I don’t remember exactly when all the goods in supermarkets suddenly got “GMO Free” stickers. I generally try not to remember any bullshit and unimportant crap (I’m sorry).But I will remember this day for a long time. Today, for the first time, I personally encountered genetically modified organisms and the very first meeting almost cost me my life…
History.
As a person who rarely watches TV, I learned about the hysteria around genetically modified foods, or rather guessed a couple of months ago, looking at a strange sticker on a pack of my favorite cookies. “GMO free” – what does that mean?! Did they cut the recipe down again and didn’t add something delicious?
Although, it is unlikely that a tasty product or ingredient will never be called such a dissonant word. I don’t know about you, but for me the sound combination “gmo” is clearly associated (or rhymes) with “schmuck”. So GMs (plural of GMOs) are probably not tasty and maybe even unhealthy. Exactly! This is something harmful – I remembered the humorous stickers “No cholesterol” on bottles of sunflower oil.I didn’t even have to surf the Internet to find out what was going on. The wife came up and explained that the country was in a fever from genetically modified hysteria. I laughed – I, too, found something to be afraid of. We live in such a harmful world that a little more plutonium in a bowl of porridge will not change anything.The very idea of mass panic seemed artificial to me. Most likely, I thought, it was some food producers who decided to promote cheaply and launched the “topic” to the masses. And although the recent (in November 2009) psychosis around the flu and gauze bandages taught me a lot, nevertheless, deep down, I continued to believe in the sound mind and sobriety of the domestic buyer. When I saw the “GMO-Free” sticker on a packet of salt or a bag of synthetic vanillin, I smiled again and again, and assumed that other buyers did the same.
Battle for the mind.
Today I was brought to the Gardener-Ogorodnik store – the neighbors in the dacha asked to buy some kind of insecticide. I stand in line, take a picture of a bottle with a funny price tag – “NAPALM, 300 ml, 72 hryvnias.” At the same time, I look around to see if they sell hexogen or at least nitroglycerin in barrels in the next department.The queue is small, but slow – people are buying up seeds for the upcoming summer gardening season. They ask the saleswoman for a long time about the yield of tomatoes, the sugar content of beets and ask her to recommend a variety of small cucumbers (hmm).And suddenly a signal of danger penetrates through my information filters – several buyers in a row, formulating requirements for planting material, insert “no genetic mutations, please.” This was done, usually, at the end of the conversation, in a confidentially intimate half-whisper, and in all seriousness.You can probably guess by now how I reacted. The impeccable psychological defense system worked perfectly – I laughed. Also quiet, but apparently not enough. A sizzling look, knitted eyebrows and not a single word, that’s what the ugly boy with a camera (your obedient servant) was awarded.And although there was no real threat in everything that was happening (I was a little cunning in the announcement of the article), I caught the “smell of fried” coming from the distant future in the corner of my consciousness. Its source was huge bonfires for the preventive burning of sorcerers, witches and genetic scientists.
Mythological denouement.
I again and again discover the fact that the majority of the population perceives science at the level of a medieval layman. Like, this is such a powerful magic that can miraculously make a person the king of the world, but if the genies (for example Maxwell’s demon) will get out of control – tryndets to humanity, fiery hell and “2012” with “The Day After Tomorrow”.This, of course, is true, but it confuses me that it is formulated in a mythological vein, with the deification of natural phenomena and scientific terms. The new FORMULA will make your hair shiny… and kill all germs. It is the formula – like this, she will take and personally kill all the microorganisms known to her.Perhaps this is not even the Middle Ages, but some primitive communal system. The admin shamanizes with the grid, the analyst predicts the demand for products (by the flight of birds), and a simple person taps on the TV (plasma and lampless, respectively) or with his foot on the tire of a Chinese small car in the hope that IT will work.Probably in the last century, humanity “re-read” science fiction, “ate too much” of popular science programs and pushed too tightly into universities. Science went to the masses and dissolved in them…Kirill Yasko. April 13, 2010.P.S. The level of “social order” for science is well illustrated by the programs of the Discovery channel.P.P.S. To keep me in the mood, I recommend reading the article by Leonid Kaganov “I want to eat genetically modified foods” . It turns out that everything I tried to say today was wonderfully done 2 years ago.All photos used in this article are not the creations of crazy geneticists, but of funny photoshoppers who participated in the contest Plantimals on the Worth1000 website .