Food Matters RSS feeds for Food Matters Science joins the table Food Matters HomeAboutContact GMO Labeling, I-522, and Why This Debate Sucks for Progressive Scientists Like Me By Kevin Bonham | November 8, 2013 | Comments31 ShareShare ShareEmail PrintPrint Me picking beans at Red Fire Farm in Western Mass I’m a granola (and dirt)-eating, tree-hugging, liberal/progressive. If I was called by a pollster asking about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), I’d be counted among the folks that disapprove, but only because I think it doesn’t go far enough (I’m for single-payer, but I could have settled for the public option). I think we should tax the rich at much higher rates, expand social safety nets and reign in corporations. I support local farmers and shop at Whole Foods. All that said, to me, science matters more than ideology. I wanted to join the Occupy Wall Street protesters, but I had experiments to do. And when it comes to genetically modified organisms in our food supply, I take the position that the National Academies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Medical Association, the European Commission, and the Royal Society take, namely that GMOs are safe for consumption. On Tuesday, voters in Washington state defeated a ballot initiative that would have required special labels on foods containing genetically modified organisms. As Christie Wilcox noted almost exactly a year ago when a similar measure was defeated in California: The simple fact is that there is no evidence that GMOs, as a blanket group, are dangerous. There’s a simple reason for this: not all GMOs are the same. Every plant created with genetic technology contains a different modification. More to the point, if the goal is to know more about what’s in your food, a generic GMO label won’t tell you. Adding Bt toxin to corn is different than adding Vitamin A to rice or vaccines to potatoes or heart-protective peptides to tomatoes. If Prop 37 was really about informed decisions, it would have sought accurate labeling of different types of GMOs so consumers can choose to avoid those that they disapprove of or are worried about. Instead, anti-GMO activists put forward a sloppily written mandate in a attempt to discredit all genetic engineering as a single entity. The legislation was considered so poorly worded that most Californian newspapers rallied against it, with the LA Times calling Prop 37 “problematic on a number of levels”. The language of I-522 in Washington was changed slightly from California’s Prop 37, but The proposed label system is too vague and contains little useful information. The supporting arguments suggest labeling could help consumers concerned with health, dietary, religious, environmental, and corporate control issues avoid GE products. The actual labeling, however, does not guarantee any GE content will be present in the product. The proposed labels are not required to specify what ingredients may be GE, nor the extent to which they may be present. In addition, the law does not require testing for the presence of GE components. Consumers wishing to discern between GE and non-GE products can already do so through existing, non-mandatory labeling designations provided by USDA Organic certification, or one of several private non-GE certification businesses. [emphasis mine] And yet, despite the lack of evidence for harm, despite the fact that it’s already possible to find food that doesn’t contain GMO, people on my side of the political spectrum, who are generally pro-science when it comes to climate change, seem to ignore or misrepresent the science of biotechnology. Some of this is surely driven by anti-corporatism. Last night, the sum of Rachel Maddow’s commentary on the loss of I-522 was based on the fact that public opinion was in favor of labeling, and then out-of-state corporations spent a bunch of money and swayed public opinion.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:35:30 +0000
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