Minister: Everyone is eating GM foods, they just don’t know it
By Charles MaggsFollow @charlesmaggs
Virtually everyone is eating meat from animals that would have been fed with genetically modified food, according to the environment secretary Owen Paterson.
He suggested the time has come for the government to look seriously at the potential benefits of GM, including a much more efficient agriculture sector, in a newspaper interview.
"There's about 160 million hectares of GM being grown around the world," he said.
"There isn't a single piece of meat being served [in a typical London restaurant] where a bullock hasn’t eaten some GM feed. So it's a complete nonsense. But, the humbug! You know, large amounts of GM products are used across Europe."
His admission comes after Downing Street confirmed it is putting pressure on European Union officials to relax rules on the so-called 'Frankenstein Foods'.
Labour tried to introduce tests on GM back in the late 1990s but faced waves of protest, with some GM farms being vandalised. It is now thought the public is less hostile to the idea.
The safety of GM foods has been monitored at European level since 2004 by the European Food Safety Authority.
Every country in the EU reserves the right to legislate on whether or not to ban genetically modified (GM) crops, but the only GM food currently available in the EU is maize.
