Are GM foods safe?
This is one of the more common questions, but one of the more difficult ones to answer as a person needs to define for themselves what they mean by safe. Also, each GM crop or food needs to be assessed on a case-by-case basis as they each have potentially different technology behind them, have different traits and therefore different potential risks and benefits, depending on the environment they are grown in.
Second, on that definition of safe, how safe must your food be before any potential risks become acceptable. There is no such thing as zero risk and all foods have some risk attached to eating them. The acceptability of risk will change from person to person.
One should also compare the potential risks of eating a GM food with those of eating a conventionally-bred food. For example, two commonly used conventional breeding techniques, mutagenesis and embryo rescue, involve mixing and mutating genes. This can produce a host of unknown toxins, allergens and anti-nutrients in equally unknown concentrations. What effect these changes may have on human health is often unknown. But we continue to eat this food.
So you need to compare the risks and benefits (and there are scientific, economic, agronomic and social risks and benefits) and work out how acceptable you find the risks. From there you need to define for yourself if a particular GM food is safe – or acceptable.