Viewpoint: PTA fails science, history, economics and common sense

This article originally appeared at Forbes and has been republished here with the author’s permission.

Kids of a certain age often think their parents are clueless. Sometimes they’re right. For considering a colossally misguided proposal that fails everything—science, history and economics, to say nothing of common sense—the New York State PTA gets an “F.”

Parents who are already struggling to pay for rising costs for new clothes, backpacks and school supplies as their kids start another school year could be in for an unwelcome surprise if the New York State PTA gets its way: The cost of school lunches may well be rising too–potentially by a lot–and becoming less nutritious to boot.

Next month, when they hold their annual meeting in Saratoga Springs, the New York State PTA will vote on a resolution to call on the state to ban all food and drinks from school cafeterias and vending machines that contain so-called “GMOs.” This proposal is ridiculous.

For a start, there’s really no such thing as a “GMO”–unless you include all the foods in our diet except for wild game, wild berries, wild mushrooms and non-farmed fish and shellfish. “GMO” is simply a pejorative shorthand used by activists to mean foods made with the most precise and predictable techniques of genetic improvement. Farmers and plant breeders have been selecting and hybridizing plants for millennia. More recent techniques, which still aren’t considered to produce “GMOs,” include radiation mutagenesis–i.e. zapping seeds with radiation to scramble their DNA and create mutants. Thousands of popular crops—including lettuce, wheat, rice, oats and the popular Ruby Red grapefruit—were derived this way. The evolution of techniques of genetic modification is nicely explained in this short entertaining video.

There is no controversy in the scientific community about the use of the newer “GMO” techniques. Every reputable scientific body and regulatory agency that has examined them–from the National Academies of Science and the American Medical Association to the U.S. EPA and World Health Organization–have declared them as safe as older techniques.  As long ago as 1989, a landmark study by the National Research Council concluded:

Recombinant DNA methodology [the prototypic technique of modern genetic modification] makes it possible to introduce pieces of DNA, consisting of either single or multiple genes, that can be defined in function and even in nucleotide sequence. With classical techniques of gene transfer, a variable number of genes can be transferred, the number depending on the mechanism of transfer; but predicting the precise number or the traits that have been transferred is difficult, and we cannot always predict the [traits] that will result. With organisms modified by molecular methods, we are in a better, if not perfect, position to predict the [traits].

In other words, modern genetic modification is an extension, or refinement—an improvement—over the kinds of techniques that provide virtually our entire food supply.

Recently, 113 Nobel Laureates–most of whom won their prizes for advances in medicine and science–wrote an open letter supporting the safety of GMOs and encouraging their adoption around the world because they enhance food security and conserve water and farmland.

Some in the PTA beg to differ, however. Using language and absurd allegations that appear to be lifted wholesale from fringe anti-genetic engineering websites–many of which also claim that vaccines are dangerous–the resolution vaguely cites “some laboratory research” and makes spurious claims about “health hazards”–which have been repeatedly and consistently debunked by real scientists in more than 2000 studies done in field trials and laboratories around the world.

When challenged on all this, the PTA’s senior officials say anyone can put forward a resolution and they have no control over the content. Really?  Would they allow a resolution to go forward opposing the vaccination of school kids? Just how far out on the kook fringe is the PTA willing to go?

What the PTA activists may not know is that going “non-GMO” can actually make foods less nutritious. Because consumers are increasingly desirous of so-called “natural” foods, many manufacturers are no longer fortifying foods with important vitamins and minerals such as calcium and vitamin D. When the original Cheerios went “GMO-free,” General Mills stopped supplementing the product with riboflavin (which is commonly produced in genetically engineered microorganisms), thereby removing a major source of vitamin B2 from the diet. And Post Foods’ GMO-free Grape Nuts lacks the vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin B12 and vitamin B2 that the older version contained.

Of course, dumb ideas about schools going GMO-free, or even completely organic, aren’t new. There’s the example of the Sausalito-Marin City (California) school district, which now only serves organic and “GMO-free food.” The problem with that example is that Marin County is the richest county in California, full of high-tech billionaires and financial types. (The median home value there is $1.2 million.) But being rich doesn’t make you smart, and in Marin they couldn’t afford to make the change to organic without huge subsidies from Whole Foods and other private donors for special chefs and other costs.

The writers of the PTA anti-GMO resolution haven’t said whether they expect private benefactors to step in and cover the costs for the entire state of New York. Good luck with that.

The proposed GMO ban is not an isolated aberration. In their zeal to “protect” their children from various hazards and negative influences, real or imaginary, parents sometimes go rogue. As recently as 2010-2011, parents demanded that various literary classics be banned from school curricula; these have included, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “Brave New World” and “Catcher In the Rye.” Sometimes, it seems, even grown-ups need a schoolyard monitor to ensure that they behave.

The state can ill afford to waste money on New Age food fads that have no scientific basis when it’s already struggling to balance its budget. Many parents can’t afford it either. New York State parents and taxpayers will be left holding the lunch bag.

Henry I. Miller, a physician, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy & Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.  He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Follow him on Twitter @henryimiller.

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