Politics: No on labeling GM foods

California voters opted not to require labels on foods that contain genetically modified ingredients. Proposition 37 would have made California the first U.S. state to require such labels, already mandatory in Europe, and it might well have led to labeling nationwide. Many U.S. foods are made from corn or other crops containing DNA modified in a lab to resist herbicides, drought, and diseases. The scientific consensus is that GM foods are safe to eat, but activists question that conclusion and argue that consumers have a right to know what they’re eating. The labeling requirement led in the polls until last month, when the food and chemical industries spent some $45 million on a barrage of TV ads against it.

This referendum was “one of the most heated and emotional” on the ballot, said Karin Klein in theLos Angeles Times. Too bad it was so poorly written, allowing companies to “simply label everything as possibly containing bioengineered ingredients.” The lack of such a label wouldn’t have meant that a food was necessarily pure: It might still be laced with pesticides or antibiotics.

Yet the labels would have done more than just identify GM foods, said Tom Philpott in Mother Jones. They would have started a national conversation on what’s wrong with our food supply—how it got “so homogenized, uniform, and reliant on a narrow base of seed types owned by a tiny number of giant companies.” Prop. 37 was a “referendum on corporate domination of the food system.” Unfortunately, it was crushed “under fat stacks of cash.” Big Food scared voters by claiming the labels would cost the average household $400 a year in higher food prices.

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The no-GM campaign also tried to scare consumers with “junk science” and terms like “Frankenfood,” said Keith Kloor in Slate.com. The activists know that “eating genetically modified food is safer than taking a shower”—their real agenda is to dismantle big agribusinesses. I, too, prefer to eat organic, but the simple truth is that we inhabit “a world of 7 billion people that cannot feed itself with only locally grown grains and vegetables.”