By EMILY BENNIGSDORF
The Collegiate Farm Bureau club on campus was able to show a screening of “Food Evolution” on Nov. 13. The film delves into GMO products, how they are made, the activist and the science.
This film challenges the “fear over facts” when talking about GMOs. It does not favor pro-GMO or anti-GMO — it states facts. The film has scientists discussing the advancements that GMO’s have made in our food and sustainability. The viewers also get an understanding of how anti-GMO activists are rallying.
“The Collegiate Farm Bureau strives to educate and advocate on behalf of the agriculture industry, and we feel this movie and discussion did just that. The film didn’t try to sway you to pro or anti-GMO. It simply presented you with the facts,” said Allison Railsback, Collegiate Farm Bureau club president.
Jackie Mundt’s motto is: “If it is tasty, I must eat it.” Mundt is an agriculture activist who was chosen to host a question-and-answer session after the film due to her passion and experience with agriculture.
“I hope that people who watch the film are more comfortable with having conversations around their food,” Mundt said. “I think that is the whole purpose of this. It is not meant to be one side is right and wrong; it’s meant to be what information is out there and making it accessible to the people around them, and I hope that people through that process feel better about what they are eating.”
The film crew was able to go to Uganda and follow a banana farmer around her plantation. There is a disease killing all of the banana trees in Uganda called banana wilt. The only way to keep up the banana production in Uganda is to find a new breed of bananas that can withstand the disease. Banana wilt can be managed, but the cost is far more than any farmer can pay.
The film was able to take Frances Nanziri, a local banana farmer, to a local public research center where they are able to grow resistant transgenic varieties of the crop. Emma Naluyima, a veterinarian who manages her banana plantation and provides education to her community, also was able to go to the research center.
When the two visited the research center, they were in awe. There was a distinct line in the crops on which side was the regular banana crop they had and which was the transgenic variety. The transgenic trees stood tall with perfect bananas. Nanziri wanted to take the transgenic home with her because her plantation had banana wilt.
She wasn’t able to because of the anti-GMO ban that is still happening in her area, so she will have to stand by and watch her crop die because she is not able to have access to the new product.
This film was able to go to an anti-GMO rally and catch up with some of the big names in the group.
“I trust the social media more than most medical doctors, more than the CDC, the FDA, more than the EPA. I don’t need a scientific study,” Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms across America and an anti-GMO activist, said at a rally shown in the film.
Honeycutt is an anti-GMO activist and promotes it for her children. She wants her children to eat a safe product just like every mother. She doesn’t need science to back up her information, which she usually gets from Facebook or the internet.
Mark Lynas is a British environmentalist and was another spotlight in the film. Lynas was an anti-GMO activist until he wanted to know more about his food and started studying it. Since he started his research, he has changed his views and is now an activist for GMO production.
In an interview with Trevor Roberts of BIOtechNOW, Lyans said, “I have often been attacked, especially by my one-time activist friends, for changing my mind on GMOs.”
Later in the interview he said: “Environmentalism, perhaps more than any other philosophy, requires science. And science means that you must change your mind when the evidence changes, however inconvenient that might be.”
“I learned that people don’t focus on the facts and they are more opinionated towards their biases than towards research and scientific data,” said Skyler Clark, a freshman studying biology at FHSU. “Thinking is a very definitive term in the fact that it is completely opinion-based, when really everyone should know where their food comes from.”
Railsback said the film was chosen to help educate the public about GMO’s.
“I think so often in our society people are afraid by the term ‘GMO’ because of the misrepresentation portrayed by the media, in result blurring the real facts about why it is used in today’s world,” Railsback said.
