Food Fight! The Big Genetically Modified Food Debate

Genetically modified foods are one of the most controversial concepts of today's modern world. Genetically modified foods have had specific changes introduced into their DNA. Crops undergo this process to have desirable traits, like a brighter color, a smoother texture, or a greater amount of nutrients. Genetic engineering has revolutionized food as we know it, and the controversy surrounding the topic of genetically modified food is essentially the world's biggest food fight.

Paul McCl is a visionary. He is a leader within the environmental and agricultural industries and has contributed to the development of new technologies, which have changed the way modern society benefits from nature. Ray Moling is a former vice president of Monsanto, a multinational biotechnology corporation. As the largest producer of genetically engineered seed, Monsanto is one of the world's most controversial companies. Lastly, Stan Benda is a senior counsel in Canada's Department of Justice. His PhD in law focuses on the labeling of genetically modified crops.

"You lose less of your crop because it's not affected as much by insects, and therefore your yields in terms of whatever you're growing actually improve. So to give an example, what you can do in potatoes, for example, is the Colorado beetle is the number one problem that affects potato growers. Through the genetics, you can actually make the potato plant resist just the beetle. GM crops help in a number of ways. The first way that's been proven is they reduce pesticide use or input uses so that farmers need to plow the land less, which means their biggest savings then become in labor and in fuel. And the next wave of products are very interesting and exciting because it could be growing crops where drought is a problem, so you have drought-tolerant crops. You need less moisture to grow some of these."

"No doubt there are minuses, and there are certainly pluses. My view is the pluses outweigh the minuses, and let me give you a few examples. One would be rice. It is just a fact about rice that half the world's population eats rice, primarily in poor countries, and it is deficient in a very important vitamin called vitamin A. Vitamin A gives us healthy skin, and it improves our vision. Without these, you're defective in these two crucial parts of our being. Now if we could genetically modify rice, which we have done, and it's actually called Golden Rice, we could fix this particular deficiency in human beings. That's a huge percentage of humanity, and my understanding is that Golden Rice will be available from 2011. So that's where, again, some of the future lies: to improve not only yields but the nutritional profile of some crops and smaller crops where specific countries or continents are more interested than in North America."

Michael Dixon is a teacher at George Brown Culinary School. Michael is very familiar with the food industry as a professional chef and does not support genetic engineering. Jamie Kennedy is the renowned Canadian chef and owner of Gilead Cafe. Jamie also believes in the benefits of traditional farming and is committed to local organic food growers. Eric and his partner Hannah are the owners of Matchbox Gardens, a small farm in Brampton, Ontario. Their business is based on environmental health, so the food produced at Eric's farm is completely grown from natural processes.

"Genetically modified foods have a host of negative effects, particularly on human health. It's one of those areas that there's still a lot of unknowns. The science is relatively new. The truth is that we don't know what the negative effects of genetically modified foods are because they really haven't been around long enough for us to ascertain what the negative impacts might be. It's not very healthy for you. It's been grown based on pesticides and herbicides and basically steroids to plump them up to make them look big and red, but they're not actually very healthy for you. So many schools of thought believe that it contributes to the increased rise of allergies, new types of cancers, strains of flu. Anytime that you kind of alter genetic structure with anything, you seem to be kind of opening this Pandora's box of potential problems."

"Currently, there is no legislation in Canada that requires genetically engineered food to be labeled as genetically modified. Society has no way of knowing where their food has come from or what it has been through. I think people have a right to know if the food that they're eating has been modified in some way. Currently, there is no legislation requiring labeling. So how is a consumer, when they go to the grocery store, able to compare a product that has genetically modified foods in it and a product that doesn't have genetically modified foods? The choice has been taken away from us. I think it should be something that the average consumer should be aware of in their foods and a choice for them whether or not they want to put that in their body or not."

"The reality is that right now labeling is for safety and efficacy. So if a product has a potential allergen, it must be labeled as such. But GM foods that come from GM technology are as safe as the regular food, as said by Health Canada. So if that's the case, as soon as you start getting into looking at labeling something as coming from GM, what does that mean to people? It doesn't provide any additional information. If you labeled genetically modified foods, you'd be surprised how much of your grocery store is actually genetically modified, and it would heavily put off the consumer base. The whole idea from the companies that don't want the labeling— their biggest argument is that they don't want to scare the public. They don't want to scare the public; they don't want to cause a panic until they've done all the testing. They don't want to put labels on there and cause fear. Well, that just tells you they haven't done all the testing; they don’t know. They don’t want to scare the public, so they're afraid of people not purchasing their product."

"At the end of the day, like most industries that government has to deal with, there's a heavy lobby group that makes sure that stays that way. It's a financial implication. You know, food in North America is one of the number one businesses around. It accounts for a tremendous part of our economy. So when you're talking about these sorts of things, you're talking about hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. There's a very big incentive to make sure that it's not labeled in that respect. They don't require labeling just because it would be potentially misleading to people. You know, companies like Japan—Europe's pretty good about that. You go to grocery stores in Japan, everything is labeled. GMOs are labeled on everything. They're way ahead of us in North America on that front."

"Bottom line to the question: labeling is always based on the product, not the process. If it's the process, there are an infinity of concerns and other breeding processes that merit attention, and it's a whole paradigm shift for labeling. If we're going from with the product to how we make it, we label aspirin for the concerns about aspirin, not how we make aspirin. Same for GE Foods, on the other hand, are tested for safety, are tested for the geology, are tested for toxicity, are tested for allergies. In other words, GE foods are probably safer than conventional foods because they're the only ones that are actually tested for safety."

"The problem that we had was where people tried to market their products as safer than GM food. This is where you rely on Health Canada in our case, or other regulatory groups to step up and say, you know, it's not true. We regulate; we verify; and these foods are as safe as conventional food. Do I think that genetically modified foods have been tested enough in the marketplace? The answer to that is no. I don't think they have been. The fact that the companies that produce genetically modified foods are also the companies that test them makes me feel a little uneasy."

"Seven years ago, Monsanto wanted to introduce genetically modified wheat to the Canadian government. At that time, the Canadian government said, okay, we'll look at the possibility of bringing GMO wheat into our food supply. However, we need information; we need science to prove to us that this is, in fact, a safe product and something that we want to use. Well, it's not the Canadian government that's doing the testing; it's Monsanto in fact that's doing the testing. So thinking about that, they're in control of all their own testing and evaluation. Their motivation is to get that sold to the Canadian government. I don't know about you, but that's not something that I feel very comfortable with."

"But my feeling is that the scientists who produce these are highly intelligent people who don't want to have their children have problems with GM foods. They wouldn't be proposing these seeds to us if they weren't safe. So yeah, I trust scientists generally speaking. I can tell you that my experience is that it is a rigorous process, and it takes years to get these products approved. It's to our benefit to have products that are out there that are safe and effective. Otherwise, obviously from a business point of view or commercial point of view, we just won't be in business."

"I think when people question Monsanto's methods, particularly around GMOs—this is something that is pretty common throughout the agriculture world—when you're getting into the big seed production companies, the common response is, 'Well, GMO foods can feed more people. We can't feed people on non-GMO foods or we can't feed the planet on non-GMO foods.' I think that that's a pretty poor excuse to be doing the things that they're doing. There are lots of great examples around the world of people being able to feed communities based on traditional farming methods that are in tune with the culture and the geography of that area."

"Well, there are lots of forecasts about what the populations are going to be over the next 50 years. I think it's safe to say that we're going to have a lot more people demanding food from shrinking arable land. So one of the options is to use as many technologies as possible, and GM technology is one of those where you can actually improve yields. You can grow more crop, more food on the same amount of land as you did with older farming practices. Do I think that genetically modified foods are a solution to world hunger? No, I don't agree with that. I would agree with companies or governments empowering villages in countries around the world to empower themselves to become economically viable. You know, in the local production of their food wherever they are in the world."

"I think this is part of the problem through industrialization of food. Certainly, genetically modified foods fall into that category. The economies that used to exist, the small economies that worked in communities around the world, no longer work because the industrialization of food has moved the food production away from the hands of families and individuals and communities and over to the power of large corporations. So giving the production of food back to people in villages, I think, is a far better solution than to think that we can play all-powerful in the industrial production of food and solve world hunger. I think it's a misconception based on short-term gain and essentially greed by large Western corporations."

"I'm certain of one thing: we cannot, absolutely cannot, feed humankind and the expansion rate of the global population if we don't use every possible measure in our power to increase the available amount of food. Certainly, I'm sure that genetically modified seeds will play an increasingly important part in feeding humankind, and it will probably come to dominate the world in which we live in about 25 to 50 years. It's unlikely we'll have these conversations 25 to 50 years from now."