I’m interested in identifying these products.
Common brand names? Common fruits/veggies?
And is there a way to tell from the packaging or some other way (online database maybe?) what products are GM?
In the States, there isn’t an easy way. Since our packaging laws and labeling standards won’t be standardised until after the new year (and that’s still iffy), some foods that may have been GM don’t have to be labeled as such. Some products that haven’t been approved for food use , like StarLink Corn, are labeled as such, but it’s only used in animal feed . Unless your kitchen is a hog farm, I doubt it’ll be there.
Check the FDA website, or pick three or four common products like flour, pasta, cookies, etc, and call the manufacturers.
As an aside, I assume by GM you mean the jiggery-pokery in the labs, not the kind that are brought about by crossbreeding for certain traits.
Define “modified”. Practically everything you eat has been through some level of culling, breeding, grafting, hybridization, and a host of other “modifications”. Why is eliminating the aforesaid intermediate steps and doing it directly any more harmful or dangerous?
While I tend to agree, astro you can’t make just one change and get only one result. I’d assume that the crossbreeding and hybridization has a tendency to weed out some other changes. Also, there are potential problems when you splice in a segment from a bacteria or something. Like most technology, you have to be careful with it, but I see no need for the Frankenfoods response.
These folk have a list of GM crops: The Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods
- soybeans
- corn
- canola
- flax
- papaya
- potatoes
- tomatoes
- peppers
- squash
- radicchio
- cotton
They also publish a list of foods that are likely to contain GM components on this page. There are too many of them to give here.
I’d just like to point out that nowhere did the OP or anyone else claim that genetic modifications are harmful or dangerous.
I didn’t say anything about it being more dangerous. If you scroll up you’ll see that I only mention being “interested” in finding out what products are GM.
And False_God, I am refering to the “tinkering” kind of GM.
Here, it would be mainly soy products and crops from which cooking oil is extracted.
The standard labelling here is something similar to “MAY be prepared from genetically modified produce”. This saves them from having to print different labels all the time, according to whether this specific batch of the product contains some genetically modified produce.
I should probably add that produce grown from hybridised stock (as opposed to genetic fiddling which has been done in the laboratory) carries no such disclaimer here (even though hybridisation is a form of genetic modification - albeit a more “natural” one).
If you have any “Certified Organic” fruits or vegetables, they can’t, by definition, be genetically engineered.