GM foods

A friend of mine asked me what I thought of a particular author's argument against genetically engineered foods, in particular GM corn expressing high levels of bacillus thuringiensis toxin to target particular pests. Here's my response (some points may not make sense without reading the original, but you'll get the picture):

Unfortunately, my motto these days is trust nobody. I don't automatically trust any company. There are plenty of people in companies (including most of their scientists) who are honorable and do their best to make a useful safe product. There are also obviously completely amoral people in companies who don't care about anything whatsoever except money. I also don't trust anti-corporate luddites because they typically indulge in shoddy thinking (as indeed you note multiple instances in this guy's rant against BT). On the other hand, I don't like the idea of eating corn containing large amounts of any bacterial protein as a result of overexpression in the corn cells themselves. I also don't like the idea of eating corn sprayed with neurotoxins, or corn covered in fungus containing neurotoxin because it was not sprayed or engineered. As long as we grow food on huge farms, some kind of technology will be used to keep pests off, and it's all at least somewhat dangerous. The alternative is to watch a big chunk of the world starve to death. As long as human beings are trapped in their genetically evolved "Have to make exponentially more copies of myself" mindset, these things are inevitable.