Today, anyone can go to the grocery store and purchase fruits and vegetables that have been genetically modified. As a matter of fact, most of us do it unknowingly all the time. But, what exactly are genetically modified foods and what sets it apart from traditional breeding? The biotech industry and our departments of agriculture claim that genetic engineering is a natural extension of traditional breeding. However, traditional agriculture methods, such as cross-pollination or selective breeding, are based on natural reproductive mechanisms. These traditional methods will cross only one kind of plant or animal with a similar species. To be specific, genetic engineering crosses the coded DNA barrier and utilizes very powerful (and unnatural) laboratory techniques for transferring genetic material directly between plants and animals. Using these techniques, genes from any plant, animal, virus, or other organism, including a human, can be inserted into any other organism. Therefore, scientists have been able to take “beneficial genes” from some plants or animals and splice them into the DNA of fruits and vegetables. This modification process can make them resistant to pesticides and or insects. Some have even been able to modify rice to have vitamin A as well as the high carbohydrates it also contains; they call it “Golden rice.”

This all seems like great progress. At a glance, one might even conclude that this technology could end world hunger. It might even be concluded that this technology will bring about a new age of more nutritious foods. However, further research indicates that there are many possible dangers of continuing down this path of technology. Genetically modifying crops including soy beans to be resistant to herbicides allows farmers to spray more chemicals such as Round-up, a popular weed killer, on them. This raises the question of how much weed killer