Commentary: A new counter to GMO haters

Since Vermont passed the nations first mandatory GMO labeling law in Apriland Connecticut and Maine followed with passage of similar laws that would take effect if other states climb onboard the anti-GMO bandwagonindustry has pushed back with a court challenge to prevent Vermont, or other individual states, from requiring such labeling.

At this point, it is uncertain whether the Vermonts law will survive judicial review, In the meantime, it remains imperative for all of the food production and food processing industry to renew its efforts to educate the public on the scienceand safetyof bioengineering. GMO labeling laws stem from one primary source: the publics distrust and paranoia about the science and applications of bioengineering. Period.

Its not about some right to know groundswell. Thats the talking point activist groups have developed to convince otherwise unaware consumers that their rights are being violated. We know from mountains of research that only about one-third of consumers actively read the labels that already provide an extensive amount of product and nutritional information. Is it really a critical issue requiring legislative action to add more information to food packaging that two-thirds of people ignore?

Of course not. Whats driving the GMO labeling push is fear, plain and simple. Anti-GMO activists have promoted the Frankenfoods model so long and so hard that even people who tend to be well-informed on issues of science and technology fall prey to the fear-mongering.

That point was underscored in an editorial from an unexpected source, who offered a couple of compelling arguments in support of genetic engineering that I believe ought to be embraced in some form by industry. The first one involves the bioscience itself, but with a novel approach.

It is no mystery as to why GMOs invoke a knee-jerk reaction wrote Beau Kjerulf Greer, Ph.D., an Associate Professor and the director of the exercise science and nutrition program at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., in a recent opinion piece for the Hartford Courant. It frankly sounds scary that corn can be engineered to produce its own pesticideuntil you know that a regular head of cabbage produces 49 different pesticides of its own.

I did not know that common vegetables were capable of producing such a wealth of endogenous pesticides, and more to the point, Ive never heard that argument used as a way to refute GMOs scariness. In other words, genetic engineering mimics the same biological processes that take place in plants naturally. As Greer phrased it, Creating a GMO is as simple as taking the gene that codes for one of those naturally occurring compounds and inserting it into a different food.

Here another variation on that same theme that is underutilized.

Consistency seems amusingly rare among the anti-GMO contingency, he wrote. A pro-labeling friend who admirably admits to having no scientific knowledge on the subject recently lectured me about the perils of tinkering with Natureall the while eating a muffin made of enriched wheat [flour]. That is wheat that has been stripped of its germ and bran, had synthetic vitamins added to it and even in its natural state bore little resemblance to its botanical ancestors, due to human-controlled breeding.

How many bakery brands tout whole wheat and all-natural on the loaves of bread they market? Yet even if the main ingredient is source-controlled, minimally processed whole wheat flour, the crop from which that ingredient was harvested is not at all natural.

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Commentary: A new counter to GMO haters