GN Commentary: October 26, 2009 - Smart Chickens

Take the time to learn from your Bible what God says about the food on your table.

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Video Transcript

How smart are your chickens—and I don't mean the Kentucky Fried variety?

As reported recently in the Sunday Independent of South Africa, the indigenous African chickens owned by Strilli Oppenheimer displayed a remarkable fowl insight.  Her head gardener Dawid Klopper brought her news that the birds were refusing to eat the maize in the chicken food. 

Maize in America is called corn.

After testing at the University of the Free State the maize was found to be genetically modified, containing BTI (natural bacterial insecticide) and Roundup weed killer.

This is just another episode in the very much ongoing controversy about whether genetically modified foods are safe for human consumption.

GMOs (genetically modified organisms) began to first be developed twenty five years ago. The craze gathered steam in the United States, but soon ran into heavy scientific and consumer resistance elsewhere.

Many of those who oppose genetically modified foods claim that enough testing for long term safety has not been done.  They charge that the GMO rush to market has been a rush to profit for seed and agri-chemical companies.

Yet the GMO companies counter that their products will produce considerably more food of earth's burgeoning population—and that those foods are safe for consumption.

So far many health experts are not convinced. 

Hungarian-born protein scientist Dr. Arpad Pusztai has been a leading critic of genetically engineered crops. In a recent article he criticized the GMO industry for using a questionable safety benchmark called “substantial equivalence”.

Substantial equivalence means that the genetically modified plant is close enough to the parent line to appear safe. This is based on the idea that man can engineer gene-splicing with the exact precision with which the DNA would duplicate itself.

There's a logical flaw in that reasoning—very likely overlooked by even many anti-GMO experts and proponents.  This flaw is the assumption that man can manipulate life forms as well as, or better than God who created them.

Man is himself a remarkable part of the creation, but man is not the Creator. Whenever humanity has tried to play God, they have won no Academy Awards—not one!

Take the time to learn from your Bible what God says about the food on your table.  Do that, and you'll be even wiser than Strilli Oppenheimer's South African chickens—and they're smart!

For GN magazine, I'm Randy Stiver.