One day as I sat with me Mom at her kitchen table, me brother Ed came in with a box of granola bars. They kept granola bars on hand because Mom had taken a liking to them, and the doctor 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 were 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 do 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 enough to put on a package that something has been altered in a presumably questionable manner, how is it not importan to tell me exactly which item was such an offense against God and man? There's a veritable 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, yet you won't say which one was genetically modified? I don't get that at all.
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