The Food Cops

Just finished watching Food Inc., a movie that everyone should definately see. What the film has to tell was pretty alarming, I won't go through all of the things in it, that would take too much time to write. What scared me the most was GMOs or genetically modified organisms and Monsanto.

What scared about GMOs wasn't the health issues related to it, because all food we eat has been genetically modified over millienia of selective breeding to yield bigger and larger crops or grow into bigger food animals. The only thing that has changed in the past fifty or so years is that this process has been more efficient through the use of genetics. What worries me are the legal ramifications of GMOs.

When a company like Monsanto develops a GMO plant it acquires the intellectual property rights to the genetic code that they have modified. This means that Monsanto owns the newly created plant or animal. Let me repeat that, they can claim ownership to entire species of plants and animals and that is absolute bullshit. How on earth can we allow a single corporation to claim ownership to an entire species of animal or plant that we depend on for sustenance? It blows my mind. If I were God, the creator all pigs and cows, I would get medieval on their asses or better yet sue the everliving crap out of them for patent infringement.

Some of the legal ramifications of this include, farmers not being allowed to save seed to plant in next year(To Monsanto this is copyright infringement), which sort what the farmers have been doing ever since there have been farmers, Monsate having their own little police force to watch that the farmers comply with don't save the seed policy, Monsanto suing farmers who's non-GMO crops were polynated by their neighbours GMO crops. For fucks sake. Thankfully the EU has made a pretty firm stand against the GMO madness and hopefully the keep it up.

While we are on the topic of food, there was another interesting documentary on Finnish TV, Väärennetty Ruoka or Forgery Foods in English, which discussed industrial food production and food engineering. Examples of food forgeries included the basil flavoured chicken that had spinach in it and the non-milk cream that had milk in it.

Its pretty interesting to see what actually goes into food, all the chemicals aside, the raspberry-peach yogurth I am currently eating also appears to contain modified potato starch, which I found oddly interesting, since now I am eating a raspberry-peach-potato yogurth. What a facinating age we live in.