According to a US study, one in three consumers do not distinguish between ‘natural’ and ‘organic’, so does that mean they’re the same? Can organic foods be described as natural?
According to the Mayo Clinic, organic foods and natural foods are completely different things. Staff at the clinic have stated on the website that “usually, natural on a food label means that the product has no artificial colours, flavours or preservatives”. Whereas, natural on a label is not necessarily associated with the “methods or materials used to grow the food ingredients”.
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GMOs allow plant, animal, bacteria and virus genes to be created that would otherwise not be formed in nature. So does the ‘lab growth stage’ mean that they are not natural?
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Nigel Halford, Principle Research Scientist at Rothamsted Research told New Food: “No modern crops could be described as natural because they are the product of over a century of scientific plant breeding and many centuries of selection by farmers before that. However, it is true to say that the sorts of mutations induced by at least the basic use of genome editing are indistinguishable from those that occur naturally.”
Thus, GE has the power to produce crops that are genetically indistinguishable from crops carrying mutations that have arisen naturally. Therefore, consumers may be wrongly associating lab production with an ‘unnatural’ status.
