I have always felt it was an important part of nurturing my family, to provide them with the very best food I could. That is why I've always enjoyed veggie gardening and cooking with love. Then I realized that a lot of commercial plants had been tampered with and produced less tasty food. Following this, I've had a profound suspicion of how industry is trying to take control of what we eat.

The most extreme form of this is GE foods and companies like Monsanto. They modify seeds in what I consider an unnatural way and introduce them in unseemly haste - without really knowing whether they are harmful to the people eating them or not.

Then I became more aware that the GE industry is desperate to get rid of their product, so is selling it as fillers and thickeners in various food products. I realized, for example, that vegetarian foods that contained soy or corn, weren?t as user friendly as they had been.

When I started enquiring from companies if they could guarantee whether their products were GE, they couldn't. So I had to find substitutes for them. I've substituted, for example, wheaten flour for cornflour. More recently I've had to enquire whether chicken or pork products might be raised on GE feed.

All this has made me more interested in growing my own food or in purchasing organics - foods that are guaranteed free of this interference. Apart from that, home-grown and organic foods taste better, keep better and the whole process is more satisfying.