GMO stands for genetically-modified organism. “At this time almost all soy products, canola oil, cottonseed oil and yellow corn, including corn syrup and corn oil in the U.S. are from GMO crops” (Dresser and Siegal). You may ask how is a GMO seed engineered? Tom Warhol and Alex Rich explain that a soil microbe, Agrobacterium tumefaciens, enables scientists to inject foreign genes into plants. An example of this is taking a gene from a flounder and inserting it into a tomato to make it more cold resistant (Kimbrell). In 1994, the first GMO food to be sold in grocery stores was a tomato. There was controversy over whether or not the tomato was safe to consume, whereas others claimed it increased the …show more content…
The ‘normal’ way that farmers have bred their cattle for thousands of years is finding the cows with desirable traits and breeding them together so the farmer can they will produce a reliable generation. The same things happens with plants, over the years the farmer could collect enough seeds with good traits and then “plant through a sort of artificial natural selection” (Warhol and Rich). With technological advances scientists have found a faster way to speed up the process by inserting and removing specific genes from plants and animals. This is where GMOs come from, herbicide-resistant soybeans and insecticidal corn; there is no limit to the improvements that can be made to foods” (Warhol and