of their organs. The head of the Rowett Institute, which had employed Pusztai, terminated his contract and ruined his career, one indication that there are dark forces at work that will attempt to prevent any damaging information about GMOs to reach the wider public.

Rats fed GM soy developed sick offspring, and the Russian researcher blowing the whistle on that has been similarly vilified and her career ended.

In India, sheep grazing on cotton plants modified to manufacture BT toxin, died in large numbers indicating that the toxin is not, as we are told, harmless to vertebrates.

William Engdahl has put these and other instances of damage and suppression of science together with historical information on the promoters of 'scientific agriculture' and his conclusions are disquieting. more...

My feeling is this if you want healthy food: try growing some of your own... by organic and local as much as possible from farmers who know the source of their seed.

Happy cooking.