Food Interaction: Eating

One thing my group (Triforce) and the (other) GMO group did was incorporate the event of eating (specifically eating oreos and drinking Hi-C) in to our presentations. The act of eating is obviously very important to the topic of food, on a few different levels.

First of all they chose GMO-foods that we identify with, that have become a part of our culture. Eating is a natural part of our interaction with food - thus the idea of serving food displays the food items in the way we'd normally interact with them, which also reflects our normal attitude and reaction to food - like an Oreo. I have - and I think I can speak for many people in the class, and probably most of America - eaten many Oreos in my day. We've seen the commercials; we've dunked them in milk; apparently they're the U.S.'s favorite cookie - thus, they're ingrained in to our culture and our identity as Americans, which is an important distinction with a GMO food. I'm not sure most Americans would know that an Oreo involves GMO's, and if they did they don't necessarily connect GMO's and Oreos - they're simply not something that is readily connected (chocolate cookies and the farm are very distant), and I would include myself in that population. When the group identified Nabisco and Oreos as using GMO's our reaction, or at least mine, was a bit taken back, as Oreo's are something we'd identify as a self-object, and I'd tend not to associate myself with something that is "unnatural" "artificial" or "industrial" like my reflexive reaction to the term GMO is.

The group did an excellent job of taking in to consideration people's initial feelings to GMO's - especially when it comes to medicines and food products which are heavily ingrained in to our daily lives which we would otherwise take for a "natural" part of life. GMO's aren't inherently bad, and do a lot of good (despite my, and Pollan's, Roussean food utopia fantasy without them), and they are something that we have taken in as part of our identity, whether we recognize their status as 'genetically modified' or not.

Eric Best