If you research them thoroughly, GMOs can be/are very beneficial and we have been using them for literally thousands of years since the dawn of agriculture. Look up an ear of corn "then and now" and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.
Okay, I took microbiology and genetics for a couple of years and am a book worm so I'm going to totally geek out on you all now!!! You have been warned.
GMO is a very poor name for the practice that is performed on our food today as it is simply inaccurate. GMO, as a scientifically observed terms, is actually the equivalent of selective breeding. The term that we associate with "GMOs" is actually known as "transgenic organisms" (The genetic material of one species being extracted and inserted into the genome of another species. Started about 100 years ago but made public in 1983 to create antibiotic resistant tobacco plants). So like genetically modifying organisms, transgenesis isn't something new either. The Flavor Saver Tomato was approved by the USDA in 1994 and was the first genetically engineered organism sold to consumers. It's purpose was to have an extended shelf life due to it's slow ripening rate but it tasted odd and also the people of Europe were highly skeptical with this advancement so "GMOs" started off with a bad rep simply due to ignorance of the fruit's genetic integrity.
So how this relates to feed corn....Over 90% of commercially produced GMOs are not found in your produce section and are actually in commodity crops (Soybeans, corn, sugar beets, cotton alfalfa, etc). The purpose of genetically engineering these crops was so they could resist the active ingredient that is found in herbicides "Round up" known as Glyphosate. Glyphosate inhibits an enzyme within the plant that synthesizes amino acids which allows the plant to metabolize food and grow. To protect the plants, they found that several bacterial organisms produce and enzyme that was unaffected by Glyphosate. To get that enzyme from the bacteria into the plants, agrobactirium was used. The plasmid of an agrobactirum is a structure that contains genetic information that the agrobacterium can eject from itself. In nature, agrobactirium will expel its plasmid containing genetic information onto a plant therefore allowing the bacteria to re code the cells of the plant so it would grow to feed the bacterial regardless of current growing conditions. Pretty cool I think!
So scientist took this natural phenomenon and used the plasmid of the agrobactirium to transfer the enzymes of the Glyphosate resistant bacteria into the plants which in turn, allowed the plants to become resistant to the Glyphosate! They then used Backcrossed Breeding to get this genetic modification into traditionally used strains of corn. That way farmers could safely use herbicides on their crops.
There has been no solidly confirmed evidence that credibly shows that GMOs pose a danger to humans. Any studies that were conducted and/or published that showed this were found to be poorly funded and constructed, utilized "cherry picked information", anecdotal, limited test group studies, and unreliably collected/charted data to create favored results.
Okay, sorry lecture over. I warned you! I may tick people off with sharing my knowledge of things but I really don't care since none of it is personal. I value the truth and believe it or not, the truth could care less about opinions and emotions.