GM Foods and Our Right to Good Food!

Why do we all wake up in the morning and go about our various businesses of making money? The basic answer that is common to all, rich or poor, young or old is FOOD.

Food is a basic necessity and the  RIGHT of access to good food is quite fundamental. But most of us seem to ignore this fact until we encounter health issues arising from bad food consumption.

I have been living in the industrialized world for more than a decade and have been consuming the so called “advanced” products with fortified ingredients. The basic question is why were the vitamins extracted from the food in the first place only to “fortify” it more vitamins?

The corporations have been having their way because we - the consumer – have stopped asking basic questions in the name of “progress”.

In the face of the current debate in India about promoting genetically modified products, the basic question is – is there a real need to genetically modify eggplant/brinjal? What is really being achieved here.

To be honest I have been consuming the GMed brinjal and it tastes quite awful. This is one of the many vegetables that I enjoy eating when I visit India.

The following statement on this website seems baseless – although I am not a specialist. It does not address the costs involved in measures of long term health, let alone the actual cost of hiring hi-tech people and acquiring the hi-tech instruments to produce the GM crop.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Now-Pawar-bats-for-GM-crops-to-meet-food-security/articleshow/5584530.cms

“Conventional technologies of agriculture are inadequate to meet the formidable challenges. The most compelling case for bio-technology, and more specifically transgenic crops, is their capability to increase crop productivity, lower production costs, conserve bio-diversity, efficient use of external inputs, and improvement of economic and social benefits and alleviation of abject poverty in poor and developing countries,"

Please watch the documentary “Food Inc.”

One thing that the US is doing wrong and other countries shouldn’t follow is “Use complex solutions to solve a simple problem”.

Example in the documentary it shows that if cows were to eat simple, regular green grass on pastures, they wouldn’t be infected with e-coli. It acts as a natural cleanser. Instead the industry chooses to add more “anti-bacterial” material to the “fodder”.

Where is common sense? (My Hindi friends will understand) --- Ghaans Charne! :)