Have you stopped eating Italian Pasta

out that many existing foods are GM in accordance with the EU definition

Dave, what you have left out of all of this is the acknowledgement that most countries do not grow enough wheat for their uses and depend on imports, so why pick on Italy? Are you insinuating that Great Britain grows all its own wheat? If you import wheat, you get it from countries that have been altering it in some way for 40 years, and it would seem that shows that over 40 years there's no particular or identifiable problem for human consumption. If you insist that your country back off imports, and you can get everyone to go along with you, then have it any way you like -- GM, no-GM, only that 40 years old technology, whatever. A lot of people would go hungry, but that's nothing to you, right? Carry that a bit further and maize becomes the size of an ear of wheat, because that's its natural state before the interference of humans, and the same could be said of almost everything we eat. I personally am very grateful to the ancients who began all this modification. I am still on the fence about crops which are lethal to beneficial insects in the attempt to be lethal to pests. The other side of that is the use of pesticides, so which is worse for us? Is this perhaps a step toward targeting ONLY pests and not the final solution? I am more in favor of modifications that improve nutritional attributes, I am also strongly in favor of the reverse breeding-engineering that is happening in S Italy to rediscover a wheat that became extinct during WWI. Why? Because I bravely tried it and it tastes significantly better in pasta. They will never be able to grow enough to do without wheat from the US, Canada, Russia, Poland and the Ukraine, though.