Collective Evolution, Jeff Roberts, January 8,
2014
Another GMO
victory achieved! Due to pressure from the major anti-GMO movement that has been
spreading, General Mills has officially announced that their original Cheerios
will now be GMO-free.
According
to General Mills, oats, the main ingredient, are not genetically modified in
any case. It’s the corn starch and the sugar that will have to change. In
addition, Cheerios is commonly used by parents as an early finger food for
babies, since the little O’s soften quickly in a child’s mouth, requiring no
real chewing. And parents want to feel that their children’s foods are as safe
as possible; genetically engineered foods don’t fit that definition by many
people’s reckoning. So General Mills is catering to a particular segment of the
market.
Check out
some of our previous articles relating to GMO’s:
- New Study Links GMOs To Gluten Disorders That Affect 18 Million Americans
- Former Canadian Government Genetic Scientist Speaks Out Against GMOs
- Geneticist David Suzuki Says Humans “Are Part Of A Massive Experiment”
Last year, Whole Foods became the first national grocery chain to require all of its suppliers to label all products that contain GMO’s by 2018. In the past year, Chipotle announced plans to phase out GMO’s and Kashi is also is taking action to phase out GMO’s.
This kind
of move could mean big things for the future of the GMO debate considering
General Mills is one of the first major companies to make this sort of change.
“This is a
big deal,” says Todd Larsen, corporate responsibility director at Green
America, a green economy activist group. “Cheerios is an iconic brand and one
of the leading breakfast cereals in the U.S.” What’s more, he adds, “we don’t
know of any other example of such a major brand of packaged food, eaten by so
many Americans, going from being GMO to non-GMO.”
Unfortunately
however, General Mills has no plans to phase out GMO’s from its other cereals
in the U.S., even though most Cheerios varieties sold in Europe are made without
GMO’s. “For our other (non-organic) cereals, the widespread use of GM seed in
crops such as corn, soy, or beet sugar would make reliably moving to non-GM
ingredients difficult, if not impossible,” says the company, in a statement.
With the
anti-GMO movement continuing to spread
through various mediums such as the March Against Monsanto, hopefully this is
only the first of many GMO-free achievements to be seen in the coming era of
nutrition liberation.
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