Bioengineered Granola

As I sat with me Mom at her kitchen table this past Saturday morning, me brother Ed came in with a box of granola bars. They keep granola bars on hand because Mom has taken a liking to them, and the doctor has said to let her eat want she wants so long as she's eating. Granola bars aren't bad for you anyway, right?

Me brother said this new brand he found was very, very good. "Here: try one," Ed tells me, and I do. They are very good, excellent really, especially the apple spice for what that's worth. But as I was too lazy to get my cell phone out of my pocket to read something, uh, substantial while I ate, I began reading the wrapper which the granola bar came in.

That one granola bar, all one inch by three inches by 3/8 of an inch thick, had forty-four, count 'em, 44 ingredients. They ran the gamut from the unpronounceable super long, vaguely Latin word to the simple and almost expected 'salt'. But at the end of the line, set off to itself in its own paragraph, I was informed that the bar 'contains a bioengineered food ingredient'.

I don't really care about that as such. Bioengineering doesn't bother me per se; we've been modifying our foodstuffs in many ways, shapes, and forms for all of human history. What perplexed and upset me was that in all the rambling quasi-nonsense about the forty-four ingredients, they couldn't take a minute to tell me which one was in fact bioengineered.

I mean, come on, now. If it's important to put on a package that something has been altered, how is it not important enough to tell me which item was so callously tampered with? There's a virtual litany of ingredients, foreign and domestic, all crammed onto the back of the wrapper like an eleventh grader trying to cheat on a history test which he must pass to become a senior, yet you won't say which one was genetically modified? I don't get that at all.