You look on the back of the taco kit box for the cooking instructions and something catches your eye. Right next to the cooking instructions is a small but puzzling sentence that reads, "Contains Bioengineered Food Ingredients". What the heck does that mean you wonder, but there's no time to investigate, you've got to get dinner ready before your family storms the kitchen like an angry mob with pitchforks and torches in hand. You finish dinner just in the nick of time and everyone fawns over you for saving the day with a delicious taco spread. You smile warmly but in the back of your mind, you're wondering what you just fed your family.
Unfortunately, I experienced the above scenario, but I discovered the Old El Paso Taco Kits I used for months use bioengineered food ingredients. I found a few food items that had the same labeling which prompted me to see just how many items in my pantry were bioengineered. The shocking results are shared below, but first, what's all this bioengineered business, and is it the same as GMOs (genetically modified organisms)?
Britannica online defines a Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) as an "organism whose genome has been engineered in the laboratory in order to favour the expression of desired physiological traits or the generation of desired biological products." In a nutshell, the desired attribute of one organism is manually introduced into another organism to give it the desired attribute. So for instance a crop like bell peppers which can not survive freezing temperatures is inserted with the genes of a cold water fish that can survive in freezing temps to create a crop of freeze-resistant bell peppers.
Sounds strangely interesting yet frightening at the same time. I can recall years ago seeing a great debate a decade ago over whether or not food products containing GMOs should be labeled. As crazy as that sounds there was indeed a time when some powerful people didn't think GMO foods needed to be labeled, however, thankfully in 2016 Congress passed a law requiring the USDA to standardize how bioengineered foods would be labeled which led to the creation of the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard (NBFDS). According to the NBFDS bioengineered foods "…contain genetic material that has been modified through in vitro rDNA techniques and for which the modification could not otherwise be obtained through conventional breeding or found in nature." So whether you use the term genetically modified organisms (GMO), genetically engineered (GE), or bioengineered (BE) it all means the same thing, although there may be some differences between the methods used in each.
Did you know the first GMO was developed in 1973 when DNA was taken from one bacterium and inserted into another? Since then the technology has been used to develop everything from medicines to plant-based foods that "act" like animal-based foods, to drought-resistant crops, etc. The big question is whether or not GMOs in our food supply are safe. For every naysayer, there is an equal or greater group that says it's safe. The purpose of this blog entry is to share the brands I've personally encountered that use bio-engineered ingredients in their products, so if you want to avoid bio-engineered foods you will definitely want to see this shocking list.
