Just say NO to GMO

Little by little I have been actively working on removing GMO foods from my pantry, to make it more painless I focus on one food or one food group at a time.

I have always been an avid label reader, when my (now grown) son was a child, he had been diagnosed with ADHD, something that is unfortunately all too common, especially in boys. One of the things we did was to modify his diet by removing everything, and I do mean everything that was any sort of sugar, that meant every ingredient that ended in “ose”, the only exception to that was lactose, fortunately that didn’t seem to bother him. Some of the items removed from his diet was sucrose (table sugar), glucose, sucrose, dextrose, fructose, the hardest one was dextrose, that can even be found in table salt! As long as we kept his diet going, he behaved so much better, fortunately I was a prolific and adventurous cook, I had no problems making anything he wanted or needed, my son and the rest of us ate quite well. It’s my son’s birthday today, happy birthday Josh!

Since those days, I still read labels, what I look for today are artificial sweeteners of any sort, it’s amazing what the food industry tries to sneak in nowadays, I’m also looking for the “non-GMO” project label as well as the “certified organic” label. It tends to be more expensive to buy foods that are organic and non-GMO, but that is starting to change. Especially with the larger food retailers using their big buying muscle to bring down the costs for the rest of us,  stores like WalMart, yeah I know, there is a lot to dislike about that retail giant, but there is also a lot to like about them. There is a cereal they sell there, one that is organic and non-GMO, it costs about $2.50 a box, well for those of you who buy cereals, you know how expensive any box of cereal can be so that isn’t a bad price to begin with. When I’m home, that same box of cereal costs me double in my little local store. So when I’m in the big town (3 hours away) I stock up of that cereal.

I’m not an activist by any means, but I will write to companies, especially if I hear they are about to expand their repertoire of foods into GMO territory. I actually got banned from General Mills’ Cheerios FaceBook page, I went there on a daily basis, along with many of other former customers to complain about them using GMO ingredients in their Cheerios, especially since their target audience/customer are children. I guess when I started posting pictures of the rats that had been fed a diet of Cheerios and had massive tumors on them, and I started posting links to the non-GMO and organic cereals that people could consume instead of Cheerios, not sure which was the tipping point, but one or both of them were too much for GM, they banned me…

The latest company I “targeted” for GMO ingredients is Del Monte Fresh Produce, (apparently they are a different company than just plain Del Monte), they are working on making a pink pineapple, it’s been approved by the USDA to import these abberations, but they are still in the testing phase… I don’t know about you, but I don’t see any reason to create a pink pineapple, now if they can do it by cross breeding, then I’m not opposed to it, but inserting a different species of gene into the plant, well that become a horse of a different color. I began contacting Del Monte, which is how I found out they are a separate division, so I contacted Del Monte Fresh Foods from their website contact form and on their FaceBook page, it would seem that I’m not alone, just like on Cheerios FB page, there are lots of people telling DMFP that they would be boycotting all of Del Monte products because of this.

 

USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has found that the “Rosé” cultivar is a regulated transgenic crop but does not require a biotechnology permit to export the crop to the U.S. The transgenic fruit “does not have the ability to propagate and persist in the environment once they have been harvested,” according to USDA APHIS. https://www.fooddemocracynow.org/blog/2013/apr/16/del_monte_gets_approval_to_import_gmo_pinneapple/

Ewww, they refer to this as “transgenic”, sounds like something I’d rather not eat! While looking for more info on this development:

 

One of the genes used to accomplish this (tobacco) was surprising to Food Nation Radio Network. Tobacco is considered toxic for humans to eat, yet there were no test results or human studies provided in the application letter made to the USDA. The USDA did not request any studies in their approval letter to Del Monte. https://elizabethdougherty.com/2013/05/02/pink-pineapple-contains-tasty-tobacco-gene-audio-elizabeth-dougherty-food-nation-radio-network/

This is the first reference I’ve seen about tobacco being used in these pink pineapples, hmmmm it’s sounding less and less appetizing all the time.

Well I didn’t mean for this article to become so long, I’ll post a part 2 soon with more info about what I am doing, eating, buying and not buying in this world of increasing GMO foods.