By that logic, we shouldn’t label Kosher foods or dolphin safe tuna. There’s lots of reasons GMOs and/or their parent companies can be considered evil or to be avoided, even if they aren’t directly poisonous.
Kosher doesn’t fit in- it has a direct effect on the consumability of the product for some people, just like labeling for allergens or phenylalanine. Labeling something as having GM products because some companies have methods one might not like is painting a huge field and all future companies who may be involved in that field with the same negative brush. It makes no sense.
There’s a law that tuna has to be labeled “dolphin safe”? Really?
I thought that was a voluntary measure - like labeling your product “GMO-free”.
I’m fine with voluntary labeling.
Except that we don’t label non-Kosher foods “not Kosher”. Rather, there’s a voluntary effort by manufacturers to label their foods as Kosher. Same with dolphin safe tuna. We’re not talking about voluntary labeling - anyone is free to label their product in any accurate way they see fit. If your product avoids GMOs like the plague, you’re perfectly welcome to label it “Non-GMO”.
I’d love to hear a few reasons why you think GMOs should be avoided, or why their parent companies can be considered evil (I’m sorry, but what is, say, Syngenta doing wrong, again? I think you may be mistaking “all GMO producers” with “Monsanto and DuPont”, and then buying into trumped-up bullshit about those two).
Wait, what?
Wait, what, what?
I know that religious jews often won’t eat non-Kosher food. But what physiological effect could it have? You compared it to allergens. That seems iffy.
Not physiological, but it’s info that informs the consumer if the food is able to be consumed. Without that info (being kosher or not) kosher Jews couldn’t buy any pre-packaged food. Reading ingredient lists wouldn’t be enough.
It is extremely weasely of you to extend your false-equivalency campaign to link labeling GM foods to labeling products as “not halal” or “not kosher”. There is a clear, bright line between a GM product and the alternative. To exclude that information from the label is to abandon accuracy- a standard you seem to endorse.
It. doesn’t. matter. If people don’t want to buy the GM product, that is the end of the story. They don’t have to defend their reasons in a court of law. Their reasons don’t have to satisfy you or anybody else. What people choose to eat is their individual choice, and not Monsanto’s, or DuPont’s, or Syngenta’s, or yours, or Congress’, or anybody else’s.
Not labeling GM products is a deception. Voluntary labeling of non-GM products is well and good, but misses the point. Only labeling GM products as such results in accurate labeling.
Yeah, Louis Pasture never fooled around with nature!
And, this just after Amazon’s fiasco of quoting George Orwell to support their point.
No one has ever stated what makes GMO products so dangerous except to say that GMO itself is evil. For years, man has cross bred strains to get the desired results. What makes adding foreign genetic material in this manner different from direct genetic manipulation? Almost all Apple trees are grafted to crab apple roots. This genetically changes the way the tree grows. It grows shorter and bushier which means that Apple can now be harvested without the use of ladders. This is done on organic and conventional farms. Not one study was ever done to see if this was safe.
The only thing different is the tool used, and no one has been able to explain why this particular tool is so dangerous. And, don’t give me that people can do one in the fields naked argument. Serious genetic manipulation of plants, whether organic or conventional, whether non-GMO or GMO are conducted in large agricultural research institutes I am tired of this type of petty nonsense.
Organic farmers may spray their crops with organic nicotine sulfate and still call them organic. Yet, the use of neonicotinoids are now suspended for use in the European Union for further study on its affect on honey bees while organic farmers can continue spraying their crops with nicotine sulfite.
Both products are actually very similar. The main difference is that the artificially made neonicotinoids are less toxic to the overall environment than nicotine sulfate since neonicotinoids were designed to solely attack insect nicotinic acetylcholine receptor while not affecting the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor in mammals and birds. Nicotine sulfite affects the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor of all animals.
Although nicotine sulfide is a toxic chemical for humans, no one is insisting on labeling produce that was sprayed with this toxin, and no one is insisting that all food that is made from plants sprayed with this toxin is properly labeled. Instead, people are insisting upon labeling our food for something where no proof exists that it is causing one whit of harm.
There’s no law about having to label foods kosher or non-kosher. No one has to put a warning label stating Warning, this food contains traif ingredients!. If you want to advertise your food as kosher, you may. You don’t have to. If you want to play up the porkiness of your product, you’re free to do so! Spam. Never Kosher. Never Will. It’s just not a requirement.
Evil? That’s a religious thing. Satan is evil and God is good. We must turn our hearts towards God! We must resist Satan!
So, this is really is a religious argument. You can’t show GMO is poisonous, but it’s evil because the companies that make them are evil. And, these companies are evil because they do evil things like make GMO seeds.
You can’t require labeling of products based upon your religious requirements. We Jews had to create organizations that go into companies and certify whether or not a particular product they make is kosher. Companies pay for this service because they hope it increase sales.
You have a religious requirement. Come up with an arcane series of rules that are beyond any logical reason that must be followed. Then, go to companies and see if they’ll let you inspect their products to see if they fall under your rules and requirements. If they do, the company gets to display your symbol on that product. People who follow these arcane rules will buy this product, and companies can increase their sales.
I have a feeling you can’t do this because certifying complete GMO free is expensive for most companies. You have to show an unbroken chain of verification for all ingredients. You have to hire inspectors to verify that everything entering the plant is indeed GMO free. No major company is willing to go through such an expense, and thus instead of having a private agency verify a particular product is non-GMO, you want to force all companies to either verify whether or not their product is GMO free.
Wait, it’s not Congress’ business, but you want Congress to write and pass a law to force Monsanto and DuPont and Syngenta and everybody else to label whether or not any GMO products are used anywhere in their final product?
If it’s not Congress’ business, then keep Congress out of it. Start a NO GMO organization that certifies foodstreams to be GMO free and provides their NO GMO seal of approval, then contact food producers (farmers, grocery stores, agribusiness companies, etc) and market to them the advantage of certifying themselves GMO, and using your company to do so.
There are already organizations that do this (including the Non GMO Project). Since corporate promotion of non-GMO content is already rolling merrily along (and consumers have ever-increasing opportunity to choose non-GMO foods), it begs the question of why many advocates still call for mandatory labeling of GMO foods - unless it’s to demonize the foods in question and force a halt to the technology.
If it’s accurate labeling that you’re after, then what do you decide is worth a label?
For example, I don’t care if the produce I buy is GMO, but I do care what pesticides were used in growing it. Do we label that?
Others here may care more about whether the workers who harvested that produce were paid a proper wage and had decent working conditions. Do we label that?
Both of those things seem more important that consumers should know than whether it is a GMO.
I demand that every piece of produce I buy have a three-page label! Not giving me this three-page label is deception.
AHEM.
It really shouldn’t. CurtC hit the nail on the head. Why does GMO deserve labeling while countless other concerns do not? Give us a reason! Tell us why this labeling is so important!
And what, pray tell, is this line? What about Bt-corn makes it so different from heirloom corn that it would need to be labeled in a bag of Doritos? I’ll tell you this much - when it comes to the end consumer, the answer is “nothing”. You’d be better off knowing the exact thing of corn
Yes, but (and this is the point you keep on refusing to address for some reason) there is a wealth of information that is excluded from labels which people may want to know - is the food in accordance with my religion? Was the food grown with certain chemicals? Were the animals involved in its making kept humanely? All manner of things which are all far more relevant than whether or not something is GMO. Should those all be on there? Give me one good reason that isn’t either completely arbitrary and doesn’t apply to whatever other random bullshit that nobody should reasonably give a shit about. That should not be difficult.
Now replace GM with non-Halal, or non-Kosher, or “grown with neonicotinids” or “is flapdoodle” and tell me why the statement doesn’t still make just as much sense. Stop dodging and address the criticism.
Yes, but what is legally mandated as a label absolutely is a matter of the law. If they have no good reason for their need for a label beyond “we just don’t like this stuff”, then THERE IS NO GOOD REASON TO LABEL IT!
Yes, and once again, we could replace GM with literally anything else and it would be true. But a 3-page-long warning label is asinine.
DNA, y’know? Scary stuff, amirite? Do you really want your food to have D-N-A? (Did you hear… DNA causes CANCER!)
I endorse this bumper sticker.
It’s deoxyribonucleic acid! You’ll hallucinate!
Nice takedown of fallacious anti-GMO arguments here, including the claim that there hasn’t been enough testing:
*"…everyone I have ever asked who uses this argument admits that, for them personally, no amount of testing would cause them to drop their aversion to GE foods. While this is not as obvious as those who trample crops, it is just as disingenuous because it still seeks to use the precautionary principle indefinitely. They have moved the goalposts so far that even they can not see them. Furthermore, if they can not define what sufficient testing would look like, how can they define what insufficient testing does look like? Which crops should be further tested? What more should we test for? What faults are to be found with the current tests? Where is the nuance?
This is also an indirect contradiction to the claim that GE foods cause harm. It cannot be true that we have not performed enough tests to assess safety and also know that they are unsafe. This suggests a double standard where evidence of harm is believed based on unscientific standards that accept rumors and speculation, but evidence of safety is held to standards so strict as to be unobtainable."*
If no amount of facts can change your beliefs, you’re talking about religion and not science.
I am not anti-religious. In fact, I am fairly religious, but I do understand the difference between my personal religious beliefs and facts. If your religion doesn’t allow you to eat GMO foods, then don’t. I have no problems with that. Just don’t use the federal government to enforce your religious beliefs on me.