Ninety-eight per cent of the British population, according to the results of the government’s ‘national debate’, say that they do not wish to eat genetically modified food. Eighty-four per cent say that GM food is ‘an unacceptable interference with nature’, and 93 per cent say that not enough is known about the long-term health effects of GM foods.
So much for the views of the average Briton, chomping his way through a burger of mechanically recovered meat and slurping some lurid concoction from a can plastered top to bottom with E numbers. No unacceptable interference with nature, the standard, non-genetically modified diet of modern Britain — a diet consumed, to judge by the proliferation of fast-food outlets, by the majority of people who filled in the 37,000 questionnaires or attended the 700 public meetings that constituted the debate.
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