The greens have fully entrenched themselves in the administration at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. On almost every corner there are signs reminding students to recycle. There are multiple stations to rent a bike on campus to cut down on carbon emissions, and solar powered street lamps line every street corner.
CFACT made it its mission to bring the truth on GMOs (genetically modified organisms) to this uber-environmentally conscious campus. As it turns out, UAB students were just as hungry for the facts as they were for the GMO snacks we handed out.CFACT distributed well-known snacks like potato chips and Cheetos that to highlight the fact that GMOs are a large part of our world’s food growing process, and have been safely used for decades.
Not only that, but GMOs have the potential to feed millions of starving people around the world by making crops more resistant to pesticides and enhancing the nutritional value of foods. For example, a crop known as “golden rice” is a rice plant that contains higher levels of beta-carotene than normal. Beta-carotene is the vitamin needed to prevent blindness. Over 500,000 children go blind every year around the world due to this deficiency, and the GMO crop golden rice can stop this horrible tragedy.
Students from different majors, political ideologies, and nutritional diets came by to express their thanks for the free snacks and share their support for GMOs. One student stated that she was liberal in ideology and was a biology major at UAB and couldn’t understand why many of her friends and professors were against GMO’s. She continued saying, “ GMOs do a lot of good for the poor in the third world, as well as help create bigger and stronger fruits and vegetables that can flourish without all the harmful pesticide non GMO products need.”
UAB students prove that common sense environmental stewardship and support for free-market advancements can live in harmony.
Those Blazers can eat!
This event was a part of CFACT’s “Stop Playing Games with Hunger” campaign, which aims to bring awareness to the potential GMOs have to feed the developing world and reduce food costs in developed countries to feed more of the homeless and those in poverty.
