Investigating Sustainability McAdam 2013 | Page 7

Down to business .
Today it is very common for the average American to walk into a grocery store pick up an apple , some oranges , maybe a banana and all their other groceries , go home make dinner and eat it . Does anyone ever know where the food was grown ? “ No .” Will they ever think about it or care ? “ No .” Well , it may be time that they do . They may want to care since 93 percent of corn is genetically engineered (“ Huff Post Green ” 10 / 30 / 2012 6:05 pm
Well , in 1992 the food and drug administration ( FDA ) said that genetically engineered food is safe . They said that the companies that produce the genetically engineered are to test the food them selves and that any problems from it they will be responsible for . About six years after the FDA announced that genetically altered food was safe they received large amounts of criticizing letters from people saying that they are not safe . Now there is major controversy that the food should be listed as genetically altered . This would probably a slightly difficult thing to do because almost anything that has soy , cotton , or corn would pretty much have to be labeled .
There are some strong reasons though that people should know if the food has bean genetically altered . For starters they have a rite to know what they are eating . Second is some people have allergies and when something is crossed with something that someone is allergic to they can also have an allergic reaction to the new hybrid . In this case they would also need to list what it is a cross between . This case of someone being allergic to a hybrid food
of what it was crossed with is not that unusual actually it happened to some people recently where soybeans where combined with peanuts to make a soybean with more protein .
There is also a problem with the methods of genetically modifying the food . You may not think about it but you really have no idea if the new DNA injected is going to go to the correct place and what the end result will be . It also is based off of a theory called the Central Dogma theory . The problem with basing it off of this theory is that the theory states that each gene is responsible for one protein and that has been disproven . So a gene to produce pesticides could be added and it may also be responsible for producing poison . If the scientist get it wrong it could be very bad to eat .
There are also studies that show how potatoes that have been genetically altered can cause problems in rats . There have also been studies that show how certain genetically altered corn can cause intestinal problems in rats also .
Genetically altered food may also help stop world hunger . A man named Norman Borlaug was working in Mexico to create a wheat hybrid . At the time there was a lot of people starving http :// www . uh
WHAT IS DNA ? “ Genetics . deoxyribonucleic acid : an extremely long macromolecule that is the main component of chromosomes and is the material that transfers genetic characteristics in all life forms , constructed of two nucleotide strands coiled around each other in a ladderlike arrangement with the sidepieces composed of alternating phosphate and deoxyribose units and the rungs composed of the purine and pyrimidine bases adenine , guanine , cytosine , and thymine : the genetic information of DNA is encoded in the sequence of the bases and is transcribed as the strands unwind and replicate .”
FROM : http :// dictionary . reference . com / browse / DNA ffingtonpost . com / margie-kelly / gene tically-modified- food _ b _ 2039455 . html ) and you do not know what food you buy is or is not genetically altered . Also as the numbers in genetically modified food rise the number of American farmers slowly decreases , as the number of Americans rise , is this good or bad ? because
Borlaug ’ s accomplishment shows all of the good that can be achieved through the use of genetic engineering . There is also a lot more that can be done with it and many of the environmental impacts that can happen because of it as you will soon find out .
because of world war two . Borlaug created a hybrid of wheat that could produce larger amounts of wheat on one stalk . He accomplished this by combining a dwarf wheat that had a strong sturdy short stalk with a high yielding variety of wheat . Borlaug new hybrid created a surplus of wheat and won him a noble piece prize . He produced the hybrid through older methods of taking the plants and graphing them then reproducing the f generation until he produced an all identical new species .
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