When most people go to the grocery store, they will usually reach for what is cheapest. Our understanding of what is healthy versus unhealthy for many is often distorted. Most of us do not consider what went into the production of our grocery store treats. When we bite into the steak that we threw onto the grill for that summer barbeque, many of us do not think of the journey of this one cut of meat. Rather, in the mind of most Americans, the steak was made from a cow, the meat was delivered to the grocery store, and later drowned in A1 steak sauce on their plate.

Over the past few months I have had conversations with many people asking me to clarify what is wrong with most of American meat. “It’s protein, right?,” I have been asked. The answer is yes—you could say it is protein, but a very processed source of protein that is probably doing more harm than good to our bodies. When one takes a bite out of a hamburger purchased at the drive through, chances are this person is eating a cow that was fed antibiotics and corn feed genetically modified at a large industrial farm. When people say, “What’s wrong with genetically modified food? It’s not proven to be harmful?,” this is when the alarm goes off for me.

American culture waits for negative consequences, rather than reacting to the warning signs. Sold on the market starting in the 1990s, GMOs has now found its ways into most of the North American diet. Consider this: as proven with DDT, our regulatory agencies approved this organochlorine insecticide to be on the market and began to see extensive repercussions on the environment and human health. While DDT was later banned, we have since then replaced it with various other pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides, and have now included GMOs in the mix.

As American Meat addresses in the film, Americans need to become more conscious eaters. Rather than trying to convert the whole nation to be vegetarians, we need to encourage a shift to support a more sustainable and healthy way of eating. With that said, instead of waiting for proof that these biotechnologies are 100% proven harmful, we as a culture need to stop putting our society in harms way, and eliminate as much risk as possible. Rather than operating on large-scale money making industrial operations, we as a culture need to start actively thinking, how are we going to encourage this paradigm shift? When is America going to stop making humans and biodiversity the guinea pigs of these industrial food innovations?