Proposition 37, which would require the Department of Public Health here in California to label genetically engineered food. If Californians vote yes on Prop 37 on November 6, California will become the first in the country to require such a labeling system, possibly creating ripple effects across the nation.
Michael Pollan talking:
genetic modification was a major innovation in our food supply that we have not had a chance to debate in this country. And it goes back now ’til 1996, when these first crops were introduced. And unlike in Europe, where there was a pretty heated debate, and in Japan, in a resolution that involved labeling—they’re sold in these places, most of them, but they’re labeled—we never had that debate, because both political parties agreed, and when in America both political parties agree, there’s no space for politics. And so, I just think it’s—it’s that opportunity for us to start talking about it.
And if this label passes in California, there will be enormous pressure for a national label by the food industry, among others. If it survives court challenges—because, make no mistake, if it passes, Monsanto will take it to court on the very first day—there will be pressure, because food companies will not want to make—formulate food differently for California than the rest of the country. So we’ll have that national debate over whether to label this product or not. And I think that’s a—that’s a healthy thing. How can that not be healthy?
something very exciting is happening around food in this country. There is a movement. It has—you see it when you go to the farmers’ market. You see it in the kind of conversation we’re having about food in the media. People are getting very interested in where their food comes from, how it was produced, and they’re trying very hard to, you know, vote with their fork, as the slogan goes, for the kind of food that supports their values, the kind of food that they deem most healthy or environmentally sustainable.
And this movement is a tremendous threat to big food, which would much rather we didn’t think about how our food is produced, because it’s often not a very pretty picture. I mean, take the meat industry, for example. They don’t want you to think CAFO, feedlot, factory farm, when you pick up a piece of beef; they want you to think home on the range, cowboys, you know, a 10-gallon hat. So, there’s a real disconnect between the way food is being sold to us and the way it’s actually being produced.
And genetic modification is part of that disconnect. It is—there is a story about how this food is produced that the industry would rather you not know. They’re happy to talk to, you know, editorial boards in op-ed pages and the elites at conferences about feeding the world, and this is the only way we can feed the world and drive up yields and save the forest, but for some reason they don’t want to have that conversation with consumers, the people who actually have to eat the stuff.
And the reason for that is quite simple. Consumers would probably avoid genetically modified food if they were given the choice. At least that’s the fear of the industry. Now, why would they do that? The industry likes to depict that as irrational behavior, you know, this fear of the unknown or of this new technology. But, in fact, it’s perfectly rational to avoid genetically modified food, so far. And the reason is, as Stacy said earlier, it offers the consumer nothing. It may or may not offer farmers some edge in terms of convenience, but to the consumer, all it offers is some uncertainty, the doubts that have been raised by certain studies about it, and also a type of agriculture that some consumers want to avoid: giant monocultures, you know, under a steady rain of herbicides, which is what most GM crops are. So, faced with that risk-benefit analysis, some undetermined possible risk versus no benefit whatsoever, what’s the smart thing to do? Smart thing to do is just avoid it until we know more about it.
genetically modified organisms may have been developed in laboratories by scientists in places like Berkeley, but make no mistake, they’re owned by very large corporations. Monsanto and DuPont now own something like 47 percent of the seed supply in this country. The real benefit of GM to these companies is really the ability to control the genetic resources on which humankind depends. It is like putting a bar code on every plant. You can tell if it’s your plant in the field. And you—farmers are forced to sign contracts forbidding them from saving seed and forbidding researchers, by the way, from studying these crops.
So—and this is perhaps my biggest objection to the technology. I’m not persuaded there is a health threat attached to GM; I think we still need to do a lot more work on that question. But what I know and don’t need to be persuaded of is that this represents a whole new level of corporate control over our food supply, that a handful of companies are owning the seeds, controlling the farmers and controlling our choices. And the food movement is all about diversity. The food movement is all about consumers connecting directly with farmers and cutting out that narrow waist of the hourglass that all our food has been passing through, these monopolies and oligopolies.
And, you know—and the consumer desires something else. But the consumer needs knowledge in order to make good choices. And there are a certain number of people who would simply like to avoid this kind of food. David Zilberman was saying that, well, you can avoid it by buying organic, but organic is expensive. And there are people who want to avoid it who can’t afford organic. We shouldn’t just make—we can’t have a two-class food system where people who want to avoid GM and buy sustainable, humanely raised meat, they get to have this good food, and everybody else is stuck with this industrial crap because they can’t afford anything better. I think we need to democratize the ability to choose good food. And this is—this is a way to do that.
our government has been promoting Monsanto’s products and the technology of genetic engineering. Both parties, as I said earlier, have supported this—the Democrats very early on. Remember the era of industrial policy—I’m sure you do, Amy—where the Democrats would pick out certain industries to promote to bring back the economy during the first Bush administration. Well, biotech was one of the ones they chose. The biotech industry and Monsanto was very close to Bill Clinton, in particular. And so, you’ve had—this is an American product that we’re promoting overseas. There’s nothing unusual about that. And it just happens to be a product a lot of people around the world don’t want. And, you know, it’s important to remember that other countries have had their debate, and they’ve decided they want to label this.
We can’t have that debate in Washington, because Monsanto has closed off all the avenues of debate. We can’t have it in state legislatures—same reason: lobbying money has closed off the avenues. In Congress, Dennis Kucinich has—you know, has introduced bills to label GM for every year since they were introduced. He’s never gotten more than a handful of co-sponsors. This bubbling up of the issue in California, through our crazy initiative process, is the only—the only way that it has managed to come before the public. And it’s a politics that’s very hard to stamp out, though God knows they’re trying, and they may succeed. And I think that, in itself, is a—is a pretty worrisome phenomenon.
And we’re seeing it on soda taxes, too, where the food industry, when challenged by people, fights back with deceptive advertising, tons of money, and so far has held the—held the ground on soda taxes nationally, spending hundreds of millions of dollars. They have pretty much held the ground on labeling GM also, by spending tens of millions of dollars. You know, we’re in this era where corporate speech is—has First Amendment rights, and they are using it very, very effectively.
And watching the difficulty of the pro-campaign response, since they don’t have airtime—and the media has done just a terrible job of calling out the deceptions in this advertising—is discouraging. But we still need to keep at it. You know, there are a lot of people in the food movement who are just like turned off on national politics, and they want to go to their farmers’ markets and work on local issues. And all that is very, very important. But the risk there is we build a two-class food system, where people who can afford to check out on the industrial food system do, and everyone else is left eating industrial stuff. That’s why we do need to deal with these issues at the ballot box, deal with them in Washington, deal with them in the White House.
Mayor Bloomberg has been fighting courageously against big soda for a very long time. And when he sought to tax soda in New York, Pepsi threatened to leave the state. And that pretty much nixed it. So, he went looking for some other tools, and he discovered, lo and behold, that the mayor has this odd power that he can regulate the size of cups and—under the Health Department laws—not everywhere, but in movie theaters and in restaurants. And so, he decided to go after that.
And, you know, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. I think it’s something we have to try. It’s been mocked, you know, to an incredible extent, and it sounds like paternalism, but, you know, no one’s—no one’s preventing people from getting a big soda or getting two sodas; they’re just saying that it can’t come in more than a 16-ounce serving. That’s important, because we have something called a unit bias. We basically eat the or drink the amount that we’re given. And if a normal soda comes in 20 ounces, we drink 20 ounces of soda. If a normal soda is in eight or 16 ounces, that’s what we drink. So, by that slight nudge of changing the size of the container—that’s it—not taxing it, not forbidding any more, we can affect people’s choices. This is, you know, creating a default, and the default is a smaller soda. I don’t know if it will work, but I think we have to try these things.
You know, the reason that Mayor Bloomberg is so obsessed about soda is that New York City has a big public hospital system, and it costs a fortune for the city to run it. And when they looked at why it’s so expensive, they discovered type 2 diabetes as one of the big costs of our healthcare system. Every new case costs the city of New York something like $400,000. So if you can drive down rates of type 2 diabetes, you can cut healthcare costs. And what is the chief cause of type 2 diabetes in New York City? Excess consumption of sugar in the form of soda. So, this is a pretty—this is about saving money, saving money for the taxpayer. And the soda industry is dead set against it.
Michael Taylor is often cited as the poster child for the revolving door in regulation. He was a lawyer representing Monsanto before the rules for genetically modified food were developed in 1992. He then left this firm, went to work for the FDA, co-drafted the rules by which GM is regulated—and I use that word advisedly, because the rules are essentially that it need not be regulated, it need not be labeled. That was the FDA decisions. And then he returned to Monsanto. And subsequently, he moved to the FDA. He’s kind of gone back and forth between Monsanto and the FDA for quite a long time. He’s working on food safety now, and I think he’s number two at the FDA. Some people are alarmed that he’ll be appointed head of the FDA in a second administration.
When you go back to the way that the FDA set up the rules for GM, you know, you discover that they ruled that these products were substantially equivalent—that’s the technical term—to conventional products, and therefore did not need to be labeled. But you look a little deeply, and you find that the FDA scientists were overruled in that determination. So it was an assertion, not a political finding, that these foods are substantially equivalent. This is just the kind of debate we need to have and we’re starting to have here in California.
– source democracynow.org
Michael Pollan, Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism. He’s written several books about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, and the forthcoming Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.