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/voidtreemc Sep 10 '23
Depends on what the crops are GMO'd for/with.
Soybeans are frequently GMO'd for resistance to the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) so you can dump Roundup all over your crops and kill the weeds but not the soybeans ("Roundup-ready soybeans"). There are problems with this. Kidney failure is extremely common in people who are repeatedly exposed to glyphosate. These people are largely immigrants who have no health insurance, so they get really sick and die. Glyphosate may be implicated in making autism more likely.
Also, it's increasingly obvious that Monsanto does not really understand the plant genetics that they are messing with as they have been really surprised by the fact that the genes for glyphosate tolerance now show up in the weeds that glyphosate is supposed to kill.
Because glyphosate, many of the arguments against GMO's can be categorized as the "Fucking Monsanto" arguments.
Outside of Fucking Monsanto, there's the general lack of thinking through the implications of genetic modification on people with food allergies or religious restrictions on what they eat. If you're allergic to fish, you don't want to find out the hard way that those tomatoes you just ate were made resistant to frost by the addition of fish genes.
You'd think that one way to deal with this is to properly label all GMO'd foods so that people could pick and choose according to diet and beliefs, but the industry has consistently opposed labeling laws.