GMO's in the USA: Box Food, Science Snacks, and the Monsanto Bots

There's a strain of thought in the food world that GMO's are fine, the science is good, and you have no real education on the matter if you protest their benefits.  Then there's another strain that believes they are questionable at best, dangerous at worst, and are only the baby of corporations like Monsanto.  I fall on the side of avoiding them, but this habit apparently requires an encyclopedic memory and a biology degree.  You basically have to be a granola to not eat GMO's.  If it comes in a box, you probably should not eat it.  Box food is all the rage, if you think about it.  It's a logistical luxury and signifies the successes of man, but also gets to the root of the food problem - the abstract nature of food production and the supply chain.  GMO's are taking us way down the rabbit hole, so that we can tinker our way into heaven instead of being properly let in when the door opens.  Open sesame is what GMO's and box food is all about.  There's a bit of je ne sais quoi when you get into box food - feels good for some odd reason, almost exciting.  Could it be our collective ascent to becoming a race of Monsanto bots, happily saturated with GMO's?  Or is it the joy we experience that the next step in our evolution as humans is arriving with each science snack we experiment?  Whatever's going on, Monsanto sure doesn't want anything to upset their apple cart, and we all know what happens when Monsanto bots don't get a square deal on their apple drink.

Just recently, Nassim Taleb published a paper, "The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)," in which he advocates avoiding GMO's based on its potential level of harm to crops and human health, which basically entails everything.  GMO's present a systemic risk, the variables of which are still both uncertain and unidentified.  In clear terms, Taleb states, "[a] rational consumer should say: We do not wish to pay—or have our descendants pay—for errors made by executives of Monsanto, who are financially incentivized to focus on quarterly profits rather than long term global impacts."  Makes sense to me, but this sort of common sense is long gone for the hungry masses.  They've been drinking the kool-aid for so long they've gone blind.

Take Proposition 37's defeat in California back in 2012 for example.  You had two sides fervently lobbying against each other, except the side that won hand over fist outspent the granolas.  The granolas just don't have the cash to go up against the gasoline pushers.  Monsanto alone, the largest source of financing against the proposition, contributed $8.1 million to its defeat, which is more than four times the amount of money contributed by the proposition's largest supporter, Mercola Health Resources.  It's no secret Monsanto makes large sums of money off their GMO corn strain and Roundup combo pack.  Labeling products with Monsanto packages in them just offers people the choice to either join in and be part of the gang or just be ho-hum on the sidelines.  What's so bad about that?  Let people make their own friends, right?

Then there are the people who have already consumed enough Monsanto gadgets to be considered owned by them - the ones strolling through grocery stores in pajamas, carts piled high with box food, soda, and other  high-tech science snacks.  Lots of technology goes into these people, yet you rarely see them forming words or emotions other than grunts and gasps.  Saturate yourself with GMO's and you're no longer considered human.  Instead, you're a thoroughbred Monsanto bot, living off the golden nuggets that fall from Mr. Keeblers treehouse and Pillsbury Doughboy's fat rolls.  You're something no one has ever been before, and that comes with a big old badge of courage.  They might be right when they say we're at the dawn of a new age.

If the gasoline pushers and their minions didn't have to run roughshod over everything, maybe the whole GMO thing wouldn't be a big deal.  Maybe it would be something we could work out nicely.  But they have to keep inserting their biotech into everyone's uncle and it's getting stale.  Why are GMO's being gleefully spewed everywhere?  Why are we incentivizing the the establishment of a new race of Monsanto people?  Shouldn't there be a way to stop this?  Oh, that's right, there isn't because Monsanto also owns the FDA.  Nevermind everything.  

We've almost tinkered ourselves to heaven, so let's just savor our wonderful assortment of snacks until we get there.  I leave you with a parting thought:  Ciao.  From the Italian word, schiavo, it means '(I am your) slave.  Bite by bite we are becoming slaves to something invisible, but there we are.  Ciao.