For those of us who live in the Bay Area, constantly bombarded by messages around seasonal/local/organic, reading an article about how GMO (genetically modified) corn impacts bourbon can be depressing. It’s something that I have been choosing to ignore up until now.
It is rather shocking there’s not an organic bourbon on the market — and according to the article the only two brands that don’t use GMO ingredients are Four Roses and Wild Turkey. Sigh. Guess that means drinking what we have and being extremely careful about what we buy next.
I hate giving the large seed companies my money — and don’t want to ingest the crap that comes from these grains. It is fascinating to note that it is primarily the international markets that care whether or not there are GMO in the ingredient list, while those in the US are less so.
The article quotes Colin O’Neil, regulatory policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety.
“To assume that the only real risk is contamination of genetic material ignores the fact that these crops by and large either produce an insecticide (which has been shown not to break down in the human gut) or they are engineered to withstand exposure to herbicide.” And farmers are spraying an increasing amount of Roundup and other weed killers as a result of herbicide-resistant “superweeds,” he points out.
Grist has another article about the search for organic spirits - which yielded only Scotch.
/LARC - Carla
