Not everything is genetically modified. Seedless watermelon are a hybrid of diploid (2 chromasomes) with a tetraploid (4 chromasomes) making it a sterile, seedless triploid cross. This happens with a lot of foods where weird cross breeding are exploited to get the desired results, or generations of selective breeding get it there. I'm not a fan of GMO either, but not everything is made in a lab. People should research things they don't understand rather than parrot that everything is going to kill you.
Discussion
Thanks for the info 💜 Everything that has been domesticated is in some way “genetically modified” so you’re right, need to be more specific. I don’t want to consume stuff with genes for insecticide resistance or other mutations spliced in. So… just gonna start buying watermelons from the local farmers market from now. Any other way to tell it’s gmo vs selectively bred?
Yep, if we want to define GMO as selectively bred then all domesticated animals and almost every modern plant food is off the table. It's what humans do.
But yes, gene splicing and herbicide/pesticide resistant junk is what we want to avoid. And it's actually a surprisingly small number of crops that have been tampered with in that way, corn being the major one. Best way is to do some searching online about the specific variety, but for now almost now common vegetables or garden grown foods are GMO. There's no money in it, they focus on major production staple crops.
Hybrids are not GMO. This is essentially the same idea as a mule.