Does she let her kids eat sweet potatoes?

While there is AFAIK no genetically engineered variety of sweet potato being cultivated, every cultivated variety of sweet potato bears genetic traces of having been modified by Agrobacterium tumefaciens, which is the bacterium which is widely used to edit plant genomes.

I think, to understand her concerns, you would need to be in the field. I’m pretty smart, and I have plenty of layman knowledge, but I’m completely lost once she gets technical.

The summary of the issue, as I understand it, is as follows.

The modifications do much more than we realised, and the impacts are poorly tested. That’s the gist. It’s enough for me to go “there could be dragons here”, but I honestly haven’t bothered to try and change any purchasing decisions. I think the horse has already bolted anyway. Doesn’t the gmo end up in pretty much everything regardless?

our understanding of DNA is pretty basic. I’d say we’re using a hatchet to do surgery.

Did she make any reference to studies?

Yes, but I’m texting her to get info. I’ll update here, but it’ll probably take a while. Probably shouldn’t have said anything, but I was hopeful that there might be another plant molecular biologist in the audience who could clear things up.

[delayed]

No modification is perfect: While all GMO modification tries to be as narrow as possible, it's not like things are ever so perfectly narrow as to only just express a bonus protein that you wanted.

The problem is assuming that any other change that happens is dangerous and untested. There's mutation all over the place in perfectly organic plants, just like with GMOs. There are also changes on gene expression from those changes, also like GMO. An overwhelming majority of changes either do nothing, or make the plant unviable at all. The practical risks of a change that does something, doesn't harm yields, and yet somehow makes the parts of the plant that a human eats somewhat toxic is a huge stretch. It's even less likely when one considers the actual regulatory processes that happen later. It might seem crazy, but people that work on GMOs tend to be uninterested in poisoning the public.

If I was afraid of poisoning due to mutation (which I am not), I'd be more afraid of what someone that has been crossing plans with some localized, ancestral wildtypes that have been planted just in some village for the last hundred years or something. They are more likely to be untested. But it's like the risk of getting hit by lighting for the 5th time this week.

I am far more likely to be poisoned by a detergent, or someone that has let bacteria run amok in their packing facility, and is somehow selling, say, premixed salads that land in my local supermarket.

I’d argue back, but I’m too ignorant. You write as if you are supremely confident, so can you back this up? Are you working in the field, or can you point me to (recent) commentary from someone who is?

I have no dog in this fight, I literally know nothing and care very little. However, I can’t just ignore the opinions that have come to me from someone who is an expert in this space. That’s why I raised it; because I was assuming there would be someone working in the field who could provide detail and nuance. Wasn’t expecting “this is all crap” as the response.

There is a lot of indications that GMO crops are much more likely to "trigger" food intolerabilities then older crops.

Through this seems to be an issue about them being further distant from what humans did eat for over a thousand years then about GMO being bad per-se. I.e. this also seem to apply (but less so) to crops which used more tradition (modern speed up) methods of cultivating crop variants.