[Sca-cooks] NOT OT: genetically engineereed foods

[Tara Sersen Boroson]

I generally dislike a chorus of "me toos" on mailing lists, but this is 
one occasion when I must say hear hear.  Thank you, Gregory.

As Gregory said, your definition of "perfectly good food" is obviously 
fundamentally different from mine.  Personally, I would not choose to 
drink a bottle of pesticide.  I'm fairly certain you would not either.  
How much pesticide in our food constitutes too much, at the moment, 
comes down to a matter of opinion and comfort level.  As long as we're 
healthy, we could drink our own urine.  Not many of us are comfortable 
with that prospect.  Personally, I feel that food only qualifies as 
"perfectly good" if it contains as darned little pesticide as possible, 
so I do in fact shun conventional foods in favor of organic.  (Let's not 
get into a stupid argument about technical definitions of the word 
organic again, please.)  That doesn't mean that if I were starving, I'd 
reject a conventional tomato.  But, I'm not starving, and I can afford 
to be selective.  The fact that someone else is starving doesn't 
obligate me to eat out of a dumpster, why should it obligate me to eat 
factory farmed beef?

Further, as someone said earlier, food is incredibly political.  I also 
choose to purchase items based on their impact on other people, the 
environment, foreign economies, and avoiding corporations to whom I 
would not give my money (Philip Morris, Montsanto, Archer Daniels 
Midland, ConAgra.)  Further, I support agricultural methods that I 
consider to be sustainable and do not support those who's methods I 
consider to be dangerous in the long or short run.

Finally, last I checked, this is the United States of America.  Here, we 
have a right to make decisions, as long as they don't hurt anybody else, 
based on our ethical, religious or intellectual beliefs.  You have every 
right to feel that we're wrong, you even have a right to tell us you 
think we're wrong (though you were exceptionally rude in your delivery, 
that was your perogative,) but you don't have a right to stop us from 
making those decisions.  By failing to label GMO foods, you're stripping 
us of that right.  The FDA required every ingredient to be listed so 
people can make other kinds of food decisions.  Why are they balking 
about accomodating this right?

-Magdalena

-- 
Tara Sersen Boroson

You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it for himself. - Galileo Galilei