As I'm sure you all noticed last Thursday, my group (The Seven Deadlies) had some cookies with us! I spoke to some of you about my journey finding GMO rich foods and GMO free foods. Trying to figure out which foods were which ended up being more difficult than I had originally thought. Amazingly typing in "foods with gmos in them" or anything of the sort on Google, doesn't give you some sort of master list of all foods with gmos in them.
Since this was our project however, I couldn't stop there. My journey ended up becoming a little twisted. What I ultimately ended up finding was a chain of brands that are known to use GMO, such as known to buy gmo crops. Even this though ended up not being full proof, because I wasn't able to find concrete information about the percentage of gmo crops or what products those crops went in to.
This journey is what led me to feel passionately about labeling gmo products. I don't have a strong opinion either way about eating gmo foods but trying to find out which foods they were was so incredibly upsetting. If someone did have a strong opinion about it wanted to eat processed foods without gmos in them they would have one hell of a time tracking down the products. I think that everyone should have the information to make their own choices regarding what they eat.
I thought of seven deadly sins and I packed my lunch this morning, because as I was putting back my bag of blue corn organic tortilla chips I noticed that there was a small GMO FREE Verified label on the bag. (I'll post the picture as a new post because I can't figure out how to put a picture in a comment) there was a website nongmoproject.org so it looks like there may be a step in the right direction for your dream of GMO (or at least GMO free) labeling!!!
ReplyDeleteOh wow, that's really cool Andrea! I browsed through the Non-GMO Project's website to try to figure out how the whole process of getting that fancy label on a product works and I noticed something interesting: they never say how much the verification process actually costs. All the FAQs direct you to email the Non-GMO Project to get a price estimate. This makes me think the process requires a substantial investment that could potentially be prohibitive to smaller startups, which would obviously not be so good for GMO-conscious consumers. But I imagine the whole certified organic movement began in a similar way with the 3rd party verification process and that's proven to be quite successful, so maybe this Non-GMO Project will become more mainstream in a similar fashion.
ReplyDeleteThat you CAN'T FIND where the GMO's are, and that a store chain can 'brand' their absence feel like 2 really important pieces of data. Good journey.
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