memes

Well, there's all kinds of GMOs that serve different purposes, because GMO is not just a thing or chemical, it's literal DNA and genes that they alter in crops. They can be good, like the corn that has fish genes to make it more resistant to frost, or the golden rice in Asia that contains more carotenes so kids don't go blind.

But as the other comment said, they're expensive and can't be regrown again, as if they're copyrighted. And yes, if we replaced regular non-GMO crops with GMO crops and reduced genetic diversity, then we'd be fucked if a plague or virus hit them and they all died. Furthermore, if one of these crops still actually had the potential to grow seeds and got out into the wild, it could cause environmental issues like becoming an invasive species, and we already have a shit ton of those around the globe.

But people used to use GMO as a trigger word to scare uninformed people into denouncing all GMOs and looking for GMO free foods.

Technically, almost all foods we eat today are "GMO" in a sense, as we've been doing selective breeding of crops and animals since the ancient times, hence why we have such fat animals, bananas without huge seeds, mostly orange carrots instead of the other colors, etc. But the genetic modification stuff didn't start until the 70s.

Here's a lovely video I remember watching back in middle school that talked about them by Kurzgesagt