EDMONTON - If you, like many consumers, shop for food in the middle aisles of the grocery store where processed foods fill the shelves, you are likely buying products that contain genetically modified ingredients.

Yet you probably arent aware which products contain which modified ingredients, since in Canada there are no requirements that GM foods be labelled. Nor are you likely aware why and how the ingredients have been modified.

And, no doubt, youre unsure if it matters.

Genetic modification has been a polarizing issue since genetically modified seeds were first approved and planted in Canada in the mid-1990s. But with consumers increasingly keen to know where their food comes from, the topic of whats in their food is also attracting renewed attention.

I think people are genuinely interested in their food, says Ellen Goddard, a University of Alberta economist who studies consumer response to new technologies. Something about the GM debate has intrigued them. They want to know more about how their food is produced.

She adds: Consumers will almost always say they want more information.

Genetically modified organisms, popularly known as GMOs, are created when the genetic code is altered to either express a desirable trait or supress or remove an undesirable one. At its heart, genetic engineering is a short cut that speeds up the work of selective breeding, work that has been going on for centuries, but at a slower pace indeed, nearly every food crop grown today has been modified through this older process. Much of the opposition to genetic engineering of foods is focused on the practice of inserting genetic code from one organism into another, which cannot happen under natural circumstances.

Its this idea of mutant food forms that first spawned the Frankenfood nickname back in the 1990s.

The reality is only a few actual crops are genetically modified, but because they are widely used, they appear in many food products. The only GM crops grown in Canada are corn, soy, canola and sugar beets. But those crops are used in animal feed and as ingredients in thousands of processed foods on our grocery shelves. According to the Grocery Manufacturers Association, up to 75 per cent of conventional processed foods in a typical supermarket contain ingredients dervied from GMOs.

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Fields of gold ... or plains of ruin? The debate over genetically modified seeds in Alberta rages on