I'm a strong believer in the Animal Rights movement, and I feel like a large-scale shift to a plant-based diet would have an incomparably positive effect on global health, on a human level as well as on an environmental level, even leaving ethics completely out of it. More and more people have recognized the benefits over the years, and it's never been easier or more rewarding to make the shift. Even so, as a movement we have a lot to learn about tempering our rhetoric with science, and putting established facts above psuedo-science that we take as fact because it feels like it should be correct.
Of all the things we're off base on, the common vegan stance on GMOs is probably most emblematic of our problems. We cite internet articles, hearsay, and 'studies' whose veracity are somewhere between Dubious and Straight Up Lies, all to advance the narrative that tampering with food's genetic structure is an unnatural act that will likely result in either our early deaths or our minds becoming controlled by the board of Monsanto. Here are 3 things that we're getting wrong.
1) What surprises me about a lot of my fellow vegan friends is how so many are such wonderful and open-minded people when it comes to animal rights, but find extremely dispassionate anti-science stances to take. Whether being immensely against vaccines to the point of insanity, shaming women who choose to get abortions because their reverence for all life extends even to fetuses (despite the damage done to those for whom it's the best choice), or advocacy for baseless 'eastern' or 'holistic' medicines and sciences (AKA Not Medicine and Not Science). I really, really believe that this extends to GMOs as well. We fight so hard advocating the reversal of climate change, but we don't acknowledge that the same percentage of scientists who believe that climate change is real and caused predominately by humanity (about 90-95%) are nearly the same as scientists who believe that GMOs are not inherently dangerous for consumption. We boast about the scientific benefits of a vegan diet, and the carcinogenic and hurtful effects of the standard American diet, but we cherry pick the science we have faith in when it doesn't suit our beliefs.
2) It is unreasonable of us to argue that organic goods are the only nutritious and life-sustaining food on the planet. In a world plagued by starvation and lack of proper soil due in part to the aforementioned climate change, it's really shortsighted of us to tell the world that GMOs, which can create bountiful, fertile nutrition in incomparable numbers for many of those who rely on aid and would not be eating ANYTHING otherwise, should be banned universally. Nobody believes that GMOs taste better than organic plants, but we have a luxury that so many do not, and shouldn't expect many underprivileged people to eat like those more fortunate. A life of predominately GMO plants is still better than one filled with organic, grass fed meat.
3) MOST IMPORTANT: Our fight is NOT WITH GMOs. It is with MONSANTO. GMO does not = Monsanto. Monsanto does not do the evil, manipulative, hungry things it does because GMO's have led them to it like a tempestuous cartoon villain hit by radiation. They do it because American corporations are driven by a sick and all consuming capitalistic desire to expand, conquer and destroy. The idea of changing genetic code to help make plants resilient, or larger, or more nutritious is not an affront against god, but something that doesn't have to be evil in a world nearing 10 billion people. We are actively hurting our cause by making our battles about greed, Roundup, and media manipulation (which is predominately what anti-GMO activists fairly point out), and then saying that it is GMO problem instead of a Monsanto problem. Why is Monsanto the only real force in the GMO game? They're the only ones that have pockets deep enough to shrug off our anti-GMO movement, while better meaning and more progressive startups get crushed by waves of misplaced, bad PR, or are themselves acquired by Monsanto.
I'm not at all suggesting that all vegans share the same logical fallacies, merely identifying extremely common misconceptions that plague our movement. Vegans who believe GMOs are always bad are not bad people, merely caught up on some bad science and bad messaging.
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