I found the 7 Deadly Sins' presentation on GMOs very interesting. I particularly liked how they examined the potential consequences of the GMO as a hot button issue and source of fear. I've discussed in a past blog post how, with regards to food, there is an ever rotating list of dos and don'ts within the American diet. The use of Oreos and fruit punch as examples of things with GMOs in them was an interesting choice on the part of the 7 Deadlies. Both Oreos and fruit punch (particularly in juice-box form) are foods I associate with childhood, as would most of us. They were the things in your school lunch that tasted way better than the baby carrots. We have learned to like genetically modified foodstuffs more than actual food, which as Pollan explained, is only natural since sweet and fatty are attributes of food that we know will keep us alive for longer. My initial reaction upon finding out that there were GMOs in Oreos and Hi-C wasn't really one of surprise but more like, "Huh. I guess they really are in everything."

I wasn't shocked or outraged. It seems almost laughable that someone would get upset that they weren't informed that there might be a GMO in an Oreo cookie. That delicious little nugget isn't even food. We know that high fructose corn syrup is terrible for you, not to mention the litany of chemical preservatives that keep those little guys "fresh" in the box for so long. I guess what I'm getting at is that putting pressure on companies to disclose if and/or which GMOs are in their foods would be fine, but would it really keep people from buying Oreos? I don't think so. People who truly want chocolate cookies make chocolate cookies. People who want to eat Oreos buy Oreos. People who want to eat Oreos but want to think that they're eating something more real give their money to Paul Newmann (who in turn gives it away to charity..) and buy Newmann-Os.

This is already starting to sound like my post from last week about the rhetoric of food labels, which it is directly related to. What would the consequences be of full disclosure about the presence of any genetically modified organisms within all food? Would it cause panic and a massive anti-GMO resistance like all of the other things in food that have at one point or another been deemed "bad"? Or would the US population react like I did - shrug their shoulders and accept that they're in a lot of the junk that is sold in supermarkets.