Nearly everything you eat is a GMO

[alex_antonin]

Every single strawberry you have ever eaten is genetically modified. The original strawberry grew in mats on the ground and were tiny and hardly worth the effort of picking. Then at some point, some rich dude crossed them with a different species in the Americas, and what we eat now is that hybrid and others.

In fact, I'm willing to bet every single thing you've ever eaten has been genetically modified, including a lot of "wild" species (actually species that went feral after being changed by humans, or got accidentally crossed with domesticated/genetically modified versions.) Humans have been doing this for thousands of years. Broccoli isn't a wild plant, not even kale is. Broccoli, kale, cabbage, cauliflower, bok choy, kohlrabi, and dozens of other vegetables are genetically modified versions of wild cabbage. Also, wild carrot roots look more like dandelion roots than they do like carrots.

Corn was also genetically modified over thousands of years, from a plant that looks more like wheat than it does like modern corn. The lemon isn't even a plant that evolved in the wild, it's a cross between two other plants, the bitter orange and the citron.

And animals? We've been genetically modifying them with selective breeding even longer than we have for plants, because it's easier. Cows are the domesticated form of a now extinct animal called the aurochs, and have as much in common with the aurochs now as dogs have in common with wolves. Maybe even less than that. And sheep? Sheep look almost nothing like their wild ancestors.

So yeah, unless you regularly forage for wild plants to eat or have eaten wild deer, then literally everything you've ever eaten or ever will eat, no matter how old you are, has always been genetically modified.