The potato is nutrient packed enough to sustain life with a few added supplements. The Irish at the time would live off potatoes and dairy products derived from milk. They relied on the potato to the point where it was their main source of food. The type of potato that they were eating was a GMO where the Mexican potato and Irish potato were crossbred to create a potato that was larger and produced a greater yield. However, one side effect was that it became susceptible to a blight which destroyed the leaves and tubules of the potato plant killing it and making the potatoes growing inedible. Since potatoes were the main food source of Ireland at the time, many people starved, and the Irish potato famine ended up killing over one million people. The British were dicks at the time and didn’t do anything to help the Irish out with the famine and just let them die, kind of like a natural genocide.

While this is definitely a bad mark on GMO’s in general, it really says a lot more about being dependent upon only one food source. GMO’s are everywhere and most people don’t know what corn used to look like before it was selectively bred to create what we eat today. Without GMO’s we wouldn’t be able to sustain and feed our current population. GMO’s however aren’t perfect because the genome of anything is a lot more complicated than big potato + big potato = bigger potato like with the Irish potato. They were breeding for size and yield, which they got, but they also bread out a resistance to the blight that they used to have. So, while I believe GMO’s are essential to feed todays population, it is also important to be careful with them. Making sure to understand the traits of the strain before implementing them fully or depending upon them, because things can and will go wrong that is hard to impossible to determine in lab tests. The side effects could be anywhere from extinction of a species, a new crop disease, or having a negative impact on the environment.