Bernie Sanders and other prominent liberals are taking a stance against established science to warn Americans of food ominously called “Genetically Modified Organisms.”
They oppose a Senate compromise prompted by Vermont’s GMO-labeling mandate, which took effect July 1. The compromise does require national labeling, but it is much less conspicuous, and could be passed with a QR code that would be unreadable to most consumers.
Vermont’s leading Democrats, as well as many Senate Democrats across the country, support efforts to require that food manufacturers include text labels saying food is “produced with genetic engineering.” This is logistically inconvenient, since over 70 percent of food is produced with genetic engineering. It is scientifically inconvenient because genetically engineered food is just as safe as “traditional” food, if not safer.
The scientific community is livid with those that reject this truth: 110 Nobel laureates signed an open letter this week criticizing Greenpeace, the world’s largest environmental NGO, for denigrating GMOs. The letter does not hold back, saying that anti-GMO sentiment is stymieing solutions to vitamin A deficiency, a condition that causes millions of preventable deaths annually.
While most liberals are not in favor of banning genetically engineered foods—although some are, including Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein—many are speaking of the vital “right to know.”
Connecticut senator Chris Murphy said “families deserve to know what’s in their food. That’s why I’m opposing a federal bill that would undermine CT’s state GMO labeling law.”
Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, tweeted these sentiments as well: “The Senate should not be in the business of hiding information from consumers.”
This appears to be pretty harmless, since no one is getting hurt by any extra information on their food labels. But Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine Richard J. Roberts disagrees. “The issue with labeling is that merely labeling something based on the method by which it is produced tells you nothing about the safety or otherwise of the product,” he told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
“It is the product that needs to be tested for safety and then that information could be included in a label. You have to realize that the impetus for labeling is to make consumers avoid GMO products. The argument is that if it needs to be labeled it must be dangerous.”
This seems a reasonable interpretation of the facts. Just Label It!, one of the nation’s largest GMO labeling advocacy groups, has an “About GMO Foods” section that highlights that they’re not natural, for example.
Senator Sanders has also questioned the validity of GMO food. On The Ed Show in June 2013, he said, “I think all over this country, I could tell you, it’s certainly true in Vermont, people want to know the quality of the food they’re eating and what they’re giving to their kids is good quality. We just don’t know all that much about genetically modified food.”
“We” clearly doesn’t include scientists, but it does include Sanders and many Democratic allies in the Senate.
