GMO Food Isn’t Coming To Get You, It’s Been Here All Along

GMO Food Isn’t Coming To Get You, It’s Been Here All Along

Worried that genetically-modified foods could be quietly, secretly, making their furtive way towards your plate even as we speak? Don’t be — people have already been eating them for a long time now.

The Case of Corn

A lot of the consternation over GMOs — particularly amongst those calling for wide-spread labelling — has centered around the idea that GMOs are something brand new and unknown. But the truth is that for a lot of crops GMO isn’t the exception. Instead, it’s long been the rule.

The USDA has been keeping updated data on the percentage of which top US crops are genetically-engineered — including the number one farm crop, corn. For the last five years, all but two to three per cent of American corn is genetically-engineered for insect resistance or herbicide tolerance (or both, as in almost 90 per cent of all corn).

GMO Food Isn’t Coming To Get You, It’s Been Here All Along

But it’s not just recently — for corn, cotton, and soy, genetic-engineering has been heavily in play for 15 years at least — and genetically-engineered insect resistance in corn becomes an even more interesting example if you look further back than the 15 years you see on the chart.

Most of the insect-resistant corn — called Bt corn — in the US comes from genes from a bacteria found in soil called Bacillus thuringiensis. But decades before Bt-corn began to show up in US farms about 20 years ago, Bacillus thuringiensis was in heavy use as a spray-on pesticide. In fact, it still is used today, in organic farming.

What Is A GMO?

Part of the confusion is simply around the term GMO. What does GMO mean? Is Bacillus thuringiensis usage a better example of the rise of organic farming or GMO farming? Is cheese, by necessity, a GMO? The answer to all these questions depends on who you’re asking. GMO has no set definition.

What is clear is that for a lot of people it’s come to stand for something — some murky, mutant future food, sprung up from a test tube rather than the ground in a dystopian near-future. The truth is that these crops are not from some far-flung future — grim or not. They’re the crops of our present, and, indeed, our past.


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.