How to tell if a Veggie or Fruit is a GMO

Food shopping can be a daunting task. Large selections of foods come with making many decisions on which foods to purchase. Identifying what foods are healthy complicates the whole process. Here is some information that will be useful when shopping and picking out fruits and vegetables.

Look for the Universal Product Code (UPC) or Price Look-Up (PLU) number associated with each piece or bundle of vegetables. The number can be found on each individual piece of vegetable as a sticker or as a bundle depending on how they are sold. There should be a series of numbers associated with each type of vegetable at your local grocery store. If the number on the label begins with "8," the vegetable is a GMO.

Ask a person from the grocery staff. If he has no knowledge of whether or not the vegetable is a GMO, he can always find out from the back office. If you are purchasing produce from a farmers market, the supplier should tell you if the produce is a GMO from his own farm. Some farmers markets require sellers to post signs that indicate if a produce is organic.

Check the labels. If the label boasts "organic" or "all-natural," it also means that it is free of GMO.

Look out for common culprits of GMO. Apples, potatoes, canola, alphalfa, soybeans, corn, papaya, sugar beets, summer squash and cotton are 10 GMO crops approved in the U.S. Since there are over 30,000 different products on grocery store shelves that are "modified," and not labeled it is hard to detect in these products which vegetables are

grown as GMOs.