Organic Food in the Media

When I think about the food I consume on a daily basis, whether it be at the dining hall at Furman University or store-bought, it never occurs to me the question of whether or not it's safe to eat or not. For that, I realize I am incredibly privileged as people all over the world struggle to fight for their health because of the food that they eat, often times not even having a choice. Often times, the food that we consume contain GMO's, or genetically modified organisms, which can be harmful to the human body in the long run:

Examples of GMO's:

• Introducing allergens and toxins to food
• Accidental contamination between genetically modified and non-genetically modified foods
• Antibiotic resistance
• Adversely changing the nutrient content of a crop
• Creation of "super" weeds and other environmental risks

Source: http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/are-biotech-foods-safe-to-eat

Why do people use them, if they are potentially harmful? In the short "run", there are temporary benefits including longer shelf-life, pest resistance, and increase in food supply. 

This brings me to my next question  - what is our world doing about it? How are they promoting the importance of healthy eating/organic foods, and how is it being advertised in our media to the public? (Organic foods meaning no synthetic pesticides, chemical fertilizer usage, no antibiotics or growth hormones etc). Most likely, you have probably seen advertisements somewhere for the promotion of organic foods at Trader Joe's or Whole Food's in America, but recent news has lead us to believe that their promotion was false advertising. One ways they use advertise is through videos, which they have uploaded on Youtube.

In hindsight this is actually quite a smart technique, as their advertising strategy was most likely to reach the masses, which Youtube does very well. As Vivian states in Chapter 11: Advertising, a lot of companies use a strategy that appears convenient and easy for people to buy their products, in order to attract consumers - "Goods and services can be ordered directly from ads appearing on the internet, making the point of purchase only a few keystrokes away" (Vivian, 298). But it's also deceiving, as it has been discovered that Whole Food's also carries foods with chemicals in them.

This is not just a problem on a domestic scale in the United States, but all over the world in countries such as the Philippines. In this article that I found on Globalpost, it talks about the horrific introduction of the first GMO rice! Isn't that totally absurd? Yes, it may be beautiful to look at, may even taste better than regular rice, but in the long term, who wants to consume all those chemicals that could harm your health drastically?? It's not even that people weren't doing anything about it, because in this article it clearly states that activists destroyed these rice fields when they heard about it, but somehow the FDA approved of it anyway. If we should take anything away, is that we need to be extremely careful of what we eat, and sometimes it may be better for us to stay indoors and cook so that we know exactly what goes into the food that goes into our bodies.