Advising people that their food contains food is somewhat counterproductive. It’s only real purpose is to enable activists and scare mongers to frighten consumers about, well, nothing, actually.
Jeff Weinstein runs a small Montpelier company called Two Guys in Vermont that makes soups that are sold in area stores.
Weinstein said he uses as many local, wholesome ingredients as he can find. He packages the soup in glass jars to steer clear of the chemicals in cans. He would love it if his soups could stand out on the supermarket shelf as not containing genetically engineered foods.
“For people who buy my soup, GE-free is important,“ Weinstein said.
Weinstein recently urged the House Agriculture Committee to pass a bill requiring foods that contain genetically engineered ingredients to be labeled as such. That means some of Weinstein’s competitors’ soup might come bearing a prominent label that reads: “This product may be partially produced with genetic engineering.”
Legislators have heard a drumbeat of support for labeling. Some 300 people turned out for an April 12 public hearing at the Statehouse. More that 100 addressed the House Agriculture Committee, all speaking in favor of labeling genetically engineered foods.
“We have a right to uncontaminated agriculture in this state,” Peggy Luhrs of Burlington told the committee at the hearing, echoing a common sentiment of uneasiness with the science of genetically engineered seeds. Many noted that 50 other nations require some sort of labeling.
“There is a desire to know what’s in their food,” Rep. Carolyn Partridge, D-Windham, chairwoman of the House Agriculture Committee.
Despite the clamor, labeling appears to be a long ways off in Vermont. Legislation that emerged from the House Agriculture Committee on Friday afternoon comes too late in the legislative session for there to be any hope of it making its way through the full House, the Senate and into law. In addition, the resistance that the legislation ran into highlights the chasm that can exist between the goals of a burgeoning political movement and the pressures legislators face as they seek to fashion laws.
The bill faces powerful opposition, and not only from the biotechnology industry that manufactures and defends its genetically engineered seeds. Some of the very people one might assume would be for the bill are also against it.
I like to know as much about my food as possible.
Spend a week on a farm. You will learn more than you care to learn.
No you don’t. There is so much irrelevant information available that would swamp out the relevant bits that you would not be more informed as a result. Just dazed and confused.
The comparison to the milk case is invalid. In that case, there was the very strong factor that there was no chemical or biological difference in the milk. There was clear and indisputable proof that the milk was not affected by the hormones. Here, such an argument cannot be made. While you can say that there is no effective difference or that the differences don’t matter, you cannot say that they are identical.
Marketing, pure and simple. If you want to sell “non-GM” you can label your goods as such, but you will have to prove it – and probably incur some costs. People that clamour for labelling just want someone else to bear the costs for their marketing campaign.
These people want labels on others’ products, with no requirement for themselves. Sould I favor a law requiring that organic food be labeled as such, because I want food that’s not grown in poop? ‘Caution: May contain deadly bacteria’ would be helpful.
Apparently the moron-a-thon about food is world wide. Pretty much nothing we eat today is as it was a couple thousand years ago. It’s all GMO. The only difference is that in a lab I can test many more variants at a time and do it in strictly controlled conditions before taking it to the field for follow-on testing. What our ancesters did was more trial and error (and error, and error). I agree with Eric in that this is just a commercial move abetted by the stupid and the easily gulled.