I’ve been intermittently playing The Simpsons: Tapped Out for a little over six months. Say what you will about such time sucks, but I’ve been having a pretty good time in my ten minutes here and there with a beloved cast of characters that I know well and enjoy. During a recent “quest,” one of the characters inquired about the town’s lack of fresh vegetables. In response, I had to go to the local yokel’s farm and plant some sort of crop. Considering that available crops included moonshine, triffids, and “tomacco” (tomatoes + tobacco…gross), I knew that I probably wasn’t going to be planting something normal. The quest item that popped up was a surely questionable hybrid of potatoes and tomatoes that was blatantly labeled “GMO.” If you’ve followed any news at all over the past decade, hopefully this isn’t an unfamiliar acronym, but it stands for Genetically Modified Organism, and it’s a hot-button issue affecting food production worldwide. For me, it’s become a very touchy subject and one that’s affected my own grocery shopping habits. All I can say is that the more I learn about it, the bigger I want our backyard garden to become. So when that GMO crop showed up in the game, I paused, and number of disparate thoughts went through my mind.

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