ABSTRACT
A genetically modified organism can be either organism, an agricultural commodity, an ingested food, or an ingested food component, including processed food. The checklist approach for whole animal toxicity testing is finding its way to the graveyard thanks to the evolutionary development of genetic engineering foods. In the minds of the individual members of society, the importance of any issue is magnified if the issue is personal, intimate such as choices for food consumption. Human activity for survival changed from hunter-gatherer functions into activities more aligned with societies that can be best described as non-migratory agronomic enclaves. Domestication through heuristic breeding was driver of phenotypic expression until the door to selective and designed genotypic modulation was opened by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel in the mid-1800s. Society in making decisions about xenobiotics uses the benefit/risk framework, which by its nature is binary process; the good or benefit of the xenobiotic is weighed in light of the risks that it presents.
