Frito Lay

February 8, 2000

I never thought of Frito com chips as Frankenstein food. Is Frito-Lay, the maker of the top 10 U.S. snacks telling me that there is something wrong with my Doritos? Surely if I wash them down with a little tequila it will be alright!

Why would Frito-Lay jump on the Greenpeace bandwagon? I guess I understood when Heinz and Gerber said they wouldn't use genetically modified products in their baby food.

This action by Frito-Lay is a giant over reaction. The public is not concerned by genetically modified products. In fact, if the taste is improved, if less pesticides are used, if some health value can be added to a food, surveys show strong public support for GM foods. Greenpeace must be beating their chest. Their spokesman had this to say. "This should make everybody in the food industry sit up and take notice."

Since Frito Lay doesn't plan to exploit this decision by labeling their products genetically modified, what do they expect to accomplish? They say they don't even plan to test their com to be sure it is free of Bt. 40% of the corn planted last year was genetically modified so that still leaves a lot of corn that Frito-Lay could use. The simple fact is Frito-Lay uses only a fraction of 1% of the com crop. A miniscule amount! It's the message that they send by this action that hurts. Genetically engineered foods represent the most exciting and promising technology since hybridization. The application prospects are as great as your imagination. If fear mongering Greenpeace is able to stampede the rest of the food processing industry into rejecting genetic engineering, mankind will suffer -- not the big agribusiness companies.