GMOs are used across a surprisingly wide range of industries and countries, from the processed food on grocery store shelves to the medicine in your pharmacy. The United States leads global GMO cultivation with 70.9 million hectares of biotech crops, but genetically modified organisms also show up in places most people never think to look: animal feed, cooking oils, textiles, biofuels, and pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Processed Food Ingredients
The most common place you encounter GMOs is in processed foods, though rarely as whole recognizable crops. Instead, GMO corn, soybeans, canola, cotton, and sugar beets are broken down into ingredients that end up in thousands of packaged products. Cornstarch, corn syrup, corn oil, soybean oil, canola oil, and granulated sugar are all routinely derived from GMO crops. Soy-based lecithin, emulsifiers, and proteins appear in everything from chocolate bars to salad dressings.
More than half the granulated sugar sold in U.S. grocery stores comes from GMO sugar beets. GMO canola is used mostly to make cooking oil and margarine. Cottonseed oil, made from GMO cotton, is a common frying oil in restaurants and shows up in many packaged snack foods. If a product contains any of these ingredients and isn’t labeled organic, there’s a strong chance it traces back to a genetically modified crop.
Animal Feed and Livestock
Most GMO soy grown worldwide doesn’t go directly into human food. It goes to feed poultry and livestock. The same is true for a large share of GMO corn. This means that even if you avoid processed foods, GMOs are embedded in the supply chain behind conventional meat, eggs, and dairy products. The animals themselves are not genetically modified, but their feed almost certainly is in countries with large-scale GMO agriculture.
Whole GMO Foods You Can Buy
The USDA maintains an official list of bioengineered foods that require disclosure labeling, and it’s shorter than most people expect:
- Corn and soybeans, the two largest GMO crops by volume
- Canola, cotton, and sugar beets
- Papaya, engineered to resist ringspot virus (most Hawaiian papayas are GMO)
- Summer squash, virus-resistant varieties
- Arctic apples, engineered not to brown when sliced
- Innate potatoes, which resist bruising and produce less of a potentially harmful compound when fried
- Pink-flesh pineapple, sold under the Pinkglow brand
- AquAdvantage salmon, the first GMO animal approved for food, engineered to grow to market size faster
- Bt eggplant, grown in Bangladesh to resist insect pests
- Alfalfa and sugarcane, primarily used as feed and in sugar production
That’s the complete list. Despite widespread assumptions, there are no GMO tomatoes, strawberries, oranges, or wheat on the commercial market.
Medicine and Pharmaceuticals
One of the earliest and most successful uses of genetic engineering has nothing to do with farming. Human insulin, used daily by millions of people with diabetes, is produced by genetically modified bacteria. Before the 1980s, insulin had to be extracted from pig or cow pancreases, a process that was expensive and sometimes triggered allergic reactions. Engineers transferred the human insulin gene into bacterial cells that could produce the hormone cheaply and in large quantities.
The same approach is used to manufacture interferons (proteins the immune system uses to fight viruses), growth hormones, and certain vaccines. The hepatitis B vaccine, for example, is made using genetically modified yeast. This technique works by taking the gene for a desired human protein and inserting it into an organism that’s easy and inexpensive to grow in a lab.
Industrial and Energy Applications
A significant portion of GMO corn in the United States goes to ethanol production rather than food. The biofuel industry has driven increased plantings of energy crops, including corn, soybeans, wheat, and sugarcane, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region and Africa. GMO cotton, beyond its use as cottonseed oil, supplies the textile industry with fiber. Some industrial applications also use GMO-derived starches and oils in manufacturing bioplastics and other materials.
Where GMO Crops Are Grown
GMO agriculture is concentrated in a handful of countries. The top 10 by farmland devoted to biotech crops, measured in millions of hectares:
- United States: 70.9 million hectares
- Brazil: 44.2 million hectares
- Argentina: 24.5 million hectares
- India: 11.6 million hectares (almost entirely Bt cotton)
- Canada: 11.0 million hectares
- China: 3.7 million hectares
- Paraguay: 3.6 million hectares
- Pakistan: 2.9 million hectares
- South Africa: 2.3 million hectares
- Uruguay: 1.4 million hectares
The Americas dominate this list, accounting for the vast majority of global GMO acreage. The European Union, by contrast, has largely restricted GMO cultivation, though it imports significant quantities of GMO animal feed. India’s GMO footprint is almost entirely cotton rather than food crops. In Africa, South Africa stands out as the continent’s leading adopter, growing GMO corn, soybeans, and cotton.
How GMO Labeling Works in the U.S.
Since 2022, the USDA’s National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard requires food manufacturers to label products that contain detectable bioengineered genetic material. You’ll see this as a “bioengineered” text label, a symbol, or a QR code on packaging. Highly refined ingredients like oils and sugars, where the genetic material has been processed out, may not require disclosure even when they originate from GMO crops. Foods certified organic cannot intentionally contain GMO ingredients, making the USDA Organic label the most reliable way to avoid them if that’s your goal.