From our apostolate, the Dominionists on Facebook.

GENETICS. The modern environmental movement would have you believe that humanity, in the form of large corporations, is now for the first time manipulating plants to bend to what corporations and their consumers want them to be. Monsanto, for example, is blamed for adjusting the genome of beneficial, edible plants to be able withstand its line of weedkillers so that farmers can just spray everything in the row. The argument against this being that the weedkillers, and even the genetic adjustments themselves, increase the triggering of certain diseases, such as cancer, in humans.

Let there be no doubt: they may be right in saying this. To adjust and change the genome of a living creation of God raises more questions than it answers, and it is certainly more than enough to send a chill down the spine of His creations in the human family.

Know, though, that humans have been bending the plant kingdom to benefit ourselves for centuries, indeed millenia. Ever eat a crabapple? It is harder to eat because it has more fiber and less sugar, unpleasant characteristics that mankind bred out of certain varieties of apple so that it would taste and sustain us better–we kept planting and breeding the sweetest ones until the modern varieties emerged.

Even in our lives we have seen it. Cherry tomatoes are tasty and sweet but grape tomatoes are tastier and sweeter so they are crowding out the cherry tomatoes in the produce aisles, and on farms that want to grow what will sell. We have been breeding the more tasty, and often less healthy, varieties for longer than recorded history. Is that bad?

At what point is our manipulation too much? That is a personal opinion. Is the genetic manipulation of the food supply a brand new and shocking development? Not really, it’s just another step along a path we’ve been on for hundreds of years. Is it a step too far? What do you think?