As you already know, this is a complicated question. It’s complicated because it has many different aspects to it. Let’s try to answer some sub-questions to clarify what we are really asking?
What is Biotech in Food?
The term “biotech” can be a large umbrella that covers everything from external manipulation (adding fertilizers to soil to influence plant growth) all the way to genetic modification of plants and animals. For the sake of clarification, we will be focusing on the most modern utilization of technology as it relates to food: genetic modification and other micro-biological tinkering.
What Do We Consider to Be “Danger”?
Danger can mean many things to many people. In the most basic sense, danger can be defined as an immediate threat to our health and wellbeing. Since people are not eating GMOs and immediately getting sick or dying, I think we can confidently set this type of danger aside. The other type of danger is a lesser-known longterm threat to our health and wellbeing. This is where things get complicated.
Longterm threats to human health and wellbeing span a large spectrum:
- Physical health decline from eating poor quality food
- Starvation threat from a collapse of our food supply chain
- Environmental threats from the negative implications of modifying plants and animals
- Various downstream spinoffs of these three main threats
Question Clarification: What do we know about the longterm risks of biotech in our food?
Since there is no way to look into the future and see what will happen as a result of our experimentation and implementation of various technologies, we can’t answer this question. What we can do is look at the best information available to us right now and make predictions about what will happen in the future.
In our following series of blogs, we will seek to explore this question. As we get in new information, we will update our predictions. Stay tuned for information on how our use of biotech will influence the future.