Christophe: This is the island of Maui.

We're here because this place has been at the center

of a fierce debate about whether we should grow

and eat genetically modified food.

And that question is only getting more important.

At the current rate, we will have to grow more food

in the next 30 years than we have in all of human history.

Doing that without destroying the environment that we live in

will be one of the defining challenges of our generation.

And many experts argue that to do that,

we'll have to engineer the genes of our food.

But the safety of that technology has been controversial for decades.

So, should we be worried about genetically modified food?

( music playing )

- Good morning. - Hey, how's it going?

- How is everybody today? - Fantastic.

Chocolate peanut butter. Chocolate peanut butter.

- Oh, my God. - How is it?

- It's really good? - I can't tell if that was good or bad.

It's Reese's peanut butter for breakfast.

- In a Cheerio. - I love it.

Why are we here?

- We are here in my home. - "We are here in my home."

I have brought you here.

I have brought you guys here to talk about GMOs.

I'm curious to hear how you grew up thinking about them.

'Cause for me, I was-- I was definitely taught that

GMOs are a terrible thing.

In my family, it was just never something that was talked about ever.

I was taught that the big business around GMOs

is something to be, like, hated.

All these labels started appearing, like this one,

"Non-GMO project verified," which seems to signal to people

that there's something harmful about GMOs.

There's one thing at this table that does contain

genetically modified organisms and is labeled as such.

- And I'm curious if y'all can find it. - Huh.

- It's not the coffee. - This one says non-GMO.

It's the one that y'all haven't looked at yet.

- The fruit. No. - Mm-mm

"Partially produced with genetic engineering." It is the Cheerios.

Alex: Oh, there it is. It's at the very bottom of the box.

Sneaky little--

If you look through the ingredients, you can see whole grain oats,

sugar, peanut butter, dextrose, corn starch,

and corn syrup, and corn that was probably produced with genetic engineering.

In a way, it's almost like a status symbol for your foods

if you're able to identify that all your foods have

the positive label of being GMO-free.

Cleo: I guess my question to you, Christophe,

is it a good label? Like, is that something that I should be looking for?

Um...

To understand how we got here,

we have to talk about the first GMO.

This is the Flavr Savr tomato.

Leading up to its launch,

people called this the super tomato.

It became major news.

The future is now, at least in terms of the American diet.

Genetically altered tomatoes are a step closer to your supermarket tonight.

The new tomatoes will soon be on a store shelf near you.

When it hit shelves, it became the first commercial crop that was genetically modified.

It was designed to be

less perishable than regular tomatoes.

What followed was a new generation of bio-engineering initiatives

that promised to feed the world,

including things like golden rice,

a GMO enriched with beta keratin to combat blindness and death

from vitamin A deficiency.

Researchers believe they have found a way

to add critical nutrients to rice.

Man: Vitamin A deficiency is a pervasive and silent killer

of malnourished children in the third world.

But over the next few years, public perception of GMOs

went from gentle curiosity like this...

As long as it was-- it was healthy, you know?

No-- no health risks. Yeah, I'd consider it.

...to bitter divisiveness like this.

Hell no, GMO. Hell no, GMO.

Other labs tried to replicate that study and found that it wasn't true.

- No, actually that is not true. - Yes.

( speaking foreign language )

One side says that modifying food is totally harmless

and the other side says that it's a serious threat to us.

They take viruses and bacteria and insecticides

and put them into the DNA.

More often than not,

they're inserting viruses

or bacteria into these plants.

But that's not exactly how it works,

so let's clear things up.

- Cleo, you free right now? - Sure.

All right. So genetic engineering works by taking a tiny piece of DNA

from one organism and putting it inside of another organism.

That tiny piece of DNA is called a gene.

It is a set of instructions that tells the organism

how to express a trait.

You can kind of think of that like taking a recipe

from one cookbook and putting it inside of another one.

So one set of instructions here contain a really special trait,

and it's bookmarked.

- Insect killer. - Exactly. Grandma's insect killer recipe.

This one page tells that bacteria

how to create this protein that kills insects.

Okay, so how does this gene

get from the bacteria to the corn?

You can use kind of this bacterium that naturally goes into the other plant

and, like, dumps the DNA off

or you can use something called a gene gun.

The gene gun literally shoots gold particles that are covered in DNA...

- Dope. - ...into cells of the corn.

This corn plant will then produce those same insecticide proteins.

And what that means is that farmers now would not have to spray

those corn plants with insecticide.

So it's not as though GMOs

are using a small part of a bacteria

and putting it into corn or something else.

It's more like they're taking a small instruction

that a bacteria has

and allowing corn to also have that instruction.

- Is that right? - Exactly.

So what do we know about how safe it is

- to eat something like this? - Mm, let me show you.

In the past 20 years that we've been eating these crops,

there have been no negative health impacts on consumers.

- That's great. - Yeah. I learned all of this from Pamela Ronald.

She is a geneticist at UC Davis.

We've been genetically engineering

many different types of plants

and genetically engineering medicines for over 40 years,

and there hasn't been a single instance of harm

to human health or the environment.

Christophe: We know that from thousands of studies,

but they're probably best summarized in this one

from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

So this is like a meta study of thousands of reports.

Can I get a highlighter? Great.

Cleo: There's some evidence that GE insect-resistant crops

have had benefits to human health by reducing insecticide poisoning.

The research, blah, blah, blah, blah,

of GE foods reveals no differences

that would implicate a higher risk to human health

from eating GE foods

than from eating their non-GE counterparts.

- That's the money line. - That's it.

This seems so certain,

but it-- it also seems like this is such a big controversy.

It is. So the 2015 Pew Research poll

found the majority of Americans

believe that it's not safe

to eat genetically modified food,

but almost 90% of scientists say that they're safe.

And this gap is the biggest

of any politicized scientific issue.

So that means bigger than climate change, bigger than vaccines.

It makes me feel like there must be some other issue

with GMO products or GMO companies

that people are really struggling with.

- That's what I want to figure out, yeah. - Like, it can't be this.

So the thing is, as much as people might worry

about GMO fruits and vegetables,

you're not really likely to find them in produce.

They're in cheap processed foods made from GMO corn and soy.

And the vast majority of GMO crops don't actually even wind up in food.

You know, for the most part,

they are turned into biofuels or into feed.

In the U.S., where over 90% of corn is genetically modified,

just 10% is turned into things that people actually consume.

So all that genetic engineering allowed us to do

was to grow crops like that

on a bigger scale than ever before.

Could it have more to do with how the business of GMOs

is actually implemented?

There's one place that I think

can help us answer that question,

and it's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

( music playing )

Hawaii is ground zero

for developing new genetically engineered crops.

In the 1990s, the entire papaya industry in Hawaii

was basically on the verge of collapse.

Plants started to be infected by papaya ringspot virus.

This problem persisted for decades,

and then came something called the rainbow papaya.

This was a transgenic variety

that was designed to resist the virus.

Until 2017, this was the only GMO fruit

that was sold in the U.S.

This fruit was proof that genetic engineering

could really benefit both consumers and farmers.

But it also kicked off a long debate about what genetic engineering

means for the state of Hawaii.

It's hosted more open air experimental field tests

than any other state in the country.

And the U.S. grows more GMOs

than any other country in the world.

And all of these companies are here because

Hawaii's tropical climate

allows for three to four plantings of seeds per year,

as opposed to just one

on most parts of the mainland U.S.

It kind of creates this ultimate outside laboratory

for seed companies.

We're gonna go visit one of these test fields

that's owned by Bayer with members of the SHAKA movement.

So tell me what SHAKA is.

The SHAKA movement is

the Sustainable Hawaiian Agriculture

for the Keiki and the 'Aina.

Okay, we're here in Kihei,

and these are the Hale Piilani homes,

and they are next to

the Monsanto test field here in Kihei.

Now these people are right on top of the problem.

What they're doing in the test field

is they're trying to see how much herbicide

the plant and the seed can take.

We know tests-- the pesticide drifts,

especially with this wind,

and it would bring it right into these homes,

straight into these homes.

This was one of the reasons for the moratorium

was the proximity of these test fields

to these homes we're standing next to.

In 2014, Maui County passed a moratorium

on the research and development and production of GMOs.

Man: Hawaii is the center of a fight

between the companies who make crop seeds here

and residents who say they are being poisoned.

Hawaii's Maui County passed one of the strongest

anti-GMO measures ever.

A battle over the Maui County GMO moratorium

is headed to court.

Eventually, that moratorium

was overruled in a federal court.

We were just asking to slow down, take a breath, stop,

and let's see what's going on in terms of experimentation

with these open fields putting all these people in danger, right?

It was easy for the industry to turn around and go, "Oh, you're anti-GMO."

Are you anti-science when you're being openly tested on?

And the fact that they're going,

"We're experimenting with this corn and we're gonna see