Organic sweet potato? No such thing

By 29. oktober 2015Blog

Here is one to think about. If you have ever eaten sweet potato then you have eaten GM food.

Yep, this interesting piece of information comes from an article published on the website of the UK newspaper The Guardian and was written by Professor Anthony Trewavas of Scientific Alliance Scotland.

It would seem that around 8000 years ago a bacterium inserted 2 of its genes into an ancestor of the sweet potato and as these genes caused parts of the root to swell (i.e. into a sweet potato). It was actively selected by humans and has become the sweet potato we know today.

So, if to be organic a plant cannot have been subjected to genetic modification then no sweet potato should be labelled organic and any animal fed sweet potato should also not be organic.

You could argue that it was not modified for a specific use and therefore the modification did not utilise biotechnology, but food for thought none the less….

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