Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • This next question is literally a hot potato. One of our viewers wants to know what my impression

  • is of GMOs. GMOs stands for genetically modified organisms and if you listen to the media,

  • you would think that anything involved with GMOs is creating frankenfoods so it's kind

  • of scary. Proposition 37 popularized it recently and what they were aiming to do was for full

  • transparency so that if whatever you are purchasing was made with seeds that were genetically

  • modified that it be listed. So I certainly see no objection to full transparency, but

  • I think there's a misunderstanding about of the wrongfulness, with the dangers associated

  • with GMOs. GMOs are not all bad. We wouldn't have broccoli or pink grapefruit or navel

  • oranges if we didn't have cross breeding. So essential what happens is is we through

  • thousands of, over thousands of years in agriculture we have been crossbreeding. I think the concern

  • is when there's manipulations of the gene combinations and it's from different species.

  • So surely there's concern, but if you go to any nursery and you see anything that says

  • hybrid that means it's taken the best of two mother plants and bred them together. So there's

  • certainly benefits. We have benefitted from years and years of this cross breeding, we

  • wouldn't have whole grains without it either. So I don't think there's reason to be concerned,

  • I think it's progress. I think it certainly makes good sense to have that information

  • available to consumers so that you make your own personal choice. But you really need to

  • be educated and you need to understand we can't feed the world without this kind of

  • technology because what GMOs have enabled us to do is increase crop yield. So that it

  • increases the yield, reduces the use of chemical pesticides, it can lower costs. It can foster

  • tolerance for things like drought, heat or frost so there certainly are positive sides

  • to it. I'msure that the concerns are there as well and for consumers, the more we know,

  • then the better the decision we can make that's good for us.

This next question is literally a hot potato. One of our viewers wants to know what my impression

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it