7 'Controversies' That Are Total Bullsh*t
3. GMOs Are Poisonous
Humanity is facing a food crisis. Our population is growing, our environment is changing, and many people are worried about how exactly we're going to feed everybody over the coming century.
One solution to the growing doom and gloom, is to increase crops' yield, nutritional density and blight and drought resistance by genetically modifying them. GMO crops can also be made to resist pests, dramatically reducing the need for chemical pesticides.
Now, you'd think that this last part would be music to the ears of the reactionary-knitted-lentils brigade as fewer "chemicals" on your food means that you have to go on one less wheatgrass juice cleanse that year or whatever, but instead, people view these "Frankenstein crops" with the deepest suspicion.
Buying GMOs is ferociously denounced as tantamount to feeding literal poison to our children by many a pundit, with everything from Crohn's to autism being traced, incorrectly, back to GMO food. This isn't just limited to scaremongering either, as many anti-GMO protesters have taken matters into their own hands and taken to destroying GM crops themselves, at the cost of millions of dollars.
The most frustrating part, however, is that there are issues that need to be addressed with GMOS but they have nothing to do with their fitness for human consumption.
The reduction of biodiversity in favour of monocultures is one such issue, as is the problem of whether GMO crops could be classed as intellectual property and therefore susceptible to monopolies by large companies.
If anything, calling for GMO labelling, citing flawed or even fraudulent studies on the toxicity of GMOs and framing the issue as a public health problem, as opposed to an economic one, is just distracting for the real issue and making it much worse.