Yet it doesn’t refer to the products of radiation breeding or chemical mutagens. Or of expression or overexpression of previously unexpressed genes. Or of natural horizontal gene transfer (plants can be slutty like that.) Or of different varieties of endomycorrhizae. Or of generations of selective breeding that could produce a plane that is genuinely toxic. That invents new variants that can be* very * different from existing varieties. Labeling those helps identity paranoids and ignorants, and costs the producers money, without a health benefit.
We also don’t require labeling of most traditional cultivars. Or what the pig was fed. Or of packaging content (what ink is used in that sticker?). Or of which “organic” or conventional pesticides and fertilizers were applied. Or the alignment of the crop rows (I’m going to start peddling nutritional feng shui.) Or who the guy was who picked your apple and a timestamp of when he last washed his hands. Or whether the food was produced on a Monday or Tuesday, because everyone knows the workers will be hungover or rushing out for the weekend.
It would cost me money to label all these things. I don’t keep track of them. Am I committing fraud? People ask some weird fucking questions about food (I couldn’t have made up the row alignment thing). And some reasonable ones (what do the chickens eat? A mix of forage and commercial pellets. What ratio? I don’t know.) There are probably GMOs in those chicken pellets; I haven’t checked.
If I felt it would be good for business to label something, I’m free to do so.* I shouldn’t have that speech compelled unless there is an unimagined risk or benefit to health.
*Within limits. Even factual statements can be deceptive if they imply a benefit. See rGBH labeling.
Supermarkets are loaded down with products that advertise themselves as organic or non-GMO (both of which are touted to lack the Evil DNA). You probably can’t walk more than a couple feet in a Whole Foods without bumping into non-GMO products.
And they’re increasing all the time in response to fearmongering and ignorance.*
So I remain puzzled at the “need” for GMO labeling (one can avoid these nasty foods easily) unless the purpose is to stigmatize and force them off the market for sociopolitical reasons. The consequences include potentially losing valuable food products like coffee and oranges due to infectious blights that could be stopped in their tracks by genetically modified versions. Or never seeing non-allergenic/healthier varieties that happen to be developed through biotechnology.
Maybe there should be a demand for all non-Kosher non-halal food to be labeled as such, instead of specific labeling that it’s Kosher/halal. There shouldn’t be any stigma, it’s just honest labeling, right?
*my current favorite is non-GMO vitamin C. You might ask - how on earth can a vitamin be non-GMO, when it doesn’t have genes, and there are no additives or preservatives in the product that have genes either? Turns out at least some L-ascorbic acid (vitamin C) is manufactured through a process that starts with corn, and there are techniques (not sure how commonly used) for employing genetically modified bacteria to produce the product.
L-ascorbic acid is exactly the same no matter whether it ultimately derives from Satanic GMO corn or “non-GMO corn grown in the green hills of Scotland” (to quote one supplement dealer’s hyperbole).
There is also a [del]quack[/del] “alternative” cancer clinic that avoids the Evil Chemo in favor of things like non-GMO intravenous vitamin C. So you can die naturally, as God intended.
There is no scientific or nutritional reason to require GMO labeling.
However, I support labeling requirements. If you don’t want to eat GMOs, its your right to know what your food is and not to buy it. In this case, let the market decide.
Yes, we should be hyper-aware of the potential threat of products that have shown no adverse health consequences in decades of use. Be safe, be sure, buy only non-GMO!
*both of the companies cited in the linked stories proudly advertise their products as being non-GMO. In Chipotle’s case, that’s apparently much more important than training your staff to wash their hands after taking a dump.
About 1% of the population is allergic to peanuts, and 100 or so people die in the USA from allergic reactions to peanuts every year.
There have been no documented cases of deaths or complications due to consumption of GMO food approved for human use.
There are a couple of possible (weak data) cases of reactions to Cry9C corn that was approved for animal feed but made its way into the human food chain. It was recalled and has been off the market for almost 2 decades.
People are notoriously bad at risk assessment. I’d hope that Dopers would be better.
Yep. They’re pandering to the ignorant, who don’t realize things like Organic doesn’t mean “no pesticides”, just no synthetic pesticides. Organic foods frequently use “organic” pesticides like rotenone, which are even more harmful than synthetic ones like malathion.
Similarly, irradiated food is perfectly safe and non-radioactive, yet people freak the hell out about it, because, you know, RADIATION!
Or worse, people buy stuff labeled as “natural”, when that term has absolutely no legal specification whatsoever. In a sense, a lot of petroleum distillates are just as natural as say… distilled vinegar, distilled water or any sort of alcoholic spirits.
My thinking is that there doesn’t need to be a regulatory requirement for labeling of GMO/non-GMO, but rather a standard that manufacturers have to adhere to, if they CHOOSE to label their products as non-GMO. That way, the onus is on the non-GMO manufacturers and crowd to make their own decisions and verify that stuff for themselves, instead of being a burden on everyone else who doesn’t give a shit.
Can peanut DNA chains end up in non peanut food and cause an allergic reaction? If so, do you feel those allergic to peanuts have a right to know about it?
I agree, I am still sympathetic to allowing labels though even though I think they will be harmful to stupid people because I kind of believe people have the right to be stupid in many areas like this.
But yes, what will happen is campaigns will be started extolling the virtues of non gmo crops and the dangers of gmo crops/animals/food.
People will now see a shiny label and the rubes among us will fall in line and choose poorly.
The irony of it all is that gmo crops have the potential to be the healthiest and most nutrient rich crops of all. Because we can ENGINEER them that way. Needless to say if we ever do allow labeling we’d need a vigorous defense of the benefits and real science.
Why not? I still don’t get the distinction here. In my opinion, selective breeding has introduced far larger and more worrisome changes in our food supply in a short period of time than a few gene splicers in a lab have. Not to mention, I trust guys in a lab with the scientific method and clinical trials making potatoes that have fewer carcinogens far more than a few hayseeds on a chicken farm breeding super hulk fryers. It just seems so arbitrary.
Why should the shelf stable potato that doesn’t cause cancer get the big scary “GMO” label while the chicken that is on average four times heavier than chickens were in the 1970s (and raised in terrible conditions) not get any label at all? The first is the result of years of scientific study, clinical trials and approval from the FDA. The second is a result of greedy chicken farmers fucking around.
Read for comprehension. I said upthread I support GMO labeling. But not for the whacko reasons that most of the proponents argue - they’re akin to antivax arguments.
You could probably deliberately design another plant that produces Ara h 1, 2, 3, 8, or 9. The gene for Ara h 1 is ~2 kb; I don’t know about the others. Expression of a known protein allergen warrants labeling IMO. But a label for the allergen.
How is it censorship? We aren’t telling people that they CANNOT say something. We are telling people that they don’t have to say something (this product contains GMO ingredients) and that they CAN say other things (this product contains no GMO ingredients) that sounds like the opposite of censorship.
I am good friends with people at the CDC and FDA and AFAICT its actually deceptive to force GMO labeling. GMO are engineered to grow with fewer chemicals like pesticides (pest resistant strains) and herbicides (roundup ready), they can have better yields, taste better, look better, etc. That’s not to say that GMO is always better but its definitely not always worse.
We have been able to convince people that its worth paying a pretty large premium to buy organic food, I don’t see why we couldn’t do it with GMO foods.
If there are other problems with GMO foods (There is some evidence that some GMo crops might be contributing to colony collapse in the bee population), then advertise that. I personally would make an effort to buy avoid foods that are contributing to colony collapse but that is not what is driving the GMO labeling movement. The movement is being driven by anti-science fearmongering (frankenfoods, etc).
This is my take on the issue, basically word-for-word. Refusing to label just fuels the hysteria about Monsanto and its Satanic directors and so on. In any event, US food labelling standards are notoriously meaningless.
Every day there’s another article about a private lab that tested food X or supplement Y and found that it contained none of what was advertised and dozens of things that weren’t.
I’m against mandatory labeling, simply because the market is already labeling voluntarily. In the US, if a food does not say Non-GMO or Organic, then one can safely presume it has GMO inputs.
Living in California, I can tell you what will happen if a mandatory labeling law is in effect. Every food product will say “May Contain GMO”, just like every building has a Prop 65 warning about potentially dangerous chemicals. Ubiquitous warnings go unnoticed. Companies already have incentives to produce non-GMO; mandatory labels doesn’t change that.
People who want foods without GMOs can already buy them. People who don’t care, don’t.
It would not shock me if somewhere, some day, negative health effects were linked to a genetically modified fruit or vegetable.
Thing is, we’ve already seen it happen - in conventionally bred vegetables.
Plant scientists were very pleased some years ago with the development of the non-GMO Lenape potato, which made great potato chips. Unfortunately, it also contained high levels of solanine, which made some of the first people to eat it sick. A similar problem was found in an “heirloom” Swedish potato.
Conventional plant breeders have also developed celery varieties that are higher in psoralens, which increase insect resistance. Sounds great, but workers who handle lots of celery are prone to skin rashes (which can be severe) and there’s evidence that psoralens have a carcinogenic effect in mice.
And there’s the unfortunate case of the New Zealand Killer Zucchini (containing high levels of cucurbitacin, which led to illness among people who consumed it. The offending variety was identified as “organic”.
If anything like these cases had been tied to GMO produce, anti-GMOers would be leaping up and down in mixed outrage and glee. Somehow, when conventional breeding is involved, such incidents are ignored in favor of highly dubious speculation about “Frankenfoods”.
And conventional breeding is arguably much more likely to produce negative outcomes, seeing that thousands of genes are being transferred and interacting in unknown ways, compared to the highly selective and well-studied techniques of gene modification.
So, go to your legislators and demand labeling of all produce, “Created By Artificial Hybridization”. Or start up a petition drive to get that mandatory label approved by voters.
Except that if we require GMO labeling people will think that GMO is more of a problem than non-GMO and then we get problems like people fighting against Golden Rice. (Which really pisses me off; a bunch of white people in food-rich countries using anti-science to keep people in poorer countries from getting adequate nutrition.)
I have a deep aversion to buying products made by left-handed people. Therefore, I demand that a package be labelled “Contains products made by left-handed people”, so I can avoid it.
After all, doesn’t a consumer have a right to know everything he wants to know? If that’s your logic, then how can you support GMO labeling and not also support my need to know about left-handed workers?
The problem with over-labeling is that each useless label makes more important labels easier to overlook or harder to find. A diabetic really needs to know how much sugar is in a product. It doesn’t help if the sugar content is buried in a hundred other useless labels, or written in micro-print because there’s so little available space on the package. If a product contains peanut, it would be nice if that fact was easily discoverable - not buried inside a giant list of things that are totally irrelevant to the quality or safety of the food.