For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Genetic Engineering page and our Millions Against Monsanto page.

Fourteen years ago, I was in NYC at a conference hosted by one of the big banks, as a financial analyst covering the food industry.

In that position, I learned how the food industry uses artificial ingredients to manage their profitability and meet earnings.  But never once, attending conferences in New York City or speaking with traders on the floor of the stock exchange, did our team meet with the chemical companies engineering their products into our food, ingredients that required increased use of a portfolio of chemicals that helped them manage their earnings.

It is a brilliant business model for chemical investors, but for eaters?

At that conference, I also happened to be six months pregnant.  At that time, parents around the world were being told about a massive change in the way that food was produced and grown, but parents here in the United States, even those of us covering the food industry, had not been told what was going on.

That is changing.

Introduced in the 1980s and patented for their novelty, GMOs, or genetically engineered ingredients, quietly found their way into our foods in the 1990s.