I’ve become more and more interested in eating more natural, less processed foods. One thing that concerns me is genetically modified food. No one, to my knowledge, has done significant and long-term testing on how genetically modified seeds affect the humans who consume the food born from those seeds. And the FDA cares not one bit (because the FDA is filled with former M0nsant0 executives. Hmmmm?!). One documentary I watched made the not-so-crazy supposition that the antibiotics that are built into the genes of GM food are contributing to antibiotic-resitant bacteria. My thought is that all these crazy food allergies that kids are now having have got to have something to do with the unnatural food (down to baby formula) that we are feeding ourselves and our children.
I follow Alton Brown on Twitter. You know who he is, right?
His show, Good Eats, is amazing and when we had cable I enjoyed watching it. He would give you the lowdown on a certain food each episode, telling you how it acts/reacts/cooks the way it does and show you how to cook up said food. Well, I follow him on Twitter and the other day I had an ingenious idea!
I would ask Mr. Brown how he feels about GM food. So, I tweeted him: “@altonbrown Being an (awesome) food scientist-how do you feel about GM seeds & food and their effects on people? Wondering if I should worry.” That was all my 140 character limit would allow. As soon as I hit the send key I thought to myself, “that’s stupid. He’s a nationally recognized Food Network personality. Is he really going to come down on one side or the other of the GM debate?” I don’t know if he has a strong opinion on GM food or not, I haven’t searched the internets to find out. I didn’t expect to hear back from him.
But I think he got the message. Later on that night he tweeted this very obscure but loaded with meaning tweet: “All gastronomy is molecular.”
Well, what does that mean? I thought he was telling me that we do need to consider, down to the molecular level, our food and its effects on our bodies. I felt vindicated and prepared to march on in this personal battle against GM food that I am just beginning to wage. That is, until I searched through Mr. Brown’s tweets to get his exact quote for this post.
As I was searching through his tweets, doing due diligence to make sure he wasn’t responding to something else, what did I come across? A tweet in which he is quoted as saying, “Molecular gastronomy won’t replace cooking basics.” Well, crap. I thought he was talking to me. I guess he was clarifying his position on the new fad of created powders and foams and weird stuff that goes on top of food. I had powdered cucumber or something like that recently that topped my lunch soup at the Museum of the American Indian. I know what he’s saying: doing weird things to food won’t mean a thing if you don’t actually know how to cook food and cook it well.
So the verdict is still out. What does Alton Brown think of GM foods? Me personally? We need to do our due diligence with studying them to know exactly what they are doing to our bodies.
Not So SAHM 