Genetic Engineering Genetically Modified Foods - 1312 Words

When food is genetically engineered, it has specific changes made to its DNA and is far more effective than past procedures like selective breeding and mutative breeding. Most food, we eat today, is, in fact, genetically modified. Food, like vegetables and fruit, are modified commonly to enhance their traits such as herbicide resistance and added nutritional content. The enhancement used to be done largely by selective breeding, which is very time-consuming and more often than not, it is not very accurate of effective. Genetic engineering is extremely controversial as people feel that it is not very safe as there could be unknown health risks involved and there have been a growing number of protests against GM foods across the globe.†¦show more content†¦Modified food is able to resist these diseases. Food is also being modified so that crops typically grown only in warm climates can now be grown in much colder climates that before, would cause them to die. This is done by t aking the antifreeze gene from cold water fish and introducing it to plants. Food is being modified to contain additional nutrition as well. Malnutrition is Common in many third world countries, where the main source of food is rice which does not contain much nutrition. However, rice is now being modified at the Swiss federal institute of technology called â€Å"golden rice†. It is said to contain unusually high levels beta-carotene (vitamin A). They hope to be able to give it freely to third world countries, helping eradicate the problem of blindness due to vitamin A deficiency. However, this may not happen due to growing anti-GM protests in Europe. A problem with GM foods is the unintended harm to other organisms, a big example of this is the problem of pollen from b.t corn which is a GM crop, was responsible for killing large amounts of monarch butterfly caterpillars. Scientists believe that the pollen was blown onto the milkweed plant that the caterpillars eat and were in turn consumed by the caterpillars. People Van Patter-Niescior 2 are also concerned that like when mosquitos developed a resistance to the DDT