While the common GMO crops on the market have been shown to be completely safe for human consumption time after time again, I think it's important to get across

While the common GMO crops on the market have been shown to be completely safe for human consumption time after time again, I think it's important to get across that being "anti-GMO" is inherently an unscientific position, regardless of the safety profile of any specific food products. Why? From a biologist's perspective, the phrase "anti-GMO" is meaningless - what are you really against if you're anti-GMO? It means you're completely against the use of a wide range of specific biotechnologies, protocols, and experiments that modify the genome of an organism. To dismiss the safety profile of all of these biotechnologies by themselves is irrational, not only because there is no proven mechanism for how they can cause harm, or because they've been shown to create perfectly safe crops, but because they use very different mechanisms (from Agrobacterium to gene guns to RNA-i to the new CRISPR/Cas) from each other. To be skeptical of the safety profile of the concept of gene editing in principle is also irrational, unless one is willing to also be skeptical of the safety profile of induced mutagenesis methods that humans have used for a century, and cross-breeding methods that humans have used for thousands of years. Why? Because both of these conventional methods "edit genes", but there is an inherent risk that is significantly higher: randomness. When scientists apply modern biotechnological methods to edit genomes, they utilize and target known and characterized genes and pathways, which can have any associated risks or consequences profiled and understood. Broad mutagenesis and cross-breeding create organisms (especially in polyploidy plants) with rearranged and mutated genes at random, which creates a scenario which makes it even currently impossible to truly understand and predict the safety or nutritional profile of the resulting organism. Of course, even these "oh-so-risky" methods are responsible for creating the entire repertoire of fruits and vegetables we eat today. Therefore, the anti-GMO movement truly does seem anti-scientific - by definition it isn't making specific claims about specific crops, or even specific technologies, but rather the broad generalization that an entire range of very different technologies are unsafe. It is also applying that generalization unfairly to modern technologies (which sound scarier and riskier) as opposed to the ones that have successfully created all modern crops (which have a similarly very low but distinctly higher risk involved). With a bit of context, it seems impossible to interpret the movement as anything besides having a problem with the existence of the field of biotechnology itself.