This week’s table talk on GMOs in meat was really interesting. This past week I actually had a lecture in FDSC 2000 on regulation of GMOs in food and different methods of gene transfer. With all of the background, both from previous knowledge learned in class and from the suggested reading for the talk, it was interesting how everyone had slightly different opinions on how GMOs should be introduced to general consumers and what it should be used for. I was amazed that some people didn’t think GMOs should be labeled partly because it could hurt their introduction financially and partly because it would be contradictory to label GMOs and not other forms of selective breeding. To me, it had always seemed the obvious choice for GMOs to be labelled for transparency’s sake, so it was really eye-opening to hear why people thought they shouldn’t be labeled.
It was also interesting to talk about all the possible implications of expanding GMOs to animals and not just plants, now that genetically modified salmon are approved by the FDA to be sold in the United States. There are so many recent changes to GMO policy with the introduction of GMO salmon being approved for sale and the requirement of GMOs being labeled in the United States that it was just great to talk about these changes and how people felt about it.
Interestingly, few people realize that GMO’s are widely used in medicine to produce vaccines, insulin and many drugs that are needed to save lives. Likewise, in agriculture long before we started to manipulate DNA, nature has done it. Sweet potatoes originated by natural infection with the same bacteria used to transfer genes into plants. That bacteria transferred genes that are responsible for the sweetness of the sweet potatoes and therefore likely are the reason why it was domesticated and is considered a super-food!