DON'T FRET OVER APOCALYPTIC TACOS.

Byline: Kimit A. Muston Local View

I hope you have padlocks on your kitchen cabinets. Because if you have taco shells in there, you are playing with fire. Those tacos could be toxic. They could bring about the end of the world.

I'll bet you never thought Mexican food could be so active.

The doomsday taco shells in question are the Taco Bell brand sold in supermarkets.

Because of a mix-up they contain small quantities of a genetically engineered corn that has not yet been certified by the Food and Drug Administration for human consumption.

The corn is not poisoned. It has been OK'd for animal feed and it's OK for humans to eat the animals that feed on it. Nobody has died and there have been no reports of illness from eating the terrible taco shells. So why the big news story?

If you listen to the bioterror activists, these traumatic taco shells are the thin edge of the wedge, the first step toward an ecological doomsday where newly invented, genetically altered vegetables and fruits cause human mutations, vast mass extinctions and the end of life as we know it.

I can understand the nervousness. The future is a very scary concept. Why, a mere century from now a large number of us will no longer be alive. Although many of us will still be registered to vote.

But the year 2100 is not going to be all that different from 2000. Men will still leave the seat up; women will still not tell men why they are mad at them; and some people will still feel that if one more thing changes the world will end.

Let's get some perspective on this. If the sun should blow up, that would be the end of the world. If CBS should broadcast a second season of ``Big Brother,'' that would be bad. But making corn more resistant to insects is not going to bring on doomsday.

How do I know this? Well, I don't want to shock you, but a seedless watermelon is not a naturally occurring plant. And next time you are in the woods your chances of stumbling over some wild iceberg lettuce are pretty small.

Green beans, apples, carrots, tomatoes, oranges - they have all been genetically modified using crude methods: grafting or cross-pollinating.

Luther Burbank did it with roses, and Mendel did it with peas, and Gorg the Caveman did it with wheat so often he eventually produced Wonder Bread.

And how about that eco-bon vivant Johnny Appleseed? This drifter imported a non-native, genetically altered species of tree and spread it all over North America. And the world did not end.

It did change. But the world is always changing. Species did become extinct. More will become extinct whether we plant the new corn or not. But not, evidently, the monarch butterfly.

The enviro-panic squad put out the story that the pollen from the new ``Bt'' corn would kill the lovely, fragile monarch. But a preliminary study done by the EPA says it won't. Should we be careful? Of course we should. But let's not panic until we see the final CBS fall lineup.

We're not talking just corporate profits here. Asian children raised on a rice diet stand a good chance of being crippled by rickets because rice does not contain vitamin A.

The new genetically engineered ``golden rice'' could make rickets a memory, unless some eco-hero of the new millennium breaks into the research facility and destroys the experimental plants in the name of passionate stupidity.

Bt corn has a gene inserted into its cell that tells the corn to produce by itself just enough pesticide so it tastes bad to insects. The pesticide Bt is already being sprayed on fields all over the world. The goal is to stop spraying poisons into the air. It would be nice not to have to use pesticides at all but so far the grasshoppers and beetles have refused to negotiate a political solution.

I think the Bio-Chicken-Littles should stick their panic in their gnomes and smoke it. I think the news media should stop treating genetically altered food as if it were something new, rather than a new technique for an old science. And I think all The Great Taco Crisis proves is that ultraliberals are as terrified of the future as archconservatives.