US House Committee Approves Anti-GMO Labeling Law

An anonymous reader writes: The House Agriculture Committee approved a measure banning mandatory GMO labeling as well as local efforts to regulate genetically engineered crops. The decision is a major victory for U.S. food companies and other opponents of labeling genetically modified foods. "This... legislation will ensure that Americans have accurate, consistent information about their food rather than a 50 state patchwork of labeling laws that will only prove costly and confusing for consumers, farmers and food manufacturers," said Pamela Bailey, CEO of the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), said in a statement.

Comments

This legislation brought to you by..

[kheldan]

..your friends at Monsanto Corporation.

Our Business Is Life Itself.

Re:This legislation brought to you by..

[thegarbz]

With no evidence that GMO food is bad for your health why should mandatory labeling be required. If people are actually keen to have non-GMO foods and a market exists for those people why not simply label all other food as GMO free to appease that market?

You see the same thing happening with every other food property starting quite early with the labeling of foods that contain no artificial colours or flavours, and 99% fat free, not to mention "organic", gluten free, phosphate free etc.

If people care about it then the labels will come on their own accord, until then there should be no reason a food should be labeled unless there's a risk associated with the product that the manufacturer is willfully omitting.

Re:This legislation brought to you by..

[CrimsonAvenger]

Should we also do this with conventional hybrids? Since they also have the chance of "new untested substances to be produced within it"?

If not, why not?

And if so, are you aware that pretty much everything we eat is a hybrid? Some newer than others, of course. But none of those hybrids have undergone "proper clinical trials before release"....

Re:This legislation brought to you by..

[Gryle]

There's been evidence.. but you can't find it now, because the independent labs that did the research were bought out by Monsanto, closed down, and the evidence buried. I'd imagine that now they proactively buy out anyone who has anything negative to show the world, and shuts them down before they can even tell anyone what they're finding.

Do you have evidence of this or are you just spouting paranoid theory? And don't tell me "just Google it" or any other similar smart-ass comments. You're making the claim, you provide the evidence.

Re: This legislation brought to you by..

[krlynch]

No ... over the last hundred years, with improvements in public hygiene, water supplies, and vaccines, we have essentially conquered lethal childhood disease. We have effectively conquered food-borne illness. We have found effective anaesthetics and antibiotics and discovered effective methods of surgery so that essentially no one dies of minor trauma. The same techniques mean that most birth defects are now survivable.

Heart attack, cancer, etc haven't skyrocketed as causes of death because of our diet ... they've skyrocketed because we now live long enough for these to be the primary things that take us out, because we've beat all the other stuff! All these diseases have (obviously) existed for millions of years, but essentially no one ever succumbed to them because they didn't live long enough!

Can most of us eat better and exercise more and eek out a few more years? Sure. But I'd much rather our situation today than that of our forbears of even a hundred years ago.

Re:This legislation brought to you by..

[harlows_monkeys]

I have no objection to the science of GMO. It is the business of GMO that I do not trust.

The difference between conventional hybrids and GMOs is that the the set of plants and animals that can be obtained by the former over any given time frame is a tiny subset of those that can be obtained by the latter. GMO gives food producers a great increase in power, and as a great philosopher once observed, "With great power comes great responsibility". I don't think the current food companies have the necessary responsibility.

With conventional hybrids, they are more limited in what they can do, and it can take longer to achieve a given desired organism. These limitations give us a chance to make sure that they are not misusing their power.

Re:This legislation brought to you by..

[NoKaOi]

You do realize, right, that every GMO is required to undergo years of testing? Unlike anything labeled as Organic or Natural or Dietary Supplement which do not require any testing at all.

Re:This legislation brought to you by..

[Nethemas the Great]

Crossing bacterial genes with corn genes is not quite the same thing as mixing and matching corn genes from one variety with another. When we take a gene from bacteria and insert it into corn we are creating a quite unnatural thing and making a whole lot of assumptions about our understanding of genetic language in the process. Maybe it was safe to do, maybe it was not. With selective breeding and hybridization, you are at least starting with genetically compatible material. You also have millions of years of history demonstrating this to be reasonably safe. Nature prevents humans from impregnating hippos, but GMOs are effectively doing just that as well as things far more perverse.

For many of us, we feel an abundance of caution is merited. Given the players involved, it's really hard for us to simply accept their statements of "trust us." There's no independent verification of safety, just blind faith that Monsanto and co. aren't employing a calculus with our health and their profits.

Re:This legislation brought to you by..

[CanadianMacFan]

I have a problem with the science of GMO because I don't think that humanity is nearly as smart as we think we are. Only 15 years ago we mapped the human genome and there were many speeches about how it was going to lead to many breakthrough cures. Turns out that things are much more complicated than just simple single on/off switches. Then there was the so-called junk DNA that scientists kept going on about for so long. And then it wasn't too long ago that they realized that it actually did have a purpose. (On a side note it shouldn't be a big surprise since nature wouldn't normally be keeping around a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't useful.)

So far, for the most part all GMO has done for us is create new strains of food that is resistant to poisons that have ended up creating more resistant weeds. We keep hearing about all of the wonderful things that GM can do but it just doesn't get past the laboratory.

I wouldn't mind seeing it used to transfer genes within the same species and it would speed up the process you could recreate with selective breeding. But I'm against transplanting genes from one species to another because we just don't know enough about how the genes interact. It's not whether the food is safe to eat or not (which is what everyone seems to focus on) but what unforeseen impacts with the plants we are introducing.

Re:This legislation brought to you by..

[crashumbc]

And the money involved makes it VERY likely that process is corrupt at MANY levels...

The limitations imposed by "traditional" methods impose hard limits on what can be done.

I personally, don't mind creating and selling GMO's...

I very much mind not being allowed to know WHAT my food IS. This corporate shill of a law is prime example of the subversion of how capitalism is supposed to work. For capitalism to work properly the consumer need to be able to make a INFORMED decision. That is being denied to me.

Re:This legislation brought to you by..

[KGIII]

I believe that is best termed as an 'appeal to authority' as well as an 'ad hominem' pair of fallacies. Now logical fallacies do not always negate the value of a rebuttal. However, in this case, it appears that they do and do so quite handily. Regardless of your professed practices you have offered nothing of quality.

If you are what you claim to be then information and education would be welcomed, I expect.

Blithering about your supposed expertise accomplishes nothing and makes me inclined to believe you might be fabricating your credentials or exaggerating them because you do something like run the homogenization machine in a milk plant and add in the vitamin D concentrate.

Re: This legislation brought to you by..

[Kazoo the Clown]

Every GMO sold in the U.S. has undergone extensive pre-market safety testing. What specifically about this process do you feel to be deficient. Especially in light of the fact that many other tools, such as random mutagenesis via radiation, do not require any pre-market testing depite having actually made people sick (unlike any GMO in the last 20 years).

You pick up the torch, and I'll pick up the pitchfork. GMO LABELLING IS NOT JUST ABOUT SAFETY. What's "deficient" is knowledge of which products are using a technology that people object to on, for example, the grounds that Monsanto's use of patented GMO crops are polluting neighbor small farmers who are then inadvertently find themselves in trouble for patent infringement. Another reason is people don't like new technologies forced on them whether they like it or not. And I'm sure there are other reasons people have for not wanting GMOs. So I'll say it again, GMO LABELLING IS NOT JUST ABOUT SAFETY.


If there's nothing to hide, there's no reason NOT to label if people want it. What's "confusing" is not to label it and leave people wondering. And in fact we see there IS something to hide. They know if they label GMOs some people won't buy them because of it. I can tell you though, if I see two products on the shelf and one says "non-GMO," THAT'S the one I'm buying.

Other opponents

[amicusNYCL]

other opponents of labeling genetically modified foods

Now who the hell considers themselves an opponent of labeling GMO foods unless they have a financial stake in it? Is there anyone walking down the street who has nothing to do with the food industry and considers themselves an opponent of labeling GMO foods?

This... legislation will ensure that Americans have accurate, consistent information about their food

So a law that requires that GMO foods are labeled as GMO foods would be a barrier to accurate, consistent information? Someone wrote that quote without even bothering to check what the issue was, didn't they?

Re:Other opponents

[erice]

other opponents of labeling genetically modified foods

Now who the hell considers themselves an opponent of labeling GMO foods unless they have a financial stake in it? Is there anyone walking down the street who has nothing to do with the food industry and considers themselves an opponent of labeling GMO foods?

I have no financial stake it in an I oppose labeling of GMO foods.

This... legislation will ensure that Americans have accurate, consistent information about their food

So a law that requires that GMO foods are labeled as GMO foods would be a barrier to accurate, consistent information?

Yes. Because "GMO" doesn't tell you anything all. It makes people *think* they are making an informed choice about their health when actually they are choosing randomly and because people have limited time and attention span, adding the label means other, actually important factors, get less attention.

Re:Other opponents

[Copid]

I'm in favor of good information on food labels, but I also see the complaint from the GMO producers. I think they're worried about something like this:

GMO company: There's no need to label these things. They're perfectly safe.
Anti-GMO activist: Why do you hate transparency? If it's perfectly safe, there's no reason not to label them.

[Time passes. Labels mandated.]

Anti-GMO activist: If GMOs are so safe, why is labeling them mandatory?
Consumers: Hey! That's a good point!

Re:Other opponents

[Your.Master]

I consider myself an opponent of mandatory labelling GMO foods as GMO, without having a financial stake in it.

I would suggest instead that non-GMO products should voluntarily label themselves as non-GMO, and enforce the veracity of that claim under truth in advertising laws. I still believe that's actually better even for the people who are opposed to GMO in general, because now they know what to look for. This is the "kosher-label" model instead of the "danger: explosive!" model.

I could also see my way to mandatory labelling specific classes of GMO products if a legitimate concern could be cited about them. Otherwise it's just really arbitrary. Like mandating a "contains Utah genes" label for products whose ancestry ever included a plant or animal raised in Utah.

Enforcing labelling on an arbitrary basis does in fact create a barrier because your choice of what is a mandatory label *itself* conveys information ("we politicians aren't confident this is safe for human consumption, but aren't willing to ban it outright either"). And the thing is, that's what presumably any product that intentionally contains no GMO truly wants to advertise, so they should go ahead and advertise it. It's their right. I haven't seen a lot of these labels. There is "organic" which guarantees no GMO, but it also comes with some extra requirements you may not wish to impose, like limitations on pesticides and fertilizers.

It's kind of like biased reporting. It is possible to report a sequence of things that everybody agrees are facts, in such a way as to suggest something that is non-factual. That's what bias is.

Re:Other opponents

[erice]

The GMO label means nothing, but those pushing it will use it to imply GMO=unsafe. It then becomes a weapon they can use to advance their agenda to have all GMO removed from the food chain. For no good reason.

Some people falsely believe gluten is bad. Do you support banning labels that tell people that a food contains wheat?

Non-sequitur. Celiac is quite real even if most of the people avoiding gluten don't have it. There is no such thing as "GMO sensitivity". Indeed, there can't be because "GMO" is not a substance.

Good! Those laws just misinform consumers anyway.

[Chalnoth]

Labeling laws like this convey no real information to the consumer. They just add a word to the food item that many people interpret as frightening, a word that has literally zero impact on the safety or sustainability of the food item. This is definitely a win for people everywhere in the US.

Re:Good! Those laws just misinform consumers anywa

[new_01]

Exactly. GMO labeling laws are analogous to labeling table salt as "NOTICE: HAS CHEMICALS!".

Labling

[penguinoid]

I think we should have mandatory labeling on anything that contains DNA, just to be safe.

Meaningless mental masturbation

[Anonymous Coward]

"Genetically modified", all food is genetically modified. Humans have domesticated, modified by selection, hybridation and other means, all the food since the beginnings of agriculture. Labelling this or that is therefore simply a lie, because all should be labelled, then.

Re:approves an anti

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, EVERYTHING YOU EAT is GMO.
The vast majority was done by selective breeding and grafting, a very small amount by directly fiddling with the genes.
There is not a single crop that hasn't been modified by humans in some way.

Re:approves an anti

[blue9steel]

Selecting breeding and genetic engineering are not the same thing. I'm not anti-gmo, but to suggest that putting Salmon genes in Tomato plants is the same as just selecting between different offspring is incorrect.

Quick, get your tinfoil hat!

[Badlight]

Ah, another case of anti-science panic.

Yes, there are some legitimate problems with GMOs, but they are legal issues, not health or environmental ones, and no one is talking about the alternative: More fertilizer, more water, more land use, more fuel to get less food.

Oh, and to pad the profit margins of the laughable "organic" food industry, which, incidentally, is spending much more money on lobbying and propaganda than the GMO industry.

So, just lump this one in with climate-change denial, anti-vaccinet, chemtrail and moon-landing--was-a-hoax crowds.

Re: approves an anti

[crmarvin42]

False dichotomy. There are a lot of ways to speed up the process other than GMO. Irradiation is still widely used in countries that don't allow GMO. If changing 1 gene makes you uncomfortable, then using mutagens to RANDOMLY change thousands of them in unknown was should scare this shit out of you.

Another blow to states' RIGHTS.

[cayenne8]

Another BLOW to states's rights and of a states' citizens to vote to know what the fuck they['re eating.

This GMO stuff isn't like selective breeding, it is putting genes from a different species into a plant...like splicing DNA out of a frog into a stalk of wheat.

Why is the food industry so "afraid" of letting the consumer make an informed decision on what they want to put in their bodies?

The food industry hasn't put this much effort and money behind anti-consumer legislation since the food nutrition labeling act (you know, the Nutrition Guides on the back of products) a few decades ago.

What are they afraid of people knowing???

Re:Another blow to states' RIGHTS.

[Dorianny]

Oh sure, look at how great letting parents make so called "informed decisions" about their children's vaccinations, worked out.

Re:Another blow to states' RIGHTS.

[siddesu]

Nope. The labels are about informed choice.

I have the right to know if what I'm buying with my money is the result of a combination of genes that have undergone thousands of years of 'safety testing' known as evolution, or something concocted in a lab by people who don't even understand fully the basics of what they're doing, but whose employers are in a rush to make a quick buck while they have the patent; something, which is only 'tested' against the interpretation of the safety rules of the said employers for a year or two.

Even if there was a working thorough safety testing procedure and no cause of concern (which isn't the case just yet), if I'm buying something with my money, I still have the right to know what it is made of, just like I have the right to know what's on the ingredient list, where something was manufactured, what color is the item in the package, what is the CPU inside and how many points are there per inch, and just like I tell my clients what's in the product that I ship to them.

If you're against labeling on the ground that it creates 'fear', let's remove the country of origin stuff too, after all, the importers have done all the testing and it is quite certain there's no harm to the consumer. Let's remove info about nutritional value, because high calories or weird ingredients scare the consumer. Finally, let's get rid of the pesky expiry date stuff, we all know that businesses will thoroughly test and that they won't put something spoiled on the shelves.

Re:Another blow to states' RIGHTS.

[Sique]

And you want to hammer this "GMO food is safe" factoid into people's heads by not telling them? Somehow I miss the logic behind that argument.

Re:Another blow to states' RIGHTS.

[siddesu]

Every-thing we eat is literally some variant of GMO, we've been making GMO foods since we've been cultivating crops and domesticating animals.

No, not at all. The 'natural' equivalent of genetic engineering is something called horizontal gene transfer, it is a process discovered only in 1951 or thereabouts and happens mostly inside simple single-cell organisms that lack nucleus and not so often in single-cell eukaryotes. As far as I am aware, there is not a lot of evidence that HGT is an important evolution factor in multicell organisms, and we mostly eat those.

before listening to Bill Nye [startalkradio.net] explain

I am not really familiar with this person, but apparently he's a former mechanical engineer turned a TV personality. That would explain his bad analogy, but by quoting him you commit a grave argument from authority fallacy :). He doesn't know any more about the subject than you, me or the average slashdotter.

Also finding out how freaking awesome their genetics lab work was amazingly impressive.

Your impression of someone's lab does nothing to alleviate legitimate concerns about the method. I'm sure that some of the doctors who appeared in tobacco commercials owned or worked in stellar hospitals.

There is no going "back to the old ways" on this where you sprinkle pollen on the stamen by hand and wait for it to grow before selecting. We're waaaay past that. We can improve the new GMO process but there's ZERO chance we're going back to the old ways.

As I already explained above, this is precisely the problem that necessitates the labeling.

At the moment, a few players with an early start have developed some techniques based on rather incomplete knowledge, and they want to monetize those fast. It is this drive for profit that is driving the process, not scientific curiosity or care about benefits to mankind. And in order to recoup the costs of the investment in the process, companies push to market things that are only tested in a laboratory, again, according to their understanding of what 'safe' and 'beneficial' means. Unfortunately, this understanding is often limited to the benefits to the investors. Some people may want to take the bet that these products are safe and buy them. Others may not. What matters is that people should have the right to know what they are buying and the right to choose how they spend their money. This is what freedom is about, no?

100's of geneticists do this for 3-4 years before handing it over to the FDA which reviews it for another 3 years.

You're badly misinformed. In fact, what happens is that hundreds of employees try to come up with evidence that their company's products are safe, and in FDA a much smaller and poorly funded group uses that carefully prepared evidence as a basis for certification.

The process is strongly influenced by politics and lobbies and is seldom too biased in favor of public safety. It is only after a significant amount of suffering accumulates that corrective measures begin to happen. You can observe the tobacco industry and the health consequences of smoking, or the fast food industry and the obesity epidemics as cases in point. There are, of course, many more specific examples that illustrate the problem with a wide range of products: medicines, particular food additives and so on.

We're now able to do in weeks what takes mother nature centuries. We can make plants resistant to bugs, pests, reduce the water they intake, make them more nutritious, give them a longer shelf life, reduce or eliminate natural toxins that many plants have, grow faster. This is really literally super food.

This is the advertisement line. But actually all 'we' have come up with is plants that are at best similar in quality with the garden variety, and the major difference is

Re:approves an anti

[jedidiah]

No. Everything I eat is not "GMO".

Not everything I eat strips individuals of their personal property rights and grants them to large corporations.

Re:approves an anti

[Required Snark]

You are factually incorrect. Some GMO crops use genetic material from Bacillus thuringiensis which as it's name implies is a bacteria, not a vascular plant.

Bacillus thuringiensis (or Bt) is a Gram-positive, soil-dwelling bacterium, commonly used as a biological pesticide. B. thuringiensis also occurs naturally in the gut of caterpillars of various types of moths and butterflies, as well on leaf surfaces, aquatic environments, animal feces, insect-rich environments, and flour mills and grain-storage facilities.

During sporulation, many Bt strains produce crystal proteins (proteinaceous inclusions), called delta-endotoxins, that have insecticidal action. This has led to their use as insecticides, and more recently to genetically modified crops using Bt genes.

It doesn't make any difference how many right wing propaganda sources you quote since they are all incorrect. When you (or they) state flatly "no GMO food that ever makes it to your plate ever has genes from one organism transplanted to another" it not even close to the truth. A simple Wikipedia search is all that it takes to get the facts.

All the cursing and name calling in you rant makes you appear unhinged and delusional. Given that you are spouting lies as well it's obvious that a rational reader would ignore everything you say.

This makes me wonder. Perhaps your family history is unique, but as far as the rest of humanity is concerned Bacillus thuringiensis is not an organism found normally living with other bacteria in our gut. If your assertion is true then maybe you do have Bt genes or are a host to that organism. If so, when did you find out about the moth/butterfly lineage in your family tree. Please share with us the story about how you ancestors interbreed with insects.

Note: In case my response was too well written for you to understand, I will restate it in terms more suited to your limited capabilities: I called you a damn liar, said that anyone with sense should ignore you, and someone in your family tree was a bug fucker. Is that simple enough for you?

Fraud

[Etherwalk]

Then I will pick up the torch.

Every GMO sold in the U.S. has undergone extensive pre-market safety testing. What specifically about this process do you feel to be deficient. Especially in light of the fact that many other tools, such as random mutagenesis via radiation, do not require any pre-market testing depite having actually made people sick (unlike any GMO in the last 20 years).

I have no problem with putting well-tested GMO products in the supermarket. I have a problem with a multibillion dollar corporation bribing my Congresspeople so that they will be able to hide the fact that the products are engineered.