Photographer : Darren Wood |
So this wonderfully inspiring story begins with me sitting at my computer in the Inspire office researching for my fact sheet on GM Foods, which you should go read if you haven’t already. You would think that I would feel more and more informed as the day went on, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I didn’t know before I started researching! Once I began to get over that shock and build my confidence with the knowledge of the issue, I stumbled upon this website and downloaded what they call the True Food Guide. Ahh yes, the True Food Guide. This book lists all the foods that are currently manipulated genetically, the ones that are currently GM and in the process of switching back to non GM, and the foods that are GM free. So here I am thinking that I have a really good understanding of GM foods and the effects etc, then I start to read this book… I could not believe how many foods and brands are GM! I was in an utter state of shock! Almost everything that I had been eating was genetically modified. I felt so deceived. After I recovered from shock I ran around the office showing this book to people to see their reaction, and it was pretty similar to mine so at least I wasn’t the only one who was in the dark! That experience motivated me to try to live GM-free for a week, just to start and then hopefully keep it up for longer. That was the beginning of my horrible failure…
I always here people talking about living green, and going organic and it just sounds so easy. Let me tell you…it’s not! First of all, I kept forgetting I was supposed to be eating non GM foods. You just get into these habits and they are very difficult to break. So that was a major barrier. The next problem I ran into was that I really didn’t know what was GM or not, even with the True Food Guide, which by the way I had to carry with me everywhere and was not too convenient. Just imagine standing in the grocery store, and looking up everything you pick up in a book only to find that it’s GM. This was very time consuming and frustrating. I also tended to forget to bring my book with me sometimes and in that case, I was searching every corner of a food package to see if there was a GM label (which many didn’t have even though they were in the True Food Guide). So you might think why didn’t I just go to the organic food store? Well, I’m on a money budget as well as a time budget and going to the organic food store just didn’t fit into either of my budgets. Let’s be honest here, when I get home from work, I don’t want to trudge my starving self to the organic food store oh so far away, when Coles and Bi-Lo are literally across the street. Okay, I could have put more effort into my GM free week, but the reality of it is that I didn’t want to. Living green should make me feel better, not be an agonizing way of life. So I quit.
Happy ending right? Well, it actually is because I learned a lot that week. I learned about my values, and how much passion I need to complete an action. I did become very much aware of which foods are GM from studying the Food Book, and I feel weird eating something I know for sure is GM. Maybe after a while of being at this stage I will take the initiative to go the next step and eat organic foods more often. If I had a choice in front of me to eat GM or GM free, I would without a doubt go with GM free so I think that is a form of success from this experiment. Also throughout this process I wouldn’t shut up about GM foods for about 4 days straight and I still point out if a product someone is eating is GM, yea my friends got really annoyed with me but now they are aware too! :)
I suggest people should give it a try and see how their GM free week turns out! And let me know how it goes!
Oh and you might want to take a look at this:
http://www.greenpeace.org.au/truefood/guide2.html
