Is Peanut Butter On Your Toast?

The article “Not in my fridge” by Jeffery M. Smith elaborately discussed the health hazards of genetically modified (GM) products. This article has opened my eyes and revealed my ignorance of how unmindful of what I have eaten for years. I was very alarmed by many of the things I have learned in this article. After learning the side-effect of GM food, I was certainly concerned for our health. Moreover, learning that the biotech company’s strong stand in advocate of GM products as well as the United States governments and the Food and Drug administration (FDA) cover up of serious safety issues of GM highly disturbed me.

In "Eat Food: Food Defined" Michael Polan argues, What do you really have for dinner. When you go to the supermarket and read the ingredient's you will see alot of words you dont know. Instead of throwing it in the grocery cart anyways, why don't you ask your parent what it actually is. Your mom or dad will look at you crazy and tell you they don't know. Think of why you dont know what is in the food you eat,"If it is FDA approved it good right?" its in the supermarket its safe . Try to stay away from the crazy words that are under the word INGREDIENT, mostly towards the middle. Just dont go to the supermarket for so long alot of people get caught in a trap of buying alot. If you go to a farm and ask to buy some "corn syrup they will most

Attention Getter and relate to audience: Before you eat a meal or snack do you ever actually think about where it comes from, what’s in it, and how it will affect your body? Were you aware that sixty percent of the food you consume encompasses one or more genetically altered components?

Today, I want to talk about bananas. This familiar yellow fruits is nutritious, delicious, and good for you. But, most importantly, there are a trillion fun facts about it on the internet. Banana Fact: “Americans eat an average of 27 pounds of bananas per person every year, making them the most popular fruit in the U.S.” Banana fact: “Research shows that eating bananas may lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes, as well as decrease the risk of getting some cancers.” Banana fact: “Banana farms use extremely harmful pesticides including diazinon and chlorpyrifos, which when consumed can cause: diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, convulsions, and comas.” Banana fact: “Tortoises and manatees off the coast of Costa Rica are facing extinction partly due to the fact that pesticide runoff from banana plantations kills the algae on which they feed.” Now you might be thinking, those things aren’t really my problem, I’ve never gotten sick from a banana and tortoises aren’t doing bad, I saw one at the zoo once. Why is any of this important? And to that, allow me to read you this sweet native american quote Ms. Barber probably found on facebook, a few clicks away from my banana facts. "Treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your

After watching GMO & OMG, Fix Foods, Fed Up, and reading “ If you pitch it they’ll eat it”, I realize that I need to make changes to my eating habits and that there needs to be a humongous change in our food industry. For an example many of us don’t really pay attention to what we eat if it looks good or smells good we're going to want more. As they said in GMO & OMG “ The Supermodel Foods”. Us people we tend to buy the food that looks best to our preference and not if it’s actually good for us. In the documentary GMO & OMG by: Jeremy Seifert he argues and tries to bring to our attention that there’s Genetically Modified Organisms has been put in our food without our knowledge. But even when knowing this we still continue to buy the genetically

In the story “Are Genetically Modified Foods Scary?” we learned that people take risks just within the foods that we eat. Most people eat Genetically Modified Foods (GMO) on a daily basis weather they know what is in there food or not. “Although most scientists

Every year approximately thirty thousand individuals go to the emergency room for peanut allergies and one hundred and fifty individuals die yearly because of allergic reactions to peanuts and tree nuts (Food Act). Allergies are a big concern because they can kill people. Food producers and companies make their packages with labels on the back showing what is in them. Parts that are shown are nutrition facts, amounts per serving, and ingredients. At the bottom in small letters it may contain allergy information or where it was packaged. It is not the first thing someone sees when looking at a bag of sunflower seeds with a tree nut allergy because sunflower seeds are categorized as a seed not a tree nut. The thing people don’t realize is that

I learned that the food production has changed over the past years. Some of the food that we consume contain GMO's ( Genetically Modified Organisms) which are living organisms that make our food bigger. Which isn't good for our health, it is extremely dangerous. For example, in the movie they introduced a little boy who was so young that he passed away from food poisoning. It all started with him eating a hamburger, and that hamburger contained some chemicals that made the little boy sick. The food industry doesn't want us to know the truth about what we are consuming because if we did, we probably wouldn't consume it. A food scientist in the movie said he would guess that 90% of the processed food products in the grocery store contain either

In the early 1940’s, a new technology emerged that was able to successfully combat crop-damaging and disease-carrying insects. A new age of synthetic chemical pesticides use arose. After their impressive success in fighting deadly insect-borne diseases during World War II, pesticides were used widely to combat insect pests for agriculture and public health. Few people challenged the benefits of the new scientific and technological products and many embraced pesticide use with enthusiasm. Despite its success, doubts about pesticide use began to appear a decade later in the 1950’s, when the government began a vigorous pesticide campaign across the country against insect pests. Scientists began reporting heavy losses of avian and

The banning of insecticide, a major pollutant and neurotoxin, has been up for debate for a significant period of time. However,

In a health conscious world today and advance food technology people are beginning to wonder ‘what is it that we are actually taking in’. This is where the word GMOs starts being tossed around. GMO is the abbreviation of Genetically Modified Organisms, but if crops and livestock are fine naturally why should they be modified? This is where the myth of GMOs being harmful to the human body become present. The public grows intimidated when they know that their food has been modified, leaving the people with a state of mind of hatred. The belief that the public gets when they sense that their food seems abnormal, especially being modified to meet the needs for a better future, will make the public imagine it as a very dangerous intake for any source of life to sustain.

During the Ragtime era Upton Sinclair felt that people should be educated on what happens to their food a social issue that can be found happening today as people are demanding to know what’s in their food. Furthermore, Labeling Genetically Modified food is the best way to educate customers about what they are consuming. Polls conducted by professional news organizations, including the Washington Post, MSNBC and Reuters/NPR consistently show that over 90% of consumers want GMO ingredients labeled. As ABC News stated, “Such near-unanimity in public opinion is rare.” This study shows how many people are adamant to have GMOs labeling. Pam Pinto, owner of Act Natural Health and Wellness in Torrington Connecticut. “I strongly feel that GM food should be labeled.” Pinto said, “We should not be our Government's experiment.”

As Gliessman, an agricultural researcher, says in Agroecology, “conventional agriculture is built around two related goals: the maximization of production and the maximization of profit. In pursuit of these goals, a host of practices have been developed without regard for their unintended, long-term consequences” (3). The industrial food industry has created a process to produce as many crops as possible in the quickest amount of time to put onto the market. The several ways utilized to achieve these goals are those that are harmful to the consumer. Two main threats are genetic modification, and chemicals. These issues are a spark of concern in addressing the health of consumers. Food industries often try to tantalize their audience with the promise of untouched, pristine produce when in reality these foods are heavily tainted by pesticides or are genetically modifieds. “One will find this obliviousness represented in virgin purity in the advertisements of the food industry, in which food wears as much makeup as the actors. If one’s whole knowledge of food from these advertisements, one would not know that the various edibles were ever living creatures, or that they all come from the soil… “ (Berry 147). People are informed little about the pesticides that we often ingest from products like these and little do people know the negative effects of GMOs.

Throughout this semester we have covered many controversial topics such as mandatory labeling of GMO’s, and the use of cloned animals for meat products. We have watched documentaries such as King Corn and Food Inc., documentaries that have also coved these same topics. While watching these documentaries and discussing these topics it hit me hard that there are consumers in this world who are being fed lies. Lies, that they don’t even know are lies, due to the lack of knowledge that we as an industry supply. It sickens me that documentaries such as Food Inc. depict new technology such as GMO’s in every negative way possible. As an industry, we are not supplying consumers with enough knowledge so that they can depict lies from the truth. The

It is no secret that roughly a third of America’s population is considered obese, and in a documentary published about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), Genetic Roulette, the director uncovers that, “Since the mid-nineties, the number of Americans suffering from at least three chronic illnesses nearly doubled.” While there are a plethora of factors that contribute to this travesty, I believe a major component of this drastic increase of chronic illness is health illiteracy. Most would blame the individuals for their health deficiencies. However the core of the problem is that the population is uninformed by their government.