9781422280478

What Is Organic Food?

GMO s and P esticides : A C loser L ook To understand why people make the extra effort to farm, buy, and eat organically, it helps to know a little bit about what they’re trying to avoid. At the top of the list are GMOs and pesticides. In one sense, farmers have been producing GMOs for centuries, by selectively breeding animals and plants with desired characteristics or grafting different plants together to create new hybrids. For example, over 2,000 years ago, Mediterranean farmers began selectively breeding long-leaved cabbages to create what we now know as kale. This is, in a strict sense, genetic modification. But today, when people speak of GMOs, they usually mean something else. Genetic modification refers to scientists in a laboratory taking genes from one species and inserting them into an unrelated species to create a desired trait. Examples of modern

The popular green called kale was bred from cabbage more than 2,000 years ago.

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