My Morning Chocolate

Image courtesy of www.gobblegreen.com, "articles about a cruelty-free lifestyle"

I try to be a responsible, environmental eater, I really do. I eat moderate amounts of fish.  I buy local whenever I can and organic sometimes.  I have canvas bags for my groceries, and I even remember to bring them with me most of the time.  But I read something the other day that made me very angry.  I think I might have yelled, or cursed in a normal tone at least, at the words on my computer screen.  Much later, I realized that I misunderstood the article completely. 

But first what I read was this:  Green Lifestyle Magazine says that to be as environmentally-conscious as possible, we need to give up soy too. (See page 2 of the link.)

Now they didn’t write this exact sentence.  But after my first reading, I thought this was the gist of the article.  You see, the magazine reports, Monsanto grows 90% of the soy in the U.S. and it’s all genetically modified (GMO).

The Institute for Responsible Biotechnology has links to a slew of studies, all excerpted from Jeffrey Smith’s Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically-Engineered Foods, that prove that eating GMO foods is a health risk – animal subjects (mostly rats, it seems) fed GMO products have suffered through bleeding stomachs, liver cell problems, and pancreas problems, become sterile, and even died.  (Which brings up questions about animal testing, but I’m not touching that one today.)

I suppose a part of me always knew this.  But I love soy.  I use soy milk in my coffee; I eat soy products at least once a day.  Just two days ago, I had a lovely pasta dinner with tofu and soybeans, and the night before Kenny used soy sausage in his famous curry dish. If I didn’t have soy, I would be a crying, pissed off, frantic lunatic. My emotions would just be seeping out of my body, and they would all be ugly.

But it was not until I started researching for this blog entry that I realized I missed Green Lifestyle Magazine‘s point entirely.  There is something we can do about GMO soy:  we can buy non-GMO soy, which actually doesn’t seem to be that hard.

The Institute for Responsible Technology has compiled a non-GMO shopping guide full of companies who do not use genetically modified products.  There’s more of them than you would think like the 365 brand at Whole Foods, Amy’s, and Vitasoy.

So eating non-GMO soy products isn’t exactly a life-shattering change.  We all can be more environmentally-conscious, decrease our health risks, and still have our vegetarian protein too, easily.