Back in July, the bipartisan Horticulture, Research, Biotechnology, and Foreign Agriculture subcommittee held hearings on the subject of whether food containing GMOs should carry mandatory labels, and the panel recommended that no, they should not be forced to carry labels. Perhaps you’re saying, labeling?
How can anyone be against providing the American people with basic information? Labeling food products seems so darn reasonable, resonating with values and phrases that sound so obviously good, like transparency and sunshine and empowering the consumer.
The call for labeling GMO altered foods, of course, comes from those who view them as unsafe, or even dangerous. (Other arguments against GMOs concern giant corporations patenting seeds, and mono-culture {one-crop] farming. These are important, but peripheral).
The problem is, this is one of those issues, like evolution and climate change, where minds are made up and no amount of information seems capable of changing them. Any study that characterizes GMOs as safe is summarily dismissed by critics as a “hoax,” “conspiracy,” “media propaganda” and/or “funded by giant corporations,” etc. Basically arguments that “shoot the messenger” without refuting any of the evidence.
If these objections sound familiar, it’s because they’re the words the Tea Party and the religious right use when scientific study after scientific study comes down on the side of evolution or climate change. The thing is, this time many of the most vociferous objections are coming from the “left,” the supposed “science’ people. GMOs are the mirror image of the right’s denial of climate change.
Read the full, original article: Genetically modified ignorance
