How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GM Food:

The National Academy of Sciences has issued yet another report reaffirming the basic scientific consensus about genetically engineered food: It’s safe. The NAS has (once again) concluded that what matters is the product, not how it was produced. This means that for regulatory purposes it should be irrelevant whether a given food product was produced through “traditional” cross-breeding of the sort practiced for centuries or through the advanced rDNA techniques recently developed in scientific labs. All such techniques involve genetic modification of the underlying plant or animal, and there is no scientific basis for deeming one “less safe” than any other. What matters are the resulting characteristics (e.g., whether the food product contains proteins that are likely to provoke allergic reactions, etc.). Of note, to date there is not a single documented and verified case of an individual getting sick or otherwise suffering harm from a genetically engineered food product. About products produced by “traditional” cross-breeding techniques, however, we can say no such thing.