ARTICLE: How Square Watermelons Get Their Shape, and Other G.M.O. Misconceptions

The following is an excerpt from a New York Times article on misconceptions about GMOs.

At the most basic level, a G.M.O. is a plant or animal whose DNA was altered in a laboratory, often by inserting genes from a distant species into its cells with the help of a bacterium or with other tools. Many major food manufacturers are loath to put the words “genetic engineering” on labels for fear that they will convey an impression that the foods are suspect. Under the new law, manufacturers can instead label packages with a symbol denoting genetically engineered ingredients, or a “quick response” (Q.R.) code that people with smartphones could scan to retrieve the information.

But they are not be required to provide information on how a food was modified or why. That a certain Hawaiian papaya, for instance, was protected against a virus that threatened to destroy the crop — with the insertion of a gene from that very virus — would be impossible to tell from a generic label indicating that it had been “produced with genetic engineering.” You also won’t know, say, that the soy lecithin in your ice cream was made from soybeans endowed with a bacterial gene that lets them thrive even when sprayed with a widely used weed killer.

In a 2014 Pew Research Center survey, just 37 percent of American adults said they believed genetically modified foods were safe to eat. Yet this spring, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicinereported finding “no differences that would implicate a higher risk to human health” from G.M.O. crops. There was no evidence that G.M.O.s in North America, where such items have been part of the diet since 1996, had contributed to a higher incidence of cancer, obesity, diabetes, kidney disease, autism, celiac disease or food allergies, in comparison with Western Europe, where G.M.O.s are rarely eaten, the organization said.

Several other regulatory, scientific and health organizations have also concluded that G.M.O.s are safe to eat. And the Food and Drug Administration warned in the fall that it would consider a label false or misleading if it implied that a food was “safer, more nutritious or otherwise has different attributes” than comparable foods simply because it was not genetically engineered.

Click here to read the entire article.