Kevin Folta is a land-grant scientist exploring ways to make better food with less input, also learning and teaching how to effectively communicate science to the public. He is also a professor in and chairman of the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida, Gainesville.
All right, I'm here with Kevin Fulta. Kevin, you're a scientist, a GMO foods expert, and if there is one subject that gets beaten to death online and in conversation and butchered, I've heard many conversations that I had to just walk away from at parties where people started talking about what GMO foods do and what's going to happen and all the horrible things.
GMO foods are probably one of the most confusing and also one of the most hated things in the world today, but also one of the most common and most misunderstood, right?
I mean almost everything, there's a, Neil deGrasse Tyson did a video about this where he was kind of explaining like the term GMO foods.
Like virtually everything you see, including things that are quote unquote organic at a supermarket, have been modified in some way in order to prolong their shelf life, in order for them to taste better, including corn and tomatoes and oranges and you name it.
Yeah, I think that's the big problem is that, and you frame this very well, the problem is that we confuse this idea of GMO, which is kind of a pejorative term that we've derived to kind of misrepresent this kind of technology, which is really just plant genetic improvement.
Like you say, we've been improving plants for 10,000 years as a species.
We find the ones that work best and we continue to select those particular lines that have benefits for us, and we've been doing this for a long time.
So everything is different than it was in the wild.
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