For those of you out there with actual lives, you may not have noticed a ballot proposition that was voted down in California last election day. Titled Prop 37, (catchy, eh?) the proposal would have required companies that sell packaged foods in California to label any product that contained genetically modified ingredients. On the face of it, that doesn't sound like such a bad idea. With some exceptions (hot dogs, brats, Hormel corn beef hash come to mind) it might be nice to know what Kellogg's is putting in my Frosted Flakes and what John Tyson is stuffing in his chickens. Allowing consumers to make informed choices should not require complex legislation.
Ah but you're not in agri-business. Turns out that Monsanto, Conagra, Kellogg's and several other corporate giants have an enormous stake in how information on ingredients is disseminated. Quite simply they don't think it's any of your business and they don't want you to know. More to the point, these companies spent many millions of dollars to defeat Prop 37. Their attitude is simple, shut up and buy that peanut butter, and jelly and bread. The stuff is perfectly safe....take our word for it. Actually, you'll have to because we're not telling you jack. Note: California, a state known for its progressive attitudes and hippie ideals has twice been flipped by advertising campaigns. Remember they also voted against gay marriage thanks to the kill-joy Mormons and their deep pockets. Californians are either very impressionable or the pot is rendering them very pliable.
As anyone who has ever been stuck in a doctor's office reading a magazine can tell you, virtually all of the corn and soy in America is genetically modified. The crops have been altered to make them more resistant to bugs and disease. So far as anyone knows, modifications have not damaged either the nutritional content of the grains nor rendered them unfit for consumption. The operative phrase being "so far as anyone knows". So called frankenfood is banned in much of Europe simply because no one knows if screwing with the DNA of a wheat plant can, over time, cause shriveled testicles in humans or cause one's teeth to rot. Except for the Brits who apparently aren't concerned about the teeth thing, Europeans pay attention to such matters. In America we are a more trusting lot.
As part of the so-called "food movement" some Californians got together and decided that whether or not you feed GMO to your toddlers should be a choice. Unlike the paternal regulations imposed by Father Bloomberg in New York, no one in California was trying to ban anything. Prop 37 only asked (OK, ordered) big agri-biz to share information about what they were loading into our Pillsbury Cornbread Mix. From the reaction engendered from the agri-folks you would have thought that they were going to be required to make asparagus ice cream and brussel sprout cola. Quotes like " Prop 37 will use the coercive power of the state to strong-arm Americans into eating fashionably" appeared in ads and op-edits throughout the state. Who says consultants don't earn their fees?
In any event, the "none of your GD business" forces were triumphant. Like the rest of us, Californians will continue to stuff their faces with god-knows-what made god-knows-how. We will continue to "trust" big agri. That would be the same big agri that needed laws before they would pasteurize milk, specify on the label the ingredients and nutritional content of packaged foods and, allow beef and chickens to be inspected for e coli and salmonella. I'm confident that each one of these draconian restrictions to fair trade were met with the same cries of strong-arming and coercive power.
But we must remember that big agri-business is our friend. They provide the finest quality foods at the lowest possible prices. And because they only have our best interest at heart we will try to forget Tyson Foods dumping insane quantities of waste products into the groundwater in Missouri and Kentucky, or JB Swift Meats record of recalls for e coli or their use of thousands of illegal workers, or The Kellogg's recall of 28 million boxes of breakfast cereal due to contamination by (write this down) 2-methylnaphthalene. Even the EPA isn't sure about this stuff. And so, until the people of California or some other state rise up and demand to know what's in their Wheaties, we will all paraphrase the Dixie Chicks and "shut up and eat".
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