The whole panic started in early 1990s when it came down to wanting to take the amount of chemicals out out of foods. Organic farming had been going on since the 1970s, then came along a couple scientist that were looking at making vegetables resistant to glyphosate. This chemical was thought to be harmless to humans, but almost killed any plant, which could make it a good herbicide and less dangerous than most herbicides that were used in commercial farming.
This threatened the organic movement although not new, was picking up steam from a new wave of healthy movements taking over the country at the time. That is when the mud started flinging. The sad part is that organic food has the potential to be a lot worse than anything GM foods. It has lead to several documented breakouts of salmonella. The problem is that if the animal dropping contain the salmonella are used as fertilizer, if they are not pasteurized to a high enough temperature, the bacteria can transfer to the food and machinery used to process the food. Peer-reviewed study after study has shown there is no health benefit to organic food, just an increased price, and worst of all it requires more land to generate the same yield of crops for organic vs non-organic.
GM-Foods are no saints either. New studies find glyphosate is not as harmless as once thought, and weeds growing next to these crops are starting to become resistant, making the herbicide useless.
Oh the actual way they make GM foods is they take the genetic material from a plant they want, and smear in on tungsten and shoot it into a seed and grow the plant and test it, no chemicals added, no viruses, no other things that people made up to scare other people.
