Saturday, April 6, 2013

GMO Labeling at Whole Foods Market - Delicious and Healthy Living

As a vendor at Whole Foods Markets, I received a letter from their corporate headquarters on their plans to label products containing Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO's).  I have seen a number of posts on Facebook that indicate that people don't understand why it will take years (2018 to be exact) for this labeling to go into effect.  That is an excellent question that I also want to know the answer to.  This letter clarifies why this labeling will take so long.

The prevalence of Genetically Modified Organisms in our food supply is now SO high that it is very difficult for the many vendors who sell their products to Whole Foods Markets to source where the ingredients came from in the first place.  They have to make certain that even the fields where the ingredients are grown won't receive cross contamination from nearby GMO crops. 

Think about it for a moment.  If I make a jar of tapenade, the olives come from one place, capers from another and garlic from still another.  It can be tough to trace back to the farms and make absolutely certain that ALL of the ingredients in my product contain no GMO's.  Whole Foods Market is simply giving their vendors plenty of time to trace back ingredients and make decisions about whether or not to replace them or to go ahead and just label them as containing GMO's.  This makes a lot of work for the vendor who will have to print up new labels that comply with Whole Food's new standards.

For now, there are many products in Whole Foods that already are labeled as non-GMO.  Products will continue to be labeled as such between now and the 2018 deadline.  Keep looking at the labels and purchase products according to what you are comfortable with. 

If a label has no mention of GMO's it may contain them but does not mean it does.  Whole Foods Market has worked hard to keep products with what they call "dirty ingredients" off of their shelves since they opened.  Unfortunately, it has become more and more difficult to do so with GMO ingredients in so much of our food supply here in the United States.

Briefly, GMO's are lab created foods that use the DNA of living organisms that are often from two different species and then they splice them together. For instance, they crossed a cold water fish with a tomato to give it a longer growing season (as tomatoes naturally do not do well in cold weather).  These things would never occur naturally so why would we want to put them into our bodies? What do they do to us?  How could they do this without consulting the consumer of the tomato?  What if you are vegan or deathly allergic to fish?  Is the massive rise in food allergies due to these practices (more than 20 years of GMO's)?  Is that why bee populations dying off, from GMO tainted pollen?  What other crops are modified and with what?  These are only a few questions of the moral, ethical and health implications that we must ask ourselves when it comes to GMO's.

Thank you to Whole Foods Markets for standing up for our right to know what is in our food.  Please shop there and at other health food grocery stores for the best ingredients available from vendors that care about our health and well being.

For more information on living a Delicious and Healthy life, go to www.DeliciousAndHealthy.com
See my cooking show, "Free Food with Dr. Meg" here!