Saturday, December 20, 2008

Coping with a Genetically Engineered Environment : "The Future of Food" Documentary

You've all heard about Monsanto genetically engineered seed and its unethical patent infringement lawsuits against farmers that happen to have their crop contaminated with the unwanted and intrusive GE seeds. It's pathetic to see how the economical greed of Mega Corporations can have catastrophic biological consequences, which some fear, might even become a treat to existence of life by eliminating diversity.

What is so scary is that mankind doesn't fully understand the consequences of these genetic modifications yet. The scientific community is currently very concerned by the genetic engineering technique consisting of inserting an antibiotic marker gene in the insertion package to then be able to test if that same insertion package was successfully attached. The medical community is terrified at the concept of loosing that antibiotic because it is suspected that the antibiotic gene markers might lead to an increase of the numbers of bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotic.

As Ignacio Chapela said in the documentary, "This is probably the largest biological experiment humanity has ever entered into" and we are not testing on rats but on earth's population.

I recommend everyone to take the time to view this documentary to be able to put what you eat in perspective. See the entire documentary on youtube with the following playlist, it consists of 9 parts of 10 minutes