In more than 30 years in politics, Bobby Starr had never seen anything like it. The Vermont state senator, a Democrat, represents a remote, rural district on the Canadian border. For the past couple of years, everywhere he went, everyone from villagers at their annual town meeting to children at a school assembly wanted to talk about genetically modified organisms in their food.
The people bringing it up weren’t outside agitators or stereotypical Vermont hippies. “They were just ordinary citizens,” Starr told me recently. So Starr became a supporter of a GMO-labeling bill in the Vermont legislature. He had plenty of company. Not a single member of the public spoke against the legislation. The final vote in the state senate was 28-2. Last week, Governor Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, signed the bill.
In state after state where labeling has been proposed, the politicians pushing it—mostly Democrats—tell the same story. The issue, they say, was hardly on their radar until a massive amount of constituent pressure put it there. In Vermont, the campaign for labeling was spearheaded by a coalition of organic farms and the Vermont Public Interest Research Group. Campaigners knocked on 80,000 doors and got 30,000 Vermonters to send postcards to their state legislators.
No widely accepted science supports the idea that GMOs are inherently dangerous to people’s health or the environment. To proponents, including many in the agribusiness industry, opposition to GMOs is nothing more than a dangerous mania, and the people in the grip of it are akin to those who refuse to vaccinate their children or who deny that human activity is changing the Earth’s climate.
Yet the grassroots fervor around the topic—driven by Internet rumors, liberal anti-corporatism, and mothers concerned about their children—is undeniable. More than a million people have signed a petition to the Food and Drug Administration asking it to label GMOs, the most of any petition in the agency’s history.
Read the full, original article: Want to Know If Your Food Is Genetically Modified?
