After I took all the photos of the maize at Pick n Pay today, I decided to ask random people in the store if they knew what GMO meant.  I asked about 10 different people, young, old, white, black, male, female, single, couple and family. 

Nine said they had no idea.  One guy said "it's about additives, that additives give people allergies so they take the GMO additives out so people don't get allergies".  Not quite, no.

What dawned on me today, is that even though maize is now labelled; people don't actually read labels nor have a clue what GMO's are.  "May contain GMO's" is also misleading. One needs to err on the side of caution, and just avoid anything that refers to GM's until there is true transparency in the industry.   It's going to take an epic public relations / marketing effort to educate people on what it means in their lives. 

Explaining to people what GMO's are in layman's terms is a very hard thing to do.  My own journey took 6 months before I even vaguely started to unravel it.  Most people don't have the time, energy or inclination because they're just too tired and too hassled.

 In the meantime, Monsanto is laughing the whole way to the bank.  This has to change.

In the light of the global March Against Monsanto taking place next week, there has been some discussion this week on Pick n Pay's Facebook page about the labelling of genetically modified products.  They maintained that they have started labelling  so I went to one of their stores today to find out.  And true to their word, all maize has been labelled - not prominently of course, their house brand is the most clearly labelled of the lot. Now if only people understood what that means... 

According the African Centre of Biodiversity though, this level of labelling is not sufficient as it is misleading.  Just goes to show how little we the public know about this whole subject and how complex it is.  We can be very lucky that there are unsung hero's and watch dogs out there that are keeping a very close eye on all these proceedings.  Thanks ACB!  You are amazing.  

The globally arranged march is picking up huge momentum!  There are 3000 people from Joburg, Cape Town, Durban, Plett and George registered for the March Against Monsanto scheduled for 25 May 2013!

For those of you who don't have any idea what GMO's and seed patents are about, just know that there are thousands and thousands of people around the world that are busy fighting for your right to nonpoisonous food and self-sustainability.  If you want to start learning, here's plenty links to get you going.

For those of you who do know about the issues, please make a stand with us.  We need to get the details out to as many people as possible.  Mainstream media is all but mum on the subject, so we need you to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog and email like crazy to get the story out there.

Share some love for Tami Monroe Canal who started this global movement when she came to the following realization.   One amazingly enlightened thought from one random citizen sick of how things are; hundreds of thousands of people globally mobilized.  And share the love to the African Centre of Biodiversity for coordinating the Joburg event. Never under-estimate your power to make change.

Click on your region below to join the movement and the conversation.

I decided to put my review on my main blog - this book is too important and needs a bigger audience than this blog currently has.