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To eat, or not to eat, that is the question…
How often do you think of genetics, or even biotechnology as you are enjoying your favourite foods? Does gene splicing ever cross your mind while you’re cutting up tomatoes for your evening salad? Probably not very often, if at all… So why do so many people gasp, cringe and tend to steer clear from food once they find out it’s genetically modified? They do this because there is a widespread misunderstanding about the subject. Upon hearing a food is genetically modified it gives people the impression that the food has been tampered with in some way, that it’s been flooded with millions of chemicals that could be harmful to our health. However, this is not the case and now its time set the record straight.

Genetic modification is the term used when referring to food which has been produced from any crop or animal, that has been genetically altered using the modern techniques of gene technology. By using the genetic information from one organism, or DNA strand, and splicing it with the DNA of another, scientists are able to modify food crops to make them grow bigger, stay fresh longer, and add important nutrients which the food may be lacking. These modifications usually involve changing one or so genes of the possible 30,000 to 50,000 genes which make up an organism. Therefore adding a couple new genes to the thousands of unaltered genes using gene technology is hardly going change to the overall genetic structure of the living thing.

However, there are still those out there that believe that genetically modified foods are unsafe to eat because they are ‘unnatural’. How far from the truth is this. People avoid genetically modified foods because they are afraid of the unknown as they prefer to stick with what they see as the ‘natural’ food to avoid risks.

But wait, so far there hasn’t been a single report of...