I grow some of my own food (salads, zucchini, Hokkaido, potatoes, etc) in my garden but it's nowhere near self-sufficiency. All of my seeds as well as my garden are completely GMO free. I've been growing the last few seasons by solely relying on my own seeds though.
Goes without saying. It’s rare to find GMO vegetables even commercially (only zucchini and potatoes even could be), let alone in a garden.
But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about ensuring the GMO vendors haven’t ever touched the seed. How are you ensuring provenance as to avoid the trust issues?
There are many places you can get food and seeds that are verified to be non-GMO.
If you're trying to do a "reflections on trusting trust" reference, well, this is the real world. You might not ever be 100% sure that something is what it says it is (you might be a brain in a jar!), but it's usually better to get it from the guy you trust than the guy you don't.
> There are many places you can get food and seeds that are verified to be non-GMO.
Of course, at least within some margin of contamination. Identity preserved allows no more than 0.5% contamination, which is the best in the biz. But, the problem is that the earlier commenter didn't trust GMO vendors, not GMOs themselves. As in: Non-GMOs from a GMO vendor are equally untrustworthy. Hell, even a hat with a GMO vendor's logo on it is untrustworthy according to that commenter.
Unless you're sticking to food that doesn't have GMOs to begin with (which, to be fair, is almost all food!), you're going to be searching high and low to find a vendor that doesn't also dabble in GMOs.