From the Genetic Literacy Project:
Pasta? Ruby grapefruits? Why organic devotees love foods mutated by radiation and chemicals
Visit the website of Wasatch Organics and you can find one of many people’s fruits: scrumptious looking Ruby Red grapefruits, plump and juicy. Or sidle over to Australia’s Whisk and Pin gourmet food emporium and snatch up some organic Ruby Red grapefruit marmalade.
Just as nature intended!
Or not.
To the foodie, what could be better than “natural” ripe Ruby Red grapefruit? Free from the alleged dangers of pesticides or genetic modification, organic Ruby Reds should represent one of the last havens of natural food, completely unaltered by man.
Think again. Ruby Red grapefruits, along with 3,000 other crop varieties consumed by millions every day, were actually created through mutation breeding, also known as mutagenesis. Plants were exposed to atomic radiation, thousands of genes scrambled in laboratory experiments that took years.
In the last 60 years, mutation breeding has produced a sizeable fraction of the world’s crops. Varieties of wheat, including almost all the most popular varieties used to make top-grade Italian pasta, vegetables, fruit, rice, herbs and cotton have been altered or enhanced with gamma rays, and often separately or additionally soaked in toxic chemicals, in the hopes of producing new desirable, traits. Now these varieties are marketed as conventional and organic foods, and are unlabeled.
Much more at the site. Why are some people so fearful of what they cannot understand? This is just accelerated hybridization - the radioactivity is being used to speed up the mutation process that naturally occurs.
Some people seem to conflate two different aspects of an entity:
Radiation = atomic bombs & reactor meltdowns = bad
Radiation = plant hybridization & better food = ?
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