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Tiny Vermont Brings Food Industry To Its Knees On GMO Labels (ap.org)
schwit1 writes: General Mills' announcement on Friday that it will start labeling products that contain genetically modified ingredients to comply with a Vermont law shows food companies might be throwing in the towel, even as they hold out hope Congress will find a national solution. Tiny Vermont is the first state to require such labeling, effective July 1. Its fellow New England states of Maine and Connecticut have passed laws that require such labeling if other nearby states put one into effect. The U.S. Senate voted 48-49 Wednesday against a bill that would have blocked such state laws. The food industry is holding out hope that Congress will prevent states from requiring such labeling. Some companies say they plan to follow Vermont's law, while others are considering pulling their products from the small state.
If they're happy with it, if it has advantages they can sell the consumers, then they should sell it to consumers on its advantages.
Why would you try to conceal GMO products from the consumer? It's confirmation that the makers of GMO products have something to hide!
while a free market economy is much better at allocating scarce resources than any other method(especially government controlled or regulated economy), for a truly free market to work , there should be full information and perfect competition, impossible conditions.
it doesn't help that in real world people who are most vocal for free capitalism tend to be the same who are against full information disclosure. i am willing to bet that those who voted against this labeling were such 'supporters' of 'free market capitalism'.
Selective breeding is a lot more predictable than directly twiddling genes. There are a lot of unforeseen side-effects.
Such as?
But what does Minuscule Rhode Island have to say about this? When will Petite Delaware speak up?
At least it's not vagina dentata....
Goes further than that. Domesticated animals? Pretty much all fruit (especially bananas)? We have, as a species, genetically modified nearly everything we consume to make it more appealing or effective. Probably should just put the warning label at the front of the store.
...
Selective breeding is a lot more predictable than directly twiddling genes. There are a lot of unforeseen side-effects.
[citation needed]
Bill Nye would disagree with you. Specifically, here is a quote from when he changed his mind about GMO's:
"The thing is, genetically modified food has no effect on us. That is to say, there is no difference between it and organically raised food. This is scientifically provable. It’s certainly provable to my satisfaction, and that’s the most straightforward thing about it, to see if it’s still nutritious and see if it has any allergic effect, and it absolutely does not. In fact, in general, all of these foods are more nutritious."
Source: http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/14...
There's further details in his recent book Undeniable about why there aren't "unforeseen side-effects" from GMO foods. I think anyone with doubts or curiosity about the subject (and evolution in general) should read it.
Snarf This.
Selective breeding is a lot more predictable than directly twiddling genes. There are a lot of unforeseen side-effects.
Such as?
As we've seen with antibiotic resistance, expect Round-Up resistant weeds for starters.
In fact, it seems to already be a problem, with over 61 million acres as of 2012.
Health-wise, GMOs seem to have proven themselves pretty safe - not the worse thing in our diets.
But not sure what most of them are really for. Leaving out Golden Rice, which is awesome, there isn't a food shortage that GMOs are trying to solve, there's a huge amount of wasted food:
Anyway, for the most part I don't see the rush to GMOs, and I'm definitely in favour of labelling and can't understand anyone being against it other than for knee-jerk reasons. Let the market decide indeed.
Selective breeding is a lot more predictable than directly twiddling genes.
Not really. Selective breeding can end up with some really bizarre things, and has given us poisonous potatoes.
GMOs get a lot more testing before they make it to your dinner table, as well.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Whether ingredients in food are GMO (or not) is a data point.
Its strange a scientist would want to want people to have access to _less_ data rather than more.
Let people can form their own judgements here.
Scientist changes his mind on a subject.
Scientist, without any sense of irony, writes book titled Undeniable, thus pulling up the stairs behind him. /facepalm
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Just add the label "GMO Created by Intelligent Design" and the whole Heart Land will buy the products like gene spliced hot cakes.
I like Bill Nye... but he's an engineer, not a scientist.
#DeleteChrome
Of course it's anti-science. Science is about formulating a hypothesis and conducting experiments to prove or disprove it. An anti-GMO stance is about forming a hypothesis and forcing everyone else in the world to validate it by fiat. No experimentation in sight.
As we've seen with antibiotic resistance, expect Round-Up resistant weeds for starters.
That's a problem with any herbicide system though, to make a long story short. Here's an article from 1992, several years before the release of Round-Up Ready crops, discussing the issue of resistant weeds. You very well can't blame GE crops for something that happens to non-GE crops. Problem is, no one talks about it when it happens to other herbicides, because then it's not a 'controversy,' it's just a problem for farmers, and no one pays attention to that. I hope you can see my problem with the typical anti-GMO talking points you've likely heard; even though some of them almost sound logical, that's only without critical context, which the anti-GMO groups never give, leading to much public misunderstanding.
Vermont is just tweaked that New Hampshire has a much better motto.
"Freedom and Unity" is just lame...
#DeleteChrome
It's been my consistent position that you can effectively achieve the same results by labelling things as GMO-free, if that's what consumers actually want.
No law has to be passed to cause that to happen (assuming reasonable truth-in-labelling laws exist, anyway), and if consumers love things being GMO-free then they will look for the label. This has happened successfully with, for example, Kosher labels.
This way it's voluntary and nobody has to get in a twist.
Neil deGrasse Tyson basically says the same thing: There's not a food at our supermarket that we haven't been performing some form of GMO - some for thousands of years even. Unless they can find for me a truly wild beef cow, then all beef products need to be labeled at GMO... There's multiple copies of NdGT's comments, but here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
John Oliver had an episode of Last Week Tonight about food waste. According to what his team determined, the vast majority of that waste (at least for produce) was for purely aesthetic reasons - whether or not the food was physically attractive.
No, it's not being done in Vermont. The Vermont statute controls foods produced elsewhere and sold in Vermont: it's a major interstate commerce demand, and will add its burden to a broad swath of folk who couldn't vote in that state. Sadly, it's probably enforceable: state liquor laws have long created similar schisms, which is why a favorite pastime of yesteryear was to load up a few cases of a favorite beer from state A to take home to state B. So, I wonder how long it will take to certify non-GMO status for pepper from India? Coffee from Brazil? Will stocks of unlabeled seed from before the law came into effect be presumed GMO untill proven otherwise? Will liars prosper, or will false claims actually be investigated? How? I think the law reeks. What information I would like to have, won't be on the label. And learning that the poppy seeds in my salad dressing were genetically modified... is worthless, a waste of ink and paper.
Tiny Vermont?
If it's small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee.
This is a problem not just with GMOs, but also with selective breeding:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06...
That is to say, one of the problems with genetic modification is that we can do it a lot faster than selective breeding and find ourselves in bad places with our food much more quickly. It's not typically irreversible, but it is a concern.
It's the freedom of the people - they will be free to make their own decisions based on sufficient information. Without the mandated information the freedom is actually limited to what the companies decide.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Just let whatever company wants to market their product as non-GMO do so ans leave the rest as they were? BTW, organic certified = non-GMO so there's that already. Food industry is scared of having to respond to consumer demands? OK cool go out of business, see if we care!
He bills himself as "the science guy"...uh....
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Difference between Domestication and Taming? (e.g. why we don't domesticate zebra?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
A lot of people opposing these laws do so because these laws are promoting ignorance and stupidity. In no way or form is a free market intended to affect societal change, so who the fuck cares if it does so? In fact, if one were to use a free market to enact such a change, these anti-science groups should petition the producers directly to label their products. They should organize boycotts and similar free-market actions. Forcing an action through legislation is the precise opposite of a free market.
Subverting a market to promote one's pet cause is not, in fact, promoting a free market.
No, it's not being done in Vermont. The Vermont statute controls foods produced elsewhere and sold in Vermont: it's a major interstate commerce demand, and will add its burden to a broad swath of folk who couldn't vote in that state. Sadly, it's probably enforceable: state liquor laws have long created similar schisms, which is why a favorite pastime of yesteryear was to load up a few cases of a favorite beer from state A to take home to state B. So, I wonder how long it will take to certify non-GMO status for pepper from India? Coffee from Brazil? Will stocks of unlabeled seed from before the law came into effect be presumed GMO untill proven otherwise? Will liars prosper, or will false claims actually be investigated? How? I think the law reeks. What information I would like to have, won't be on the label. And learning that the poppy seeds in my salad dressing were genetically modified... is worthless, a waste of ink and paper.
I disagree and so do others. Thankfully this isn't an instance where you get to push your insane ideas on others (and in their bodies.)
A lot of people opposing these laws do so because these laws are promoting ignorance and stupidity.
Question for you: do you know how GMO foods are made? I'll give you a hint: we don't actually have genetic engineering cracked, it's "copy this from this thing into this other thing, did it do something that looks right for a finite subset of tests?" There is absolutely good reason to label GMO foods, people need to be every bit as informed as if they had a surgeon about to perform heart surgery on them that just roughly knows what location of the body the heart is in.
My anti-GMO stance comes from the same experiment that has been repeated hundreds of time over more than 50 years : "Let Monsanto decide if they can help people and be the good guys, or screw people and the environment, and generally be huge assholes."
Yes, you can blame the Round-Up Ready crops, because that isn't applied to non-GMO crops. It would kill them. On the GMO crop, they spray it over the whole field. You really can't separate the problem, because that is the only time that it is being frequently applied broadly like that.
For example, they use it on Giant Knotweed around here, but they have to use a hand sprayer and spray individual plants.
And there currently is an epidemic of resistant weeds in GMO fields. Maybe you don't read enough ag news to know about it? And the GMO farmers are getting really whiny, because they thought science cured weeds. LOL And they are really resistant to the idea of going back to old weed control methods. "The sky is falling, the sky is falling." The sky isn't falling, but if the weeds come back they should switch back to normal seed because the GMO plants are less robust. (the resistance has a metabolic cost)
This statement is completely wrong and that is what makes me sad about this whole debate. People make decisions that they are not qualified to make.
Selective breeding is MUCH less predictable than direct gene editing. With gene editing I know exactly what I am inserting and where it goes and like a computer program I also know what it does.
With selective breeding you are selecting for visible traits and not for the DNA. Selective breeding of tomatoes to make them solid red also dramatically cut their nutrition content. The tomatoes that where red with a little green on the top where healthier for us but selective breeding eliminated healthy parts along with selecting for solid red.
The same has been done with corn and many other foods we eat.
If you want to make a plant more drought resistant then directly add the gene for it, Don't try to selectively breed for it since you will get a lot of other changes to the plant also.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Actually, science doesn't tell us which information we should want to have.
The argument isn't that there is a provable science-y difference, that is just a straw man you erected. The argument is that people want to have this information. That is it. There are lots of reasons, including ones related to land management.
It's been my consistent position that you can effectively achieve the same results by labelling things as GMO-free, if that's what consumers actually want.
No law has to be passed to cause that to happen (assuming reasonable truth-in-labelling laws exist, anyway),
Current laws regarding ingredient lists ought to cover GMO products, so I'd agree no new laws should be needed.
But the lack of such labelling indicates the truth-in-labelling laws might not be stringent enough. Hence the "this product does not contain GMOs.
This way it's voluntary and nobody has to get in a twist.
The "No GMOs" can still be voluntary, but like multi-lingual labels, ingredient listings, and nutritional info, a GMO indication isn't the burden industry would portray it to be.
As A Vermonter I love to see these stories. VT is increasingly a playground for the rich and those subsumed with WLG* to support the cause du jour.
Hate fracking? Vermont BANNED it in a very public legislative effort. (Even though Vermont will never have fracking due to geologic conditions in the state.) But of course the Illuminati who run the state strongly support a new, natural gas pipeline that will transport fracked NG to the most "sustainable" of towns.
Hate litter? We are all becoming professional garbage managers due to legislatively micro-managed trash laws. (Meanwhile, Keurig/Green Mountain Coffee STILL dumps millions of plastic, unrecyclable single-use K-cups into the environment.
The local "food co-op" broadcasts BUY LOCAL then sells grossly overpriced Yuppie-chow imported from California.
I can go on but you get the point. Do as I say - not as I do.
*White Liberal Guilt
Its an information label, not a warning label.
Its there so consumers can follow their _own_ hypothesis -- not some lab's.
Since Brazil and India already have GMO labelling laws in place, I doubt it will be problem.
entropy happens
I starting to fell love with the state of Vermont; Sander's state
Do you limit your food aversion to crops grown with Monsanto seeds, or do you vilify a technology because of one supposed abuser?
I'm not the one who erected the ant-science straw man. You are making an argument that the poster I replied to did not make. Please try to keep up. While you're at it, stop legislating shit just because you want to know it. You have ways of getting the information that don't increase my costs.
Do you have any evidence that GMO is dangerous to those who consume them? I believe there's plenty of evidence that heart surgeons with a vague idea of anatomy are dangerous.
Your comparison is so absurd that there really are no words for it.
Who claims that GMO is healthier? I mean, there are documented cases of organic produce having pathogens that GMO crops would not have, but let's ignore inconvenient facts for now.
If it was old-fashioned breeding techniques, no problem. If scientists used a virus to splice genes to/from an organism, I want to know. That technique has not been proven to be completely accurate or side-effect free.
One of the healthiest vegetable oils, Canola Oil, is a product of genetic modification to remove a potential toxin, making it safe for humans to consume. Most of the characteristics were obtained by "conventional" genetic modification, similar to that used to create, for example, a seedless fruit variety.
However since Monsanto introduced the Gene-Spliced variety in the late 1990's, ("Roundup Ready Canola") that form has come to dominate the available crops in Canada and the USA. Also, the Monsanto variety has found it's way into the storage lots of the non-licensed seed stock. The result is the GMO Canola is virtually the only form available today in food grade Canola Oil (although it is worth noting that at least 87% is by grower's choice of the Monsanto seed, not seed stock contamination).
To avoid the GMO variety is to abandon the use of Canola altogether.
Canola pushes both all the "Heart Smart" buttons, and all the "GMO/non-GMO" buttons.
Because food manufacturers have largely embraced Canola as an input in processed foods, essentially everything from all the middle aisles in a North American supermarket contains GMO Canola. In other words, almost all the products in the supermarket in Vermont will have to be labeled as containing GMO ingredients.
The alternative is to use a less healthy vegetable oil, and that might include Hydrogenated varieties containing unhealthy Trans Fats, and earn the right to apply the NON-GMO label.
How can you boycott a product based upon certain properties if the manufacturer purposely obfuscates whether or not the product has those properties?
Bottom line: the people who are paying the bills - the consumers - want to know the provenance of their food. If it promotes "ignorance and stupidity" for people to know this, then it's the responsibility of the ones who are selling the product to do education and/or marketing to make sure people understand all the miraculous properties of the shit they want to sell.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Vermont resident here. Best argument I heard against the labelling requirement was that it's TMI. Similar to the arguments about packaging being "recycled content" or "recyclable", or "made in USA", the opponents make the case that every additional disclosure requirement obfuscates ingredient and nutrition information, or dolphin-safe etc. If Vermont required companies put the number of women employed as a percentage of labor, or minority representation on company board of directors, or employee-owned stock, etc. etc., SOMEONE will always be in favor of "disclosing" it on the label. But there's a legitimate concern that the net effect is "noise". Consumers engage in a form of "moral licensing", giving more weight to "recyclable" than "carbs". T
here is a social cost to obfuscation and "Too Much Information" on labels.
Many in Vermont have a legitimate purpose in branding the state as more natural and organic because it's basically impossible to operate factory farming here. But while legitimate, it's also legitimate to argue Vermont's concerns are basically protectionism against milk and cheese made more cheaply in Ohio. My concerns over GMO has to do with monoculture and unintended consequences of reduced genetic diversity, and eventual loss of rights to plant your own seeds. And I feel strongly about it. But trying to make other people who are less educated, who think GMO is a health concern, share my agenda is a "poster child" technique which will produce fewer returns the more information is packed onto a label. If we put every "true" thing on a label, people will be deluged and stop reading labels. And THAT is the tactic I hope food labels don't embrace - EULA Agreement scale labels that provide so much "information" that the consumers are lost in politics, packaging, nutrition, ingredients, weight, volume, etc.
Gently reply
Can't they have a label for when it may or may not?
And use that for those who don't want to have to be bothered with it?
Or companies feel that consumers in other states will avoid the products if they say they contain GMO ingredients?
I guess then they have made their choice. Personally I'm not sure I would care if I lived in the US. Also I would just take "may" for what it is, just as it was before.
and to *me*. but not to those who have irrational thought about GMO. Or Hallal. Take it as a religion : how would you feel as a jewish person if people were adding pork stuff everywhere without labelling it ? Or Add in food stuff like, rind or pork grease, when you are a vegetarian by conviction,without noting it ? Same things here. If a majority of epople want it, then maybe it is us , the minority which recognize as GMO as being generally safe , which should hear and bow to the masses.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
... except for salt. I guess salt has never been genetically modified compared to (say) 1000 to 5000 years ago, perhaps because it doesn't contain any genes.
Everything else -- arguably including wild game -- has been modified by humans manipulating its genes, most often by the tried and true method of waiting for "nature" to cause a mutation and then selectively breeding to stabilize it in a domesticated population.
So General Foods etc should retaliate by simply labelling all food products as having been modified relative to their "natural" state prior to the existence of mankind. Then consumers will get bored looking at the label (and possibly might be educated about the meaning of "GMO" relative to the biological human universe). End of problem.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
because that isn't applied to non-GMO crops
Nonsense. Spraying the ground before planting a non-glyphosate resistant crop is common practice to kill weeds and/or a cover crop. Read up on "no-till" agriculture.
It's also common with some crops to spray at the end of the season to make harvesting easier; for example, potatoes are often sprayed a couple of weeks before being dug to kill the tops.
Why are they worrying about this when food containing DNA is being sold unlabeled? Has the world gone crazy? /s
I thought VT's motto was "Feel the Bern"\
People are willing to pay more for "Natural" foods. If they label it, they have to sell at a discount. The entire point of GMO foods is to increase profit margins, and selling at a discount ruins that. The Lie that GMO foods will end world hunger needs to die. Third world farmers can't afford GMO anything, and western farmers have their production levels limited to protect prices.
I notice they exempted milk and cheese from the law. It couldn't possibly be because Vermont cheese is a big deal and virtually all cheese is technically GMO now (very few cheese makers get their rennet by cutting open a calf these days). The labelling law is stupid, but if you're going to do it, don't be hypocrites about it.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
Food Allergies require knowing what you eat. If they put peanut DNA into a tomato then people will die from eating tomatoes, not knowing it's actually part peanut. This isn't something you can see or predict. Nobody with a peanut allergy would question eating a tomato, it's an unknowable hazard.
Label everything GMO and let the hipsters starve.
Have gnu, will travel.
Once FoxNews gets into the news space all other news sources cease to exist.
"this product does not contain GMOs" is a misleading a marketing claim just like "organic food is pesticide free"*.
The fact being that every crop has had some kind of genetic modification by humans. At one end you have selective breeding techniques, sometimes with 1000s of iterations giving a crop that is not even close to the starting plant and would not survive in the wild without various farming techniques such as fertilising (both "organic" and chemical) and watering. Then you have things like hybrids where two different strains (and even sometimes plants) are cross-bread producing a third (usually sterile) variety. Then you have the chemical modifications that have been in use for years such as the process that genetically modifies water melon (and other plants) seeds before planting that makes them a seedless variety. Most of these are genetic modifications that would not normally happen in nature (or if they do, would only happen rarely, not to the same extreme, and have no impact as they are not viable).
(* Organic farmers use pesticides produced using "natural processes" as opposed to being chemically synthesised, which is in itself a very fine line as their production is still usually a chemical process, just the source of the chemicals or where the process is preformed differs. Some "organic" pesticides and their by-products are more toxic and harmful to humans and the general environment than their non-organic equivalents)
[The Universe] has gone offline.
I don't give a crap if something is GMO or not... we'd have a hard time feeding the world without GMO. What I care about is if my purchase profits Monsanto or not, considering the predatory, deceptive, and sometimes downright evil acts that company has perpetrated.
GMO isn't bad... but the unfortunate fact is that the most visible and prolific company working in GMO crops is tarnishing the science of GMO by association.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Seriously, it is far more important to know WHERE your food comes from, then if it is GMO.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
They are just going to buy off, sorry contribute to the campaigns of, a few federal politicians to get a law passed that will outlaw the labelling of whether food contains GMO ingredients. Problem solved.
"This product genetically modified using Mendelian technology"
Look buddy, rub a couple brain cells together and think about it. Are there significant differences in the amount? Yes. Yes there are. That is not debatable, and you don't even debate it; you simply point at squirrels.
You don't know anything about what is used on a field when, or you'd know there is a huge difference in the amount applied. Either use the truth, or don't bother pretending to have knowledge about the subject.
It really serves no purpose to be intentionally misleading even after the correct points were already made.
Look, it isn't "anti-science" to know what science is.
What science tells you what labels I want? Is it ag science? Or do they not even study humans, much less this?
What science tells you what labels I should want? There isn't one, that isn't science.
I'm certainly not being anti-science. But if somebody tells me that my opinion is "anti-science" because they don't share my values, they should find a mirror. And I'm not talking about optics, I'm talking about psychology.
It doesn't need to be "different" to you in order for me to want the label. Science isn't involved, except that we're having to explain to you what "science" is after you throw the word around.
Engineer? For fuck sakes Bill Nye has always been a performer. He's been riding his name recognition since "Science Guy."
Here he is as one of the "High-fiving white guys."
"His name was James Damore."
Question for you: do you know how GMO foods are made?
I do.
They are grown using sunlight, water, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and various other carbon compounds.
I also know how non-gmo food is made. Wanna take a fucking guess as to how?
Hand-waving isn't a fucking argument, you dumb fuck.
"His name was James Damore."
Disarming the masses isn't actually a "leftwing agenda;" it's a totalitatian agenda. Unless you have an IQ under 105 (and/or are entirely ignorant of history), you've already figured out that "left" and "right" are meaningless , as both so-called "schools of thought" have been commandeered by the same interests. Oh, wait; you haven't? Nevermind, then.
90%? 90% of who, exactly? It sure as hell isn't 90% of their customers, or they'd have a really, really small customer base now, wouldn't they? Or are these 90% just authoritarian assholes who want to force companies to do stuff, even though it doesn't affect their buying habits in the slightest?
Maine beats them all... Live free or die!
Sorry, man, but that's New Hampshire's motto.
#DeleteChrome
> Disarming the masses isn't actually a "leftwing agenda;" it's a totalitatian agenda.
While all political parties seem to want to meddle in things that really are none of their business, certain people are hostile to the idea of self-reliance. You may need to take care of business for yourself some day. The situation may not allow for you to call upon some government entity to rescue you.
When seconds count, the government is minutes away.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This argument appear whenever GMO is mentioned oni /., and it's usually disingenuous. Selective breeding != GMO, and I suspect you know that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I have no confidence that GMO producers will test their GMO food products well enough. It’s not profitable.
Hey, because the lawsuits from killing off millions of consumers would just be a little line item on the balance sheet.
Show me a left-wing government that didn't disarm it's people as it rose to power.
Causation vs correlation; how about I show you (so-called) "rightwing governments " that have done (or are doing) the same thing? It's not about "left" and "right" as those have both been co-opted by interests that we could describe as fascist (which is really feudalism in disguise).
And yes, for all practical purposes Stalin was a fascist...
It's about actual power and control, not vapid ideologies. Those are just tools to confuse, as you've so clearly demonstrated...
No he wasn't.
Around 90% of GM food crop yield goes into animal feed.
Less than 10% goes into the processed foods that will be impacted by the very naive Vermont law.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find out whether meat, milk or eggs in Vermont, which came from GMO-fed source animals, need to be labelled. You shouldn't have to think too hard to realize the answer.
The leading global GMO-supported food chain is RoundUp-Ready Soy going into "broiler" (chicken meat) production. It has not quite 100% share of soy going into chicken production. That will not change.
The food industry has not been "brought to it's knees" by Vermont.
And GMO "labellers" are just GMO opponents, and are very very ignorant people.
-- Mike Greaves
Such a pro-consumer law would be viewed as an "impediment' to profit under the TPP. The interested party (the company) will be eligible for an Investor State Dispute Settlement for non conformance to the TPP. The interested party nominates a number for compensation and then the taxpayer (also the consumer) has to maintain compensation to the company (i.e. pay them) until the "impediment" (i.e. the pro consumer law) is "nullified" (i.e removed).
Essentially the TPP makes all pro-consumer laws and protections un-affordable to the state and the taxpayer. People are free to protest why laws can't be put in place to provide those protections and politicians will respond by saying they are unaffordable. What they won't say is that they are un-affordable because they are the ones who agreed to signing away their own nations sovereignty to a third party out of their control.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Kraft recently changed its Mac & Cheese by changing it to use natural ingredients. They sold the new formulation for three months before saying anything.
this is not a troll.
mod up.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Maybe, but it was one particularly conservative Supreme Court overturning a couple of centuries of precedent. And even in doing so, that <sarcasm>bastion of liberal activism</sarcasm> Antonin Scalia had this to say in his majority opinion of the case you're using for reference (Heller v. DC):
Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
From a practical level, that's the first question anyone should add.
Revel in your Frankenfood. Make special General Mills version of Frankenberries (with added GMOs) and Booberries.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Do you have any evidence that GMO is dangerous to those who consume them?
Examples of things that have harmed people after 5, 10, 20, 50 or generations away from their use exist throughout Human history. Lack of proven danger over such a finite span of time is not an argument by any stretch of the imagination. This on top of the fact every single GMO change is distinct. Go ahead and think about that a moment, consider just how many GMO products are out there, the average lifecycle for new changes in any given product line and the basic fact that any artificial adjustment to genes may produce adverse results that don't even manifest themselves for generations. You can fly blind if you like, don't presume to believe you have the right to force that on everyone, especially those of us with experience in synthetic biology. Let the developing world test it, they need the surpluses of food.
I do. They are grown using sunlight, water, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and various other carbon compounds. I also know how non-gmo food is made. Wanna take a fucking guess as to how? Hand-waving isn't a fucking argument, you dumb fuck.
You clearly have no knowledge of synthetic biology and you are in fact evil for speaking on the subject without it.
Or however it goes. (Or went. Don't recall seeing it lately.) This isn't the first time one state has affected a national producer.
Oh, and there's also Texas and history textbooks.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
This GMO thing is nothing some stickers couldn't handle. Some foods, like Coca-Cola made in Mexico and ramen noodles imported from Japan, already carry extra sticker labels on the packages to allow these imported items to conform to US labeling requirements.
This happens routinely with imported food from all over. There is no reason a similar kind of GMO label could not be developed for Vermont and make it the duty of the retailer or distributor to ensure the labels are applied. Stores too could do this as they stock the shelves. In this way, the factories don't need to change at all, and there is no need to change anything for any other states nor worry how to conform to different laws in different states. Just make stickers very cheaply in bulk and apply where an when needed.
Problem solved.
And oh yes, sure DO pass on the cost of the stickers and labor to apply them to the consumers. Why not? It's a cost center.
Sig for hire.