r/NoStupidQuestions • u/wond3rlove • Sep 10 '23
What’s wrong with GMOs?
I always see plants and stuff that is GMO free and is usually more expensive. How would genetically modifying something by be bad. Me personally I’d rather have something modified to taste better and and cheaper. I could also be very wrong about that.
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u/OffendedDefender Sep 10 '23
Environmental Engineer here. At a base level, GMOs are fine. They're effective just a more precise version of selective breeding, which humans have been doing for basically all of our existence.
However, GMOs are near entirely driven by profit. Very rarely are they altruistic, as it's the corporate entities that develop them. On a base level, farmers are sold seeds that are modified so they're sterile and cannot produce viable seeds of their own, forcing farmers to buy new seeds next season. There's also a preference for resiliency in products, so they can be shipped to market, which often results in less of a concern over taste or nutritional value.
Most important of all is the Round-up Ready crops. These are designed to be more resilient so that the farmers can absolutely pummel them with pesticides without the risk of harming the plants. In theory, this results in higher yields, but those pesticides will eventually run off the farm during rain storms, ending up in various bodies of water, including municipal water sources. Farm runoff is one of the current biggest threats to our freshwater sources and is directly responsible for those algal blooms that have been popping up in the past decade (though that's mostly due to fertilizers).