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The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Coporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk
Seventy-five percent of processed foods on supermarket shelves—from soda to soup, crackers to condiments—contain genetically engineered ingredients. The long-term effects of these foods on human health and ecology are still unknown, and public concern has been steadily intensifying.
This new book from the Council for Responsible Genetics gathers the best, most thought-provoking essays by the leading scientists, science writers, and public health advocates. Collectively, they address such questions as:
Are GM foods safe and healthy for us?
Will GM food really solve world hunger?
Who really controls the power structure of food production?
Are GM foods ecologically safe and sustainable?
Why is it so difficult to get GM foods labeled in the US?
What kinds of regulations and policies should be instituted?
How is seed biodiversity, of lack thereof, affecting developing countries?
Should animals be genetically modified for food?
How are other countries handling GM crops?
Ultimately, this definitive book encourages us to think about the social, environmental, and moral ramifications of where this particular branch of biotechnology is taking us, and what we should do about it.
This new book from the Council for Responsible Genetics gathers the best, most thought-provoking essays by the leading scientists, science writers, and public health advocates. Collectively, they address such questions as:
Are GM foods safe and healthy for us?
Will GM food really solve world hunger?
Who really controls the power structure of food production?
Are GM foods ecologically safe and sustainable?
Why is it so difficult to get GM foods labeled in the US?
What kinds of regulations and policies should be instituted?
How is seed biodiversity, of lack thereof, affecting developing countries?
Should animals be genetically modified for food?
How are other countries handling GM crops?
Ultimately, this definitive book encourages us to think about the social, environmental, and moral ramifications of where this particular branch of biotechnology is taking us, and what we should do about it.
- GenresHealthFoodNonfiction
393 pages, Hardcover
First published June 3, 2014
20 people are currently reading
147 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 6, 2014
The way this book is put together really makes it easy to read, you can jump from one chapter to the next depending on the issues that are most interesting to you. Very well written without hyperbole.
October 2, 2014
It was not well written. I couldn't get pass the writing, so I didn't finish it.
November 5, 2014
I thought it was incredibly well written and covered the full breadth of the issue. The authors are some of the most well respected experts in their fields.
November 13, 2014
The book, as I read it, didn't openly indict GMOs but it did raise a lot of the concerns with them in a heavily footnoted but easy to ready format. I really found it interesting.
September 16, 2020
Really informative, put together in a comprehensive & user-friendly way. Small chapters, articles basically. This (e-book) covers all pertinent issues, topics & subjects regarding GMOs. Glad to have put in the hours to cover it--feels like bio class. My experience was enriched from having logged the many referenced websites directly onto my phone. Some footnotes are worth following up on: I just saved 'em in my "Reading List" on my browser. Better this than habitually clicking on the tantalizing tidbits of news & garbage online. Being tossed about by the storm of (mainstream) media vs. Navigating by the oars of inquiry & erudition. I try the latter.
Book can be redundant, several voices that will address a certain issue, such as the Bovine Growth Hormone in cows, and after a while the reader has heard the salient points and is ready to move forward. It's not an overpowering 5-star experience for me on account of my having been somewhat aware already of certain things. Like, I knew that salmon were being engineered because the lead singer of the band Red Hot Chili Peppers promotes fresh salmon. And we see in the groceries today the pictures of "grass-fed" animals & "cage-free" chickens. So the lay reader might yawn occasionally.
Monsanto! That company is the exemplar of what consumers are up against. This book doesn't focus directly & singly on Monsanto but does incriminate them, peripherally, so to speak. The transgressions (lawsuits) are documented. But the force, that comes with all of these advances in tech, and the omnipresence of that conglomeration of vested, perverted & corrupted interests that is Monsanto, the GMO Hegemony, continues to be a powerful reality in the world today. They say they want to save the world and solve its hunger.
Though there was enough science-y content in the book I would have appreciated more explanation of how organisms are engineered. Some diagrams of fetuses & embryos for example. There was a slide that showed a 'band'...and this was interesting as it was used to prove or disprove whether something was modified. I'd have liked to know more about Monsanto & DuPont, like names, and who did what with who to form what company. I'd have liked to know more insider stuff on agribusiness rather from the victims, or opponents. By the way, very depressing learning: the number of Indian farmers who ended their lives. They were miserably indebted to huge seed companies.
I was rewarded from having learned how important farmers are to the world. The craft & skill. The history of agriculture. The variety of wild rice, maize, and the beauty of how the earth produces our sustenance. It really hurt to learn, flat-out, just how burdened and oppressed they truly are. Prices being lowered in the market; cows being driven to produce too much milk, so much that there comes a surplus, an excess of milk, & of cows; farmers being forced to buy GM seed, and into a vicious cycle of dependency; huge, vast farms having fewer & fewer employed farmers; the pollen from GM crops crossing over by wind-drift into other organic crop farms and contaminating them; and the cruel audacity of Monsanto to sue small farmers for no just cause.
If you like fiction, sci-fi stuff, then try "Windup Girl" by Paulo Bacigalupi. This book constantly came up to mind because it is a dystopian book that is about a world bustling with agribusiness & synthetic organisms, right down to the windup girl, the sex bot. Borg. Doll. ? What do we call things when they are made? "GMO Deception" covers that question well. Proponents of GMO cited that there were no differences, or that the differences did not amount to the GM organism being substantially different from the natural organism. But the irony: the proponents strove to patent their creations so as to profit from their mass production & commercial availability. They said, "this is new, we made it, it's ours." And add, "this is no different from the real thing, it's safe to buy & consume." But if we alter the DNA, then we alter the organism. And the book does well to iterate that there are unidentified consequences to changing plants & animals, and that those consequences are innumerable. One can have an allergic reaction from eating a PB&J sandwich but not know if the peanut was modified or not, or if the jelly was made from GM seed fruit, or if the bread was made of a GM wheat that was modified to survive better under cold, frosty conditions. This enzyme from this plant being put into that plant for you to eat. Etcetera.
I recommend the book, certainly. It's browsable but worth a straight-read through. Informative.
Book can be redundant, several voices that will address a certain issue, such as the Bovine Growth Hormone in cows, and after a while the reader has heard the salient points and is ready to move forward. It's not an overpowering 5-star experience for me on account of my having been somewhat aware already of certain things. Like, I knew that salmon were being engineered because the lead singer of the band Red Hot Chili Peppers promotes fresh salmon. And we see in the groceries today the pictures of "grass-fed" animals & "cage-free" chickens. So the lay reader might yawn occasionally.
Monsanto! That company is the exemplar of what consumers are up against. This book doesn't focus directly & singly on Monsanto but does incriminate them, peripherally, so to speak. The transgressions (lawsuits) are documented. But the force, that comes with all of these advances in tech, and the omnipresence of that conglomeration of vested, perverted & corrupted interests that is Monsanto, the GMO Hegemony, continues to be a powerful reality in the world today. They say they want to save the world and solve its hunger.
Though there was enough science-y content in the book I would have appreciated more explanation of how organisms are engineered. Some diagrams of fetuses & embryos for example. There was a slide that showed a 'band'...and this was interesting as it was used to prove or disprove whether something was modified. I'd have liked to know more about Monsanto & DuPont, like names, and who did what with who to form what company. I'd have liked to know more insider stuff on agribusiness rather from the victims, or opponents. By the way, very depressing learning: the number of Indian farmers who ended their lives. They were miserably indebted to huge seed companies.
I was rewarded from having learned how important farmers are to the world. The craft & skill. The history of agriculture. The variety of wild rice, maize, and the beauty of how the earth produces our sustenance. It really hurt to learn, flat-out, just how burdened and oppressed they truly are. Prices being lowered in the market; cows being driven to produce too much milk, so much that there comes a surplus, an excess of milk, & of cows; farmers being forced to buy GM seed, and into a vicious cycle of dependency; huge, vast farms having fewer & fewer employed farmers; the pollen from GM crops crossing over by wind-drift into other organic crop farms and contaminating them; and the cruel audacity of Monsanto to sue small farmers for no just cause.
If you like fiction, sci-fi stuff, then try "Windup Girl" by Paulo Bacigalupi. This book constantly came up to mind because it is a dystopian book that is about a world bustling with agribusiness & synthetic organisms, right down to the windup girl, the sex bot. Borg. Doll. ? What do we call things when they are made? "GMO Deception" covers that question well. Proponents of GMO cited that there were no differences, or that the differences did not amount to the GM organism being substantially different from the natural organism. But the irony: the proponents strove to patent their creations so as to profit from their mass production & commercial availability. They said, "this is new, we made it, it's ours." And add, "this is no different from the real thing, it's safe to buy & consume." But if we alter the DNA, then we alter the organism. And the book does well to iterate that there are unidentified consequences to changing plants & animals, and that those consequences are innumerable. One can have an allergic reaction from eating a PB&J sandwich but not know if the peanut was modified or not, or if the jelly was made from GM seed fruit, or if the bread was made of a GM wheat that was modified to survive better under cold, frosty conditions. This enzyme from this plant being put into that plant for you to eat. Etcetera.
I recommend the book, certainly. It's browsable but worth a straight-read through. Informative.
May 19, 2017
3.5 rating
This book was mostly a compilation of articles that were published in the "GeneWatch" publications. No qualms here, as I have read a few books of published blog entries, material that I would have never read if it wasn't published as a book. In order to reach more people, I feel that this a good route to go. (And it didn't bother me that there were a handful of articles from the 1980s because they often had a lot of back story and additional information on GMOs that the newer articles did not discuss).
I really appreciated a lot of the beginning of the book and found it quite engaging. There were a lot of articles and interviews with scientists who published work against GMOs that exposed some of the dangers with growing them. There is a lot of good info here and that I have read elsewhere as well.
Why did I only give this a 3.5 rating?
The book was almost too long, and even though I was over half done, I got sick of reading it because yes, there were a lot of repeated themes - even though I appreciated how the book was broken down into different sections concerning things such as environment, social, policy, etc. etc. I felt if it had been more concise then I would have finished it.
Then came the reviews on Goodreads. There were some I could tell were so blatantly fake - like the dozen or so people from Brooklyn that all created and were last active right when they rated this book, and this was the only book they reviewed. Why? It seems suspicious to me.
This book was mostly a compilation of articles that were published in the "GeneWatch" publications. No qualms here, as I have read a few books of published blog entries, material that I would have never read if it wasn't published as a book. In order to reach more people, I feel that this a good route to go. (And it didn't bother me that there were a handful of articles from the 1980s because they often had a lot of back story and additional information on GMOs that the newer articles did not discuss).
I really appreciated a lot of the beginning of the book and found it quite engaging. There were a lot of articles and interviews with scientists who published work against GMOs that exposed some of the dangers with growing them. There is a lot of good info here and that I have read elsewhere as well.
Why did I only give this a 3.5 rating?
The book was almost too long, and even though I was over half done, I got sick of reading it because yes, there were a lot of repeated themes - even though I appreciated how the book was broken down into different sections concerning things such as environment, social, policy, etc. etc. I felt if it had been more concise then I would have finished it.
Then came the reviews on Goodreads. There were some I could tell were so blatantly fake - like the dozen or so people from Brooklyn that all created and were last active right when they rated this book, and this was the only book they reviewed. Why? It seems suspicious to me.
December 27, 2024
The book is a series of essays, and everything is at least a decade outdated. I went in thinking I was pretty strongly against GMOs, and after reading this, I’m about 100x more strongly against. I was unaware of how bleak the picture is unfortunately and for much of the world is likely irreversible with the damage done.
It’s a sad reality that we so transparently have a triumvirate of inherently corrupt vehicles here, the corporations, the government and the media. Absolutely, positively shameful. And citizens yawn with apathy, naïveté and/or stupidity. And as I write this in late 2024, it’s nearly impossible to go to the grocery store and find a single meal to make that is not genetically modified.
It’s a sad reality that we so transparently have a triumvirate of inherently corrupt vehicles here, the corporations, the government and the media. Absolutely, positively shameful. And citizens yawn with apathy, naïveté and/or stupidity. And as I write this in late 2024, it’s nearly impossible to go to the grocery store and find a single meal to make that is not genetically modified.
June 11, 2019
The same arguments racists use against immigration: it's "them" that have an evil plan against "our" something.
November 11, 2019
Too bad there isn’t a 0-star rating.
November 19, 2014
This book consists almost entirely of recycled manure from the GeneWatch series of articles, some dating back to the 1980s. It provides no updated information or context with any of these pieces. The few new pieces are essentially the same detritus that can be found from those authors at other sites. Published by the same folks who provide Andrew Wakefield and RF Kennedy Jr a platform for vaccine misinformation (Skyhorse), this text managed to exceed the depths of my low expectations. Dreadful waste of time.
November 13, 2014
Not light reading but deeply engrossing-I learned a lot.
July 27, 2015
This book gives the behind the scenes view of the big business behind the way we get our food. Very enlightening.
April 6, 2016
doesn't provide much real evidence against GMOS just Monsanto. Blame the shooter not the gun right?
November 16, 2014
A who's who of experts on Gm food-engrossing read.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews