GENETICALLY ENGINEERED FOOD
DANGER OR BLESSING

This is part one of two articles on Genetic Engineering. The excerpts for this article were taken from the September 1999 Issue of CONSUMER REPORTS and will be marked with (cr). Until reading this article I did not realize that as much as 40-50% of some foods we consume daily have been Genetically Engineered.

September 1999
Consumer Reports

(cr) IN THE U.S. AND ELSEWHERE, THE FOOD
SUPPLY IS BEING GENETICALLY ALTERED.
HERE'S WHY YOU SHOULD CARE.

(cr) Today, a mere three years after the first large-scale commercial harvest, genetically engineered crops cover one-fourth of U.S. cropland--more than 90 million acres, according to 1999 industry estimates. That includes more than 35 percent of all corn, almost 55 percent of all soybeans, and nearly half of all cotton. Some have come to market as whole foods; others find their way into processed items. In all, 50 genetically engineered crop plants have been approved by the Department of Agriculture (USDA), though some aren't yet being grown in large numbers, including potatoes, tomatoes, melons, and beets. Others, such as rice, wheat, cucumbers, strawberries, apples, sugarcane, and walnuts, are still being grown on test sites.

(cr) Our tests of everyday groceries show that genetically engineered foods are already on supermarket shelves--in baby formulas, tortilla chips, drink mixes, taco shells, "veggie" burgers, muffin mix--and even in fast-food fare. There's no evidence such foods on the market aren't safe to eat. You've probably had some yourself, although you'd never know it. Unlike the European Union, which has mandated that genetically modified foods be labeled, the U.S. government has opposed mandatory labeling, arguing that Americans aren't interested in the issue and that they have nothing to worry about anyway.

(cr) In fact, U.S. consumers are largely unaware of the issue. In a recent survey by the International Food Information Council, 71 percent of Americans surveyed rated themselves poorly informed about food biotechnology. Just one-third were aware that genetically engineered foods are available in the supermarket; half thought not, and the rest didn't know or didn't answer the question.

(cr)So what? Just ask John Obrycki and Laura Hansen. The entomologists at Iowa State University are in a field of genetically engineered corn, trying to determine whether the corn pollen is a threat to an unintended victim: the monarch butterfly. A study published this spring found that pollen from some types of genetically modified corn can kill monarch larvae in lab experiments. Now Obrycki's team is following up; so far, he says, a year's worth of mortality data show the threat to the monarch is indeed real.

Two of the biggest issues in the ongoing debate over genetically engineered foods is: