Sue Wrote:
>
> And a couple of questions. What kind of organic
> food makes people sick? Also, are all gm foods
> bad?
>
> Sue

1) "Organic" foods can still pick up harmful stuff from their environment, like pesticide/herbicide drift, or soil heavy metals, or bacteria/fungi that can harm people. They won't have herbicides/pesticides deliberately applied, but that doesn't mean they are free of them (YOU aren't free of them, you.... like I.... likely have DDT stored in your body's fat deposits, from residual traces in the environment left over from pre-ban days, or from illegal use of it on produce imported from Mexico/etc).

2) Not all GM foods are bad....the problem is that WE DON'T KNOW how safe they are or aren't. There is VERY little testing done on them, each new genetic modification (ESPECIALLY when adding genes from another species) is a totally new ballpark, but the FDA often bows down to industry claims that "well, it's still a tomato isn't it? It's not a SIGNIFICANT modification, so it doesn't need new testing". In one admittedly extreme case, a GM potato variety was developed & just 6 months shy of being eaten by consumers (contracts with frozen & fast food giants already signed, seed potatoes produced & being shipped for planting, etc) when a lab technician who was running some tail end nutritional
analysis (all machine, measuring starch & sugar & etc content) "just happened" to take a bite out of one of the extras left over from the analysis.... and his mouth started going numb before he even had a chance to spit it out! They'd engineered it to express a toxin in the leaves, to keep bugs off, but it "unexpectedly" expressed the toxin in the TUBER as well (which it either hadn't done in the early version, or that they hadn't thought to check for). Just think about that for a moment.... a toxic food, that had already gone through the approval process & was about to be massproduced.... BEFORE they found out it was toxic!

We need FAR more oversight than exists.

Kenuchelover.