[mitochondrion]

The problem with GMO foods is not that they have been manually manipulated by man, but that they have been manually manipulated by men with interests not necessarily congruent with the persons eating them: namely, the emphasis of crop yield, appearance, and appealing ("cheap") taste over soil quality, sustainability, nutrition, and general "goodness" — in short, the pursuit of short-term private profit over long-term social good, at the expense of commons which before modern technology were simply practically inviolable.

[api]

That's kind of why I said "hysteria." I was thinking of the blanket suspicion of any and all GMO products because they are GMO, not more nuanced thoughts such as yours.

Technologies are just tools. It's all in how they are used.

[mitochondrion]

Well, all GMO products are subject to the same pressures of divergent interests. If you eat things, and if some GMO products you might eat are bad, and if the only genetic-modification-related insight you have into what you eat is "is-GMO" or "not-GMO", then the (entirely rational and reasonable) heuristic to adopt is an "hysterical" avoidance of GMO products.

Also, the reason why a person does or does not do such a thing is rather of less importance than what that thing is that he does or does not do. For example, if pigs carry disease, and your religion proscribes you from eating pigs because "God says so", your life is preserved whether or not you or anyone else have any conception of germ theory whatever.