Perhaps no group is more in the spotlight on the topic of labeling than The Non-GMO Project, whose monarch butterfly logo has become increasingly pervasive in the half-decade since it was created.
[T]he Information Technology & Innovation Foundation …. [has] released a citizen petition to the FDA challenging the use of The Non-GMO Project’s logo, saying that it “deliberately deceives and misleads consumers in violation of the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.”“They make the presumption that genetically modified organisms are a category that makes any sense at all,” said Val Giddings, who, along with Robert D. Atkinson, co-signed the ITIF petition. “The term ‘genetically modified organisms’ is a nonsense term ….”
Giddings went to great lengths to document the label’s scientific shortcomings …. “Every technique that scientists use in the lab to move DNA within or between organisms, and the enzymes we use to do that, are things that we have discovered in nature and figured out how they work,” he said.
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“There’s a towering irony here,” Giddings notes. “The Non-GMO Project uses a logo of a monarch butterfly. Scientists have discovered that monarch butterflies have themselves been genetically modified by viruses that are specific to lepidoptera, which have inserted viral DNA into those monarch butterflies in their past evolutionary history, making them, by any rational definition, genetically modified with foreign DNA.”
Read full, original article: Petitioner: ‘On no level’ is Non-GMO Project’s label defensible
