Now I mentioned  in the previous post, most giant pumpkins are hybrids and not GMOs. So what is a GMO vegetable? GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organisms, which means any food product that has been altered at the gene level.

Now farmers and gardeners have been crossbreeding different species of plants since Luther Burbank pollinated one flower of a plant with another flower of another plant to create a plant or vegetable with certain desirable traits that produce heartier, better tasting, or more beautiful crops. These are called hybrids.

The concern here is with modern genetic engineering, genes from an animal, plant, bacteria, or virus are inserted into a different plant, altering irreversibly, the genetic code, (blueprint) of the organism that received the gene. What a scary thought! This would be like taking a flounder gene and inserting it into a tomato gene to create a tomato with a longer shelf life (this is true-they are doing this)!

Franken food pumpkin head

To think that we are crossing different species (think animal with a plant or virus with a plant) is outrageous. I don’t want to worry if some vegetable I’m growing will rise up and bite me on the butt while I’m working in the garden! No wonder they have the nickname of “Franken Foods”!

We should all be demanding to know what foods in our store are GMOs or contain GMOs and demand the stores remove them. Who knows what the hell these vegetables  and products will do to us in years to come…