I do not eat fruits and veggies anymore.. just a few classes on bio- engineering food scared me. At least when they bio engineer animals, they can only go so far before it is fatal. So skipping all of that, even if it is bacon flavored.
Why don’t you eat heirloom fruits and vegetables?
You think older folks are not paying attention. You can bet their parents or grandparents were into farming. They know more than we think.
ALL foods that we eat are genetically engineered, NO exceptions. The only difference between the techniques we use now versus those used in the past is that now, we can target a single gene, while in the past, we altered tens of thousands of genes randomly and hoped that one of the random results would be useful.
If a plant or animal has been cross-bred, then its entire genome has been altered. Genes that were suppressed in the parent stocks become active in the offspring, and vice versa. Entirely new configurations of DNA were brought into existence through cross-breeding techniques.
Around the early 1900s, a popular genetic engineering technique was to expose seeds to radiation. The radiation literally broke the DNA into fragments and destroyed nucleotides, so that if the plants survived, when they tried to repair the DNA damage, the results were unpredictable. Segments of genes ended up glued together in ways that could never happen "naturally", even by breeding. Plus, the DNA sequences of genes were randomly altered, all over the genome. Plant varieties resulting from radiation exposure have been used in agriculture for over a century.
It is incomprehensible to me that people are perfectly fine with the drastic and random genome alterations that characterize our long history of genetically modifying organisms, but when we use precision techniques that literally allow us to make a change as small as one single nucleotide out of the billions in the genome, leaving the rest of the genome intact and unchanged, people are irrationally afraid. I try to understand, I really do, but I fail.