In the same way Big Food makers tried to rename sugar in their products so that consumers wouldn’t know that their favorite brands contained almost 75 percent empty calories, the mainstream media is trying to re-brand GMOs so that the public thinks the food creations are completely safe.
That’s right. Just like Hilary Clinton advised biotech at a recent symposium, she thinks if customers just ‘thought of GMOs differently’ we would like them more.
Like putting a new coat of paint on a dilapidated shed and calling it a mansion, or prettying up our fall wardrobe with some new shoes – we just need a new ‘name’ for GMOs, and then we’d like eating something that could make us infertile while causing cancer and kidney failure.
In a recent article posted by the NY Times, the author goes on about how to give ‘altering the DNA of plants’ a new name. They don’t call this genetic engineering at the University of Copenhagen. They’re calling it re-wilding.
Michael B. Palmgren, a plant biologist at the Danish university who headed a group, including scientists, ethicists, and lawyers that is funded by the university and the Danish National Research Foundation, said:
“I consider this something worth discussing.”
These plant engineers want to take a couple of ancient plants and repurpose a gene or two – otherwise known as a GMO, and call it something new. They’ve published their proposal o do so in the journal Trends in Plant Science.
They also call it ‘precision breeding’ when they edit plant by inserting and deleting DNA into a plants cells – also known as a GMO.
It truly doesn’t matter what name you want to give food which could threatens viable and ancient plant crops with cross-pollination, causes the overuse of herbicides like glyphosate known to cause cancer, and food which ruins our air, water, and soil.
It also doesn’t matter what you want to call a GMO when it is registered with the FDA as a pesticide, as in the case of BT toxic GM corn, or if you are adding genes or taking them away without proper risk assessments.
Let’s face it; there is a reason that communities and even entire nations are taking a stand against genetically modified crops a well as the pesticides products that go with them. There is a reason that hundreds of scientists, some even being formerly pro-GMO, are speaking out against the known and unknown dangers of worldwide GMO crop-expansion.
But if this is something that is going to happen no matter what the people want (90+ percent want GMOs to at least be labeled, for example), then it’s about time the industry has tried the tactic of re-branding the hotly debated term “GMO” so that they can more easily bypass widespread public opposition.
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