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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.
Every single GMO organism has the chance for new untested substances to be produced within it. They should be regulated the same way we regulate drugs with proper clinical trials before release for exactly the same reason.
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.
I also used to be a huge proponent of GMO labeling before listening to Bill Nye explain why it's both redundant and pointless and should be embraced instead. 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. Nothing we eat today is not GMO unless we go berry picking deep in the forest. I know it's simpler to think many of the foods we eat today were cultivated/domesticated 10,000's of years ago, and it's true. However we've been continually modifying everything we eat, every year, non stop, since then. The corn we eat today is nothing like the native plant we first cultivated, and also different than the corn we ate 100 years ago. So the idea of the food we eat having been safety tested for "thousands of years" doesn't really strictly hold up.
Also finding out how freaking awesome their genetics lab work was amazingly impressive. They can test and sequence genomes for plants in hours with specialized machinery instead of weeks like it used to take. Transcend 100s of generations of a plant in a matter of weeks, selecting from among the throng the best candidates for perpetuation. When they're happy with the genetic results they then cultivate them to ensure expectations meet reality. 100's of geneticists do this for 3-4 years before handing it over to the FDA which reviews it for another 3 years. 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.
If anything it's scary-amazing to know how effective it is and where this will take our world in the next 100 years. 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. Being anti GMO is nearly as bad as being anti-vaccination.