Cornucopia’s Take: Our colleagues at the Organic Consumers Association are looking for help in finding the GMO apples released into Midwest grocery stores. The apples have been genetically modified not to brown. The anti-browning gene adds nothing nutritionally. Rather it is a marketer’s dream, allowing a long shelf life for apples you wouldn’t eat if you saw the browning. Consumers have the right to know. Let’s find out where they are.
GMO Apples Hit Store Shelves This Week—but Where?
Organic Consumers Association
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This month, up to 400 Midwest grocery stores started quietly testing packages of sliced “Arctic Apple” GMO apples.
Intrexon, the company marketing the apples, won’t tell us which stores are selling them.
The company also won’t label its apples “GMO” because, according to Intrexon’s CEO: “We didn’t want to put ‘GMO’ and a skull and crossbones on the package.”
TAKE ACTION: Help us find the GMO apples! Join the scavenger hunt, November 7 – December 1, to locate the stores selling GMO apples. Sign up here and we’ll send you instructions, talking points, etc.
Don’t live in the Midwest? Please forward this to friends and family who do!
The Arctic Apple is one of the first GMOs to be marketed directly to consumers instead of farmers. It was created for purely cosmetic purposes to never brown, no matter how old or rotten it is.
In other words, it’s completely unnecessary.
It’s also risky. The Arctic Apple was developed using a technology that many scientists worry may have unintended, negative consequences—for our health, and the environment.
So why make a GMO apple that consumers don’t need or want? To generate profits for companies like Intrexon.
And guess what? If consumers, many of them unaware they’re buying a GMO product, buy enough of these apples, and generate enough profits for Intrexon, it could open the floodgates to other new risky and unlabeled GMO foods that Big Ag wants to force onto your plate.
The only way to show companies like Intrexon that we don’t want their GMO apples is to not buy them—and convince grocery stores to not sell them.
But first, we have to find them.
TAKE ACTION: Help us find the GMO apples! Join the scavenger hunt, November 7 – December 1, to locate the stores selling GMO apples. Sign up here and we’ll send you instructions, talking points, etc.
This action is simple. Next time you shop, all you have to do is look around for packages of these sliced apples. Ask your grocery store manager if your store carries the packages of Arctic Apple or plans to carry them. Then let us know.
We’ll send you everything you need, including instructions for how to identify the Arctic Apple and what to say to your store manager. Thank you!
