ARTICLE: When was the last time you changed your mind on GMs?

The following is an excerpt of an article posted to the Australian website Farm Online discussing the recent documentary Food Evolution and how it is changing people's minds about GMOs. 

In the highly emotive landscape of Genetically Modified crops, proponents of the much maligned technology and users like farmers or others with legitimate commercial interests are often portrayed as the evil villains conspiring to inflict some wicked form of gradual poisonous demise on the planet, while rubbing their hands with glee.

In contrast, members of the opposing camp who denounce biotechnology are all too often characterised as glistening champions of truth, protectors of small children, bastions of integrity standing up for everyday people, or white knights seeking to protect the very essence of life itself from being annihilated by GMs.

But in an enlightening new documentary, ‘Food Evolution’, biotech scientists, GM farmers, truth-seekers and pragmatic thinkers with the capacity to respect and acknowledge robust evidence are the ones wearing the white hats while standing in the spotlight, shining a light on truth.
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Food for thought and central to the documentary’s central theme of changing peoples’ minds and choosing facts over emotional logic is the use of a well-known quote attributed to Mark Twain, in the introduction, ‘It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled’.

However, there is ample conjecture among critics to question whether the American writer - whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens and his pen name Mark Twain - actually wrote it, including by the internet urban myth busting site Snopes.

“Doesn't matter, it's still true,” said one Twitter commentator on the quote’s authenticity.

The iconoclastic documentary aired in Canberra last night at an event partnered by the National Rural Press Club and hosted by GMO Only - a new group that says its “views are based on facts”.

An expert panel reflected on the controversial contents of ‘Food Evolution’ afterwards including its Hollywood based director and Academy Award nominee Scott Hamilton Kennedy, via Skype, live from his hotel at 5.30am in Washington DC.

To read the entire article, please visit the Farm Online website.