According to Owen Paterson, environment secretary in Britain, the health scares surrounding genetically modified crops are complete nonsense. He even goes a step further in saying that Britain should be emphatically looking at their cultivation.
Confident that the prime minister will soon publicly back GM food, he sees the biggest problem will be persuading the public to embrace this view, a problem we are all too familiar with in the United States. And he may be right to be a bit worried: a survey published in March found that a quarter of Britons are unconcerned by GM foods, up from 17 percent a decade ago. ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross, seeing a more than half-empty glass, pointed out that these statistics indicate that now, only 75 percent of the British population remains concerned about the non-existent health threats of GM foods.
But what the 75 percent of people who still fear GM foods have to realize is that they are already inadvertently eating GM food on a regular basis. As Paterson notes, There isn t a single piece of meat being served [in a typical London restaurant] where a bullock hasn t eaten some GM feed.
ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom blames power hungry or misguided environmental groups for the perpetuation of false and destructive claims regarding GM food. The hypocrisy of these people is sickening. While driving their Prius s to Whole Foods with reusable shopping bags thinking they are saving the planet, they seem to conveniently forget that the environment in Africa isn t all that swell, as evidenced by mass starvation much of which is due to their opposition to progress.