Food Fight: The Debate over GMO Labels

2013, Health  -  58 min Leave a Comment
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The debate over whether the American people should be fully aware of what their food is, and how and where it comes from, wages on in Food Fight: The Debate Over GMO Labels. Over 70% of the food on supermarket shelves today has some level of GMO-integration in it. 88% or more of all corn, cotton, soybean, and canola crops are of the GMO variety. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considers GMO crops to be "substantially equivalent" to those bred via traditional means, and does not require they be labeled on the whole.

There are no studies that point to specific cases of illnesses derived from the ingestion of GMO foods, but as Stephen Trinkaus, the owner of Terra Organics, explains, we do not have sufficient long-term data to determine whether less immediate negative effects have already or will arise from eating foods that we are tinkering with the makeup of at a genetic level. Allergy development, cancer proliferation - these are things that would not show up right away and that GMOs could be correlated with.

The goal of most GMO research and alterations, in the food realm, is to make them more tolerant of herbicides and increase crop yields - reasonable pursuits. A great deal of the products containing them are of the processed variety - cookies, chips, crackers, cereals. The debate at present is not really whether they should exist at all, but rather whether manufacturers of these foodstuffs should be forced to differentiate their products from those that are not genetically modified in the labeling that consumers make their decisions based upon.

The film takes us to the actual farmers growing our food to shed light on the issue, many of which insist that GMOs pose no increase in risk to the people that consume them. There are also many views expressed that align with the advocacy of introducing yet-to-be-instituted GMOs - heart-healthy oils into wheat and the like are small modifications that could come from new strains of the crop that might very well improve our quality of life. Regardless of where you might stand on the issue, Washington's Food Fight will absolutely leave you more capable of arguing your viewpoint.

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