The genetic modification of agricultural crops has been a point of contention in the public dialectic regarding consumer safety for decades. Illumination of the controversy over the potential health risks of genetically-modified organisms (or GMOs in colloquial terms), as well as opposition to the unscrupulous practices of the agribusiness sector promoting their use, has been a pillar of the natural foods grocery industry’s code of ethics since the genesis of both movements in the 1970s. Genetic modification as applied to agriculture refers to a biotechnological process wherein genes from a given species of plant or animal are transferred to the genome of another plant or animal in order to theoretically confer certain benefits to the hybridized organism, a technique developed in the laboratory in 1973 by geneticists Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen, originally using bacteria as their experimental subjects. Since then, the biotechnology of genetic modification has rapidly complexified and its industrial application has expanded significantly under the auspices of federally-funded research grants and an intimately-interwoven public relations promotional apparatus. The first genetically-modified consumer product approved for public use was human insulin, designed to treat diabetes and greenlit by the FDA in 1986; and the first edible GMO produce approved by federal agencies for inclusion in the human diet was a genetically-modified tomato brought to market in 1994. Over the course of the intervening three decades, the selection of lab-developed GMO crops available for distribution in agricultural markets expanded to include cotton, soybeans, alfalfa, corn, potatoes, sugar beets, wheat and canola, among others. The research and development of these synthetically-bred crops has been embedded since its inception in a corporate landscape typified by dishonesty and coercion and notorious in the public consciousness for eschewing impartial analysis and rigorous safety testing in lieu of loaded clinical trials and aggressive agricultural marketing strategies designed to push product onto an unwilling consumer.

The GMO industry can be understood as an offshoot of the ‘Green Revolution’ of the Twentieth Century, the corporate mechanization or industrialization of agriculture following the Second World War pioneered by such dubiously-reputable organizations as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. During this time, corporations manufacturing chemicals for the weapons industry shifted their focus from war profiteering to agricultural innovation, applying chemical technologies originally developed for warfare to growing food. The most widely-popularized example of such corporate re-branding is the by now well-known story of the Monsanto Corporation, the manufacturer of the defoliant Agent Orange, made infamous during the Vietnam Conflict. Following the war, Monsanto transitioned their business model into agricultural biotechnologies, introducing the now similarly-infamous herbicide Roundup to agricultural markets in 1974 and pioneering the research and development of genetically-modified crops over the course of the ensuing decades. In most cases, genetically-modified crops are designed to function biologically in synergy with the agricultural chemicals produced by these corporations, as in the case of Monsanto’s line of “Roundup Ready” seeds, genetically altered to be resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, the active chemical ingredient in Roundup. Unfortunately, the saturation of the market with herbicide-resistant seeds dramatically altered the modern agricultural landscape, leading to a fifteen-fold increase in the use of glyphosate between 1994 and 2005 and shifting standard practices in the direction of a heavily chemical-dependent industry that environmentalist and GMO activist Vandana Shiva calls the “corporate monoculture,” a system characterized by “mass standardization and dependence on corporate products.” This radical departure from traditional agricultural models, introduced on a large scale within only the past three decades, has had the startling effect of significantly denuding much of the soil base in heavily-monocultured regions and radically impacting biodiversity in these areas. Furthermore, the GMO seeds produced and distributed by the agritech industry are often innately sterile and/or patented as technological products, thus prohibiting farmers from legally saving and replanting seeds from year-to-year and further deepening their practical and financial dependence on the corporate monoculture.

The body of knowledge in terms of health risks to the human organism associated with the consumption of genetically-modified crops has been characterized by inconsistent and often contradictory clinical results, with the majority of research funded by the agritechnology corporations themselves, a clear conflict of interest that has generated legitimate concern over the deliberate obfuscation of unbiased analysis of GMO safety and efficacy. Analysts such as F. William Engdahl have clearly illustrated the troubling “revolving door” arrangement between the agritech industry and the food safety administrations in both Europe and America, with executives from corporations producing GMO seed regularly assuming positions within the legislative bodies responsible for reviewing the products’ safety and approving their commercial distribution. For example, more than half of the scientists composing the panel responsible for authorizing the introduction of GMO corn to European markets in 2009 had ties to the agritech industry, and a thorough critique of the available medical literature would be hard-pressed to identify a large-scale study on GMO safety and efficacy that is not overtly (or covertly) linked to funding from the GMO industry. Genetically-modified organisms and the chemical products associated with their use have been implicated as a correlative factor in the development of an alarming array of health conditions from endocrine disruptions affecting fertility and birth complications to a dizzying variety of cancers, however hard conclusions confirming causation in the progression of such diseases has been elusive due to the murky atmosphere of GMO research and legislation. That being said, there have been clearly-defined mechanisms of disease progression associated with GMO consumption illustrated by impartial researchers, primarily related to intestinal and immune function. Functional medicine practitioner and researcher Chris Kresser identifies Bt-toxin, a genetic component of GMO corn and cotton derived from the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis, as a potent disruptor of endothelial integrity in the gut lining of the intestines. Kresser explains that “Bt-toxin kills insects that eat the plant by breaking down its gut lining and killing the insect from septicemia caused by the ensuing blood infection,” essentially causing a fatal form of Leaky Gut Syndrome. While Bt-toxin has not been conclusively proven to cause the same degree of disruption to the human gut, a sufficient body of clinical evidence suggests that the fundamental mechanism of endothelial degradation associated with Bt-toxin does affect gut-mediated immune function in human cells in vitro, suggesting a strong correlation between such genetically-modified organisms and the development of metabolic endotoxemia or intestinal permeability, an underlying condition implicated in the development of nearly all chronic inflammatory and autoimmune conditions. This correlation could explain, at least in part, the simultaneity of the introduction of GMOs to the human diet in the mid-1990s and the ensuing explosion of autoimmunity in human populations, particularly in developed Western societies that have seen widespread application of agricultural biotechnologies and in which up to 60-70% of commercially-available processed foods contain GMO ingredients.

Considering the equivocal nature of the extant body of research regarding genetically-modified crops and the burden of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence suggesting a safety profile that is questionable at best, it is objectively in the consumer’s best interest to avoid these biotechnological products wherever and whenever possible. Fortunately, making the informed choice to remove GMOs from one’s diet has been made significantly more straightforward through the efforts of organic certifications and non-profit organizations such as the Non-GMO Project, who have created and maintained an exhaustive documentation of genetically-modified crops and their derivatives as well as a legal framework for clearly identifying and labeling products containing them, often in spite of significant corporate and regulatory opposition. When shopping, look for the Non-GMO Project’s butterfly logo to ensure that your purchases do not contain hidden or concealed sources of genetically-modified ingredients. Of course, the natural foods grocery industry has been a bastion of liberated discourse and education regarding the ubiquity of these controversial crops and ingredients in the landscape of contemporary Western food systems since GMOs were initially introduced to market in the 1990s, and to this day your local natural grocer remains the most trusted and reliable source of certified non-GMO produce and prepared foods available in your community, wherever you may be. Here in northern New Mexico, Cid’s Food Market has been providing Taos and surrounding communities with certified organic and non-GMO options as an alternative to the “corporate monoculture” since 1986. As globalized food production and distribution systems drift ever further from their grounded roots in traditional agriculture and become progressively more synthetic and digitized in the coming century, locally-owned and community-oriented businesses with proven integrity like Cid’s will only become more relevant as priceless resources for the people who rely on them for access to traceable and genetically-unaltered foods in an increasingly unpredictable global food market.

SOURCES

1) Todhunter, C., 2012, Genetic Engineering and the GMO Industry: Corporate Hijacking of Food and Agriculture

2) Engdahl, W.F., 2007, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

3) Kresser, C., 2012, Are GMOs Safe?, https://chriskresser.com/are-gmos-safe/

4) The Non-GMO Project, https://www.nongmoproject.org/

The latest addition to the spread of all-natural and grass-fed meats provided by the Cid’s Food Market butcher counter is the 100% Black Angus beef sourced from Creekstone Farms, headquartered in Arkansas City, Kansas. Creekstone Farms was originally founded in 1995 by John and Carol Stewart as a family-owned ranch in Campbellsburg, Kentucky specializing in raising purebred Black Angus cattle, a Scottish breed prized for producing beef of exceptional culinary quality. The company expanded into large-scale meat processing in 2003 and currently sources and processes premium Black Angus beef and Duroc pork from family farms and ranches throughout the midwestern United States. Renowned in culinary circles for the unsurpassed hand-selected excellence of their meats, what nevertheless sets Creekstone apart from their competitors in the industry is their unique commitment to exceptionally-stringent standards of animal welfare. This ethical standard culminated in the company enlisting the services of animal behaviorist Dr. Temple Grandin in designing their single-plant meat processing facility in Kansas, the first of its kind in the nation to be built from the ground-up optimized for animal welfare at all stages of operation.

Dr. Temple Grandin is an associate professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University, where she has specialized in researching the humane handling of livestock for nearly thirty years, in addition to being a prolific and outspoken academic voice in furthering the understanding of autism spectrum disorder, with which Dr. Grandin was formally diagnosed in her mid-teens. Over sixty of her research papers have been published in academic journals such as the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association and the Annual Review of Animal Biosciences, including titles such as “Factors That Impede Animal Movement at Slaughter Plants” (1996) and “Making Slaughterhouses More Humane for Cattle, Pigs, and Sheep” (2013). Beyond her contributions to academic literature, she has authored sixteen books of popular science on both animal welfare and autism spectrum research; some of her best known titles include Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals and The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Aspberger’s.

Dr. Grandin has leveraged her unique perspective on neurodivergence in the human mind to better understand and anticipate the needs of the animal mind, motivated by what she perceives as a shared understanding of “the anxiety of feeling threatened by everything in my surroundings.” The practical applications of her research in the invention of new equipment and methodologies for use in the meat-processing industry have been guided by her intuitive understanding informed by her experience as a person on the autism spectrum, which she describes as a feeling akin to viewing reality through the livestock animal’s eyes. This unique perspective led her to develop a variety of technologies designed to reduce panic and anxiety in animals being led to slaughter, including a curved corral system, non-slip entrance ramps, and solid false floors, among others. All of these technologies are integrated in her patented center track, or double rail, conveyor restraint system, wherein livestock are held and transported through the final stages of slaughter in such a way that maximizes physical comfort and ensures their nervous systems remain as undisturbed as possible throughout the process. These systems have been fundamental to the design of Creekstone Farms’ single-plant animal-processing facility in Kansas since its inception, in addition to the company’s strict prohibition of crates, cages, cattle prods, and tie stalls. Furthermore, the facility and the farms it serves are routinely subject to thorough auditing to ensure the animals processed there are optimally-tended and relaxed throughout their lives.

The effects of panic and anxiety, and the stress hormones these emotional reactions produce, significantly alter the biochemical landscape in the mammalian body, and livestock animals are no exception. High levels of cortisol released by the adrenal glands in a stressful slaughter environment deplete glycogen reserves and acidify the animal’s musculature through the conversion of glycogen to lactic acid, causing a condition known in the industry as DCB (an acronym for “dark cutting beef”). Dark cutting beef from a stressed livestock animal yields a final product with a noticeably darker color and firmer texture, in addition to retaining more water, thereby drastically reducing the meat’s culinary value. Furthermore, in terms of food safety, DCB has a significantly shorter shelf life and is far more prone to bacterial spoilage than meat produced by a calm animal raised and slaughtered in optimal conditions. A study conducted in Germany in 2023 concluded that livestock slaughtered directly on the farm tested for blood cortisol levels twenty times below animals slaughtered in an abattoir, confirming the profound influence of stress hormones on meat quality, flavor, and tenderness. As such, Creekstone Farms’ sterling reputation among culinary professionals is undoubtedly due in large part to their investment in Dr. Grandin’s philosophy and methodology.

When it comes to raising and slaughtering animals for human consumption, consideration for the animals’ innate behaviors and ways of moving in relationship with the world around them are of paramount consequence. This is evident not only from an objective observational perspective, but confirmed through years of data gathered by researchers such as Dr. Grandin. The downstream effects of the way an animal is cared for throughout its life and up to the very moment of slaughter impacts not only the nutritional profile and preservability of the meat it produces, but also significantly alters its flavor and enjoyability from a culinary perspective. As such, it is plain that ranchers and meat processors benefit in the long term by prioritizing their animals’ well-being, rather than callously disregarding them as abusable property in the name of maximizing production and profitability (a subject thoroughly elaborated in Dr. Grandin’s essay Animals Are Not Things). Creekstone Farms has proven themselves a pioneer in the ethical treatment of livestock animals in terms of respecting their agency as living beings, as the first large-scale meat processor in the United States to prioritize animal welfare as a foundational pillar of their production model. This mold-breaking awareness has handsomely rewarded the company with an unparalleled reputation of culinary quality among consumers, as well as set a new standard of demand in the meat-processing industry regarding the humane handling of animals raised for consumption. The ripple effect of this devotion to moral fortitude in the food industry is being felt to the present day as the landscape of our models of production and consumption continue to shift, with significant credit due to iconoclastic organizations such as Creekstone Farms. Armed with the knowledge of the effects our food choices have on our health and on the quality of our lives, we can take control of our own bodies and the systems we rely on to nourish them by choosing food that prioritizes quality over profit and ethical consistency over mass production. Taste the difference for yourself by sampling Creekstone Farms’ Black Angus beef at the Cid’s Food Market butcher counter.

May 23rd, 2025

Those of us who closely scrutinize nutrition facts and ingredients lists may have noticed on recent visits to Cid’s Food Market that the prepared foods in the grab-and-go section have begun substituting avocado oil for safflower oil. While such a minor detail may at first seem innocuous, this simple shift in ingredients represents a much deeper story tying together the chronic disease epidemic with maleficent corporate influence in the food industry. Furthermore, this easily-overlooked decision highlights the commitment of Cid’s Food Market to supporting the health of the Taos community in direct opposition to cheap industrial food products that have been economically incentivized by unscrupulous corporate interests.

In order to properly frame this discussion, we must cast ourselves back in time to the dawn of the modern food industry. Prior to the industrial revolution, ancestral human diets typically contained up to ten times as much fat as a modernized Western diet, primarily in the form of saturated animal fats and monounsaturated fruit oils (e.g. olive, avocado, and palm oils). Contrary to conventional wisdom, these fats are highly stable and serve critical functions for human health. Lest we forget, Homo sapiens evolved throughout Earth’s most recent glacial period, or Ice Age, and thus relied heavily on animal fats as a source of calories and nutrients during the exceedingly harsh conditions of that time in our planet’s history. In fact, our consumption of saturated animal fat is at least partially responsible for the biologically-unprecedented explosion in brain growth and neurological complexity that occurred in our evolutionary history throughout this time. After all, the brain itself is essentially composed of fat.

A broad variety of foods that are common in present-day post-industrial diets were virtually absent from the diets of paleolithic and pre-industrial humanity throughout most of our evolutionary history, including most grains, legumes, and dairy products. Among these late additions to the human diet are the oils of hard seeds such as rapeseed (the source of canola oil), cottonseed, and safflower seed, as well as oils pressed from grains and legumes such as corn and soybeans. The seeds these oils are sourced from are prohibitively difficult to process and digest, rendering them inedible to humans and precluding them from viability as a source of nutrition for pre-technological societies. In order to extrude anything resembling nutrition from these highly-inedible plant sources, the modern food industry must heat the seeds to extremely high temperatures (thus oxidizing the delicate unsaturated fatty acids therein) and process them with petroleum-based solvents such as hexane to maximize oil extraction; furthermore, the processed and oxidized seeds are then chemically deodorized to neutralize their powerful odor (thus producing trans fats, which have been associated with a myriad of exhaustively-documented health risks).

One would be justified in questioning how on Earth such an objectionable source of anti-nutrients became so commonplace in American kitchens. That story begins in Cincinnati, Ohio in the 1870s, when William Proctor and James Gamble began using cottonseed oil in their soap-making business; at the time, cottonseed oil was considered a toxic byproduct of the lamp oil industry, which had recently been supplanted by the widespread use of petroleum. Being enterprising young entrepeneurs, Proctor and Gamble discovered that cottonseed oil could be further rendered into a “solid cooking fat resembling lard” through a chemical process called hydrogenation, thus leading to the introduction of Crisco to American markets at the turn of the twentieth century. Over the course of the following several decades, following Proctor and Gamble’s lead, a variety of seed oils that were originally industrial byproducts were re-branded as sources of cheap cooking oil due to their exceptionally low cost of production. Clever marketing strategies were employed by the industrial manufacturers producing these oils in order to promote their use in American homes, in order to overcome the reality that these industrial seeds are alien to the human diet and were hitherto-unprecedented in culinary use.

In the 1940s, Proctor & Gamble (by this time a multi-million dollar corporation) proffered a generous $1.5 million donation to the fledgling American Heart Association, thus funding the rapid expansion of the AHA’s profile in American public health while ensuring the nascent organization would remain beholden to the economic interests of its most generous benefactor by promoting the use of seed oils with carefully-designed scientific research claiming benefits for cardiovascular health. This development coincided with the publication of Ancel Keys’ dietary lipid hypothesis in the medical literature, claiming a correlation between saturated fat and cholesterol consumption and the rising incidence of heart disease in America at that time. Keys’ conclusions have since been thoroughly refuted and his research methods heavily criticized by fellow cardiologists; regardless, his debunked dietary lipid hypothesis has enjoyed widespread circulation among politicized medical-industrial circles to the present day, in spite of the fact that no controlled double-blind clinical trial designed in the intervening seven decades since its publication has succeeded in confirming the correlation between cholesterol and heart disease.

The fundamental metabolic problem with the consumption of industrial seed oils primarily concerns the human body’s requirement of a delicately-balanced ratio of essential omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, polyunsaturated fats that the human body does not produce on its own and must necessarily source through diet. As Chris Kresser, internationally-recognized authority on functional medicine and ancestral nutrition, succinctly summarizes, “Upon consumption, omega-6 fatty acids give rise to arachidonic acid and potent metabolites that are primarily pro-inflammatory in nature, including prostaglandin E2 and leukotriene B4. Omega-3 fatty acids like ALA, EPA, and DHA, on the other hand, give rise to anti-inflammatory derivatives.” Ancestral human diets typically maintained a balanced one-to-one ratio between omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids, thereby sustaining an optimal cellular homeostasis; however in modern post-industrial diets that ratio is often grotesquely disproportionate, in some cases to a factor of ten or even twenty-to-one. Such a severely skewed fatty acid ratio triggers a pro-inflammatory cascade in human tissues that contributes to a dizzying variety of chronic inflammatory conditions from heart disease to multiple sclerosis.

In modern Western diets, the most concentrated sources of high-dose omega-6 fatty acids are the industrial seed oils. These oils are used ubiquitously throughout the food industry, in practically all restaurants and a vast majority of packaged foods, and thus are among the primary contributors to the chronic inflammatory and autoimmune disease epidemic that is silently exploding throughout the world. Furthermore, the highly-unstable molecular structure of industrial seed oils renders them extremely sensitive to heat and light and prone to degradation when exposed to these environmental influences, in the process producing trans fats and lipid peroxides. Chris Kresser once more explains, “Trans fats are well known for their role in the development of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes; in fact, for every 2 percent increase in calories from trans fats, your risk from heart disease is nearly doubled! Lipid peroxides, on the other hand, are toxic byproducts that damage DNA, proteins, and membrane lipids throughout the body. The accumulation of lipid peroxides in the body promotes aging and the development of chronic diseases.”

Needless to say, industrial seed oils have no place in a biologically-optimal, evolutionarily-oriented human diet, and their over-representation in modern Western culinary use has not occurred organically, but rather been dishonestly manufactured by profit-driven agribusinesses and marketed by a captured medical industry. The sad truth is that many food producers and restaurant owners are persuaded to make use of these industrial byproducts-turned-staple crops through cost-benefit analysis, motivated by profit over a genuine desire to provide healthful food that is aligned with our evolutionary development. However, in the words of a close friend and mentor, when it comes to food, “You either pay now, or pay later.” Cid’s Food Market is demonstrating itself to be one of the rare businesses that prioritizes the wellbeing of its community over the proffered path of least resistance provided by the profit-mongers of the corporate food conglomerates. In this critical period of reflection and shifting paradigms in food and medicine, this is a principled choice that will be counted on the right side of history.

SOURCES

1) Kresser, C., 2019, How Industrial Seed Oils Are Making Us Sick, https://chriskresser.com/how-industrial-seed-oils-are-making-us-sick/

2) Gedgaudas, N., 2012, Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and a Longer Life

3) Fallon, S., 2023, Wise Traditions Podcast #406 – Avoid Seed Oils, https://www.westonaprice.org/podcast/avoid-seed-oils/#gsc.tab=0

4) Enig, M., 2000, Know Your Fats: The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils, and Cholesterol