I Run a GMO Company and Support GMO Labeling

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/i-run-a-gmo-company-and-i-support-gmo-labeling.html

by myw01 • 10 years ago

58 65 10 years ago

Absolutely! GMO products have many benefits, and they should be sold to the public on those benefits.

Yes, there is a lot of pseudoscientific misinformation out there, but the solution to that is to educate people on the facts, not to deceive them into becoming unwitting customers by withholding information.

danielbarla• 10 years ago

Sure. The article also goes along the line of "let's label things as a great way to build trust with consumers", and that's obviously a good thing.

Though I wonder if the asymmetrical requirements for this type of labelling is overall a good thing. Consumers will instinctively treat it as a warning message. Along similar lines, is it a good thing that medicines are strictly regulated and labelled? Definitely. Is it a good thing that unproven and scientifically highly implausible "cures" get placed on the same shelves, sans warnings? I'm not so sure. We shouldn't be creating market opportunities for lesser technologies aimed at an uniformed public.

dikdik2• 10 years ago

I've been preaching this sentiment for a few years, it's always fun to sign those petitions in the grocery store while telling the petitioner they are way off base on GMO's being "dangerous" (it's like saying the internet should be shutdown because someone could steal your credit card information.)

I really believe any products coming from large scale farms should be labeled with their strain, growing technique, pesticides used, and what farm it came from. I do think labeling GMO's will have the opposite effect as most pro-label people believe. Once people realize most of their food has had GMO's in it for years and to eat all non-GMO will cost them double or triple, they will all simmer down.

However, "GMO" itself is still a murky term. We genetically engineered all sorts of crops before we could easily manipulate DNA at a molecular level. For example, ruby red grapefruit was engineered by planting earlier cultivars around a radioactive pole to induce widespread mutations (and thus new varieties).

sspiff3• 10 years ago

Or sweet, orange carrots: they were originally purple and bitter and had a woody core, but were selectively bred to reduce bitterness in Persia.

Centuries later, they were selectively bred to be orange by Dutch royalists (in support of the royal House of Orange).

jdimov10• 10 years ago

Does selective breeding count as GMO?

Zelmor• 10 years ago

Selective breeding is not the same as injecting the genome sequences of deep sea fish species into your plats to produce new chemical elements we have no fucking idea of what they do to consumers during 60+ years of consumption.

crdoconnor• 10 years ago

In the case of GMO foods it's the extra pesticides slathered on them that actually worries me.

I'd prefer explicit pesticide labeling but GMO labeling is a close enough approximation. GMO usually means an extra dollop of roundup.

jjoonathan2• 10 years ago

I thought it was the other way around: GMO gives you better selectivity, meaning you can use less pesticide to get a given yield?

I can't speak for glyphosate, but for Bt I seem to remember that you need 10x or 100x the concentration if you spray it on account of not being able to distribute it perfectly evenly.

teekert• 10 years ago

Hehe, exactly, and even then, companies will mutate the crap out of yeast (for beer for example, or bacteria for Yoghurt) to make them more efficient. When they reach a satisfactory level of increased efficient they don't use said yeast/bacterial strain. Instead, they will put a wild-type yeast in a UV oven and screen for exactly the same mutations as artificially induced in the first strain. Only in the second case the process is called: Classical strain enhancement.

littletimmy2• 10 years ago

This terrible argument seems to crop up again and again. Selective Breeding IS NOT Genetic Engineering.

Suppose I told you that I wanted a good-looking dog. There are two ways to get that. On one hand, I could get a great male dog and mate it with a great female dog and produce a good-looking dog for you. On the other hand, I could take any dog and perform plastic surgery to make it into the dog you want. Although the final product may be similar, does anyone believe those two processes are the same? It's absolutely a nonsensical assertion.

To put this in terms of logic, you're arguing that because Process X and Process Y both lead to Outcome Z, Process X and Process Y are equivalent. We know that the general case of this argument is false (e.g. bribing a police officer or not committing crime both keep you out of jail, but they are not the same processes). If you want to argue that this argument holds in the special case of GMOs, you have to argue for it! You cannot just state it and expect us to believe it because it is false in the general case.

collyw5• 10 years ago

Its targeted gene mutation versus random gene mutation - not very different if you ask me.

a_imho2• 10 years ago

Once people realize most of their food has had GMO's in it for years and to eat all non-GMO will cost them double or triple, they will all simmer down.

I don't think most of the food consumed globally has GMO in it, even so for countries with significantly smaller GDP than the US. Agree though, give as much transparency as you can, put on as many information as possible and let the customers decide what they want.

pilom2• 10 years ago

Well almost all corn, rice, grapefruit and peanuts produced worldwide are GM depending on your definition.

mason240• 10 years ago

This is a terrible idea because crops are commodity. Imagine if when writing software, you had to label the brand of every proccesser used in all development machines. Not to mention the huge advantage this would give to larger farms.

SquareWheel• 10 years ago

My initial reaction is to agree, and that more information is always a positive thing. But as I've read further into the issue I've come around to the other side. That by putting labels on GMO products specifically, we're implying that there's a safety concern.

The comments from anti-GMO groups are strongly in support of labeling, and the reasons generally come down to "it'll make it easier to ban them".

https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/20...

So at this point my feeling is that labeling is only beneficial if it includes all the information -- more of a history of the ingredients. Do they come from GMOs, cross or mutation breeding?

If the issue were really about giving consumers the right to know, this would be the ideal solution. Otherwise - and I suspect this is the case - labeling appears to be step 1 in an effort to ban GMOs completely. And considering the positive impacts GMOs will have for the human race in the next 20 years, that would be very disappointing indeed.

alexwebb2• 10 years ago

My initial reaction is to agree, and that more information is always a positive thing. But as I've read further into the issue I've come around to the other side. That by putting labels on GMO products specifically, we're implying that there's a safety concern.

Exactly. The thinly veiled motivation of most labeling proponents is to use it as a scare tactic.

I've always viewed it as being similar in spirit to putting those "Evolution is just a theory" stickers on high school biology textbooks.

stephaniepier• 10 years ago

Yes, I think of this comic whenever the GMO labeling debate comes up: http://i.imgur.com/NYKSHeV.jpg

I think the author is overly hopeful that people will educate themselves on what GMO actually means.

kriro• 10 years ago

"GMO-haters" are often blatantly ignoring science. However I fully agree that labeling is a pretty good idea. Transparency is good, a quick-facts box, a GMO stamp of sorts and a QR-code that links to a dedicated website with super detailed information (even linking to relevant papers) would be ideal. The more transparent GMOs are the better. It seems there is quite a lot of FUD by anti-GMO people.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think GMO companies default to being good people. Some spend decent chunks of money on lobby work which always has me worried and some are entangled in somewhat questionable science funding but by and large I think there's way too much blind hatred for GMOs in general (or my media perception is quite distorted which could also be true)

The author of the article has it pretty right imo

smackay• 10 years ago

Most of the hate for GMOs are rooted in politics - the science often has little to do with it. Monsanto's business practices and their early attempts to create complete lock-in for farmers along with trying to get the EU to force GMOs on consumers drives a lot of the fear and anguish.

As a far as the science is concerned there is plenty of fearmongering but again this drives the political debate. As a counter example look at the hype over CRISPR - nobody is up in arms about the possibilities for curing cancer although the chances of things going wrong for early trials in people are probably higher and the outcome rather more ghastly.

toufka• 10 years ago

Exactly. Provide a 'Gene list' similar to an ingredients list. It lists a gene identifier, and a percent regulation (+/-, up down). And a QR/link to more info. That way the public can both be informed about what is going on, and can figure out if they want RoundUpProtexion™ or Vitamin B Synthase in their food.

And it is not information overload - or at least that should be a non-argument. The idea that the public knows what monosodium-glutamate, or high-fructose corn-syrup, or cholesterol, are all a result of labeling. And on the balance, significantly for the public's good.

greggman• 10 years ago

I don't know what the right answer is but...

People say transparency is good and more info is good. Well to play devil's advocate it seems pretty obvious labeling the race of the people making the product so consumers can choose not to buy products made my a certain race of people would be bad. In other words it seems it's not true that all transparency and information is good.

In this case I tend to believe labelling will mostly be used for ignorance not info

forgetsusername• 10 years ago

it seems pretty obvious labeling the race of the people making the product so consumers can choose not to buy products made my a certain race of people would be bad

Because the "race" of the person is irrelevant?

Maybe there are political or moral reasons as to why you would choose to not purchase from a certain country (ie human rights), but of course we do have labels for that.

mseebach• 10 years ago

Who are you to decide what's irrelevant? More information is always better, right? Let people decide for themselves?

Also, never mind that there are certain instances where concerns against certain countries is merely thinly veiled racism against the people in those countries.

The parent was obviously, as they stated in so many words, playing devils advocate (and so was I in the above, for the record). The subtext is that whether it's GMO or not is equally irrelevant and will only serve a purpose for those with unfounded prejudices (and for those that might be confused into giving such prejudice undue consideration).

beardicus• 10 years ago

Well then I sure do hope we start labeling mutagenic breeding too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding

But nobody seems to have an issue with that. No problems for selective breeding with huge mutations from radiation or mutagenic chemicals, but insert some precise, well-studied genes into another organism and people lose their minds.

bsbechtel• 10 years ago

From a marketing point of view, labeling is only going to take away a value-add advantage that non-GMO products have over unlabeled items. I am aware of several GMO free companies that are growing by leaps and bounds, and can charge 20% more by VOLUNTARILY labeling their products as GMO free. If all food products are forced to label themselves as GMO or GMO free, this price premium isn't so great because the cost of all food products goes up to pay for the labeling + FDA oversight. In addition, if you ran consumer marketing A/B testing to compare two products labeled GMO free vs GMO and GMO free vs no label, it might actually show that more GMO free products are sold when displayed against a no label product rather than a GMO label product. Finally, mandatory labeling for nutritional products hasn't been proven to dramatically affect health outcomes of a population, so it seems like the outcome of a GMO labeling requirement wouldn't be too different from that.

dangoor• 10 years ago

I appreciate the sentiment behind this article because to me not all GMO goods are the same. For example, if a given ingredient is GMO to be Roundup ready, I'm not keen to support that[1]. For others, maybe there isn't enough data to know if the food produced is not harmful to us... in the US, the regulators are balancing the needs of the businesses and the needs of the consumers, and sometimes that balance is tilted toward letting the business get its goods out even in the face of uncertainty.

Compounding all of this is the crazy complexity of nutrition research which makes it difficult to assess the long term impact of anything we eat on our health.

In short, I tend to eat organic not because I think GMOs are intrinsically bad, but because they raise questions about the pesticides used and the track record of the given ingredient. "GMO" by itself doesn't tell me if something is good or bad.

[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/150422-glyphosate...

michael_h2• 10 years ago

I tend to eat some organic because I want tomatoes that taste like tomatoes.

askyourmother• 10 years ago

GMO - what's not to love about plants designed to bath in larger quantities of carcinogenic pesticides whilst their natural competitors wither under the chemical assault? Or seeds that do not allow the next generation to seed? I mean that's great right?

nashashmi• 10 years ago

I am saddened by the comments expressed here. They proudly support gene hacking and unsympathetically hate all those who call for caution and care.

We keep adding to our information banks about DNA. We had and have more questions than answers about the complexities of DNA. And yet we still want to modify the gene artificially and put the results into production without waiting on more research. This seems like a form of hubris, because we think the knowledge we have is enough.

The opponents of genetic modification give anger and frustration to supporters that they end up putting on side blinders and blissfully ignore all of the very causes of concern. It is a behavior similar to global warming skeptics reacting against climate change alarmists.

Philosophically speaking, there is a concept called the Dunning-Kruger effect: The people with the least doubt in what they are doing perform the worst, whereas the people with the most doubt perform a whole lot better. Doubt is healthy, and foolish pride/arrogance can only lead us to failure.

So let's agree that more research is needed. And let's not bash those who want to side with caution. And let's allow for freedom and respect to label GMO's as GMOs. We reach a healthy society, not a dictating one.

michael_h2• 10 years ago

Philosophically speaking, there is a concept called the Dunning-Kruger effect: The people with the least doubt in what they are doing perform the worst, whereas the people with the most doubt perform a whole lot better.

That's not what the Dunning-Kruger paper said. Simplified to a sentence, it could be paraphrased as "We are unqualified to evaluate our own performance". People who perform the worst generally still rate themselves as performing the worst, they just think they are a whole lot closer to everyone else than they actually are.

pilom2• 10 years ago

So what level of proof that these are safe would you like? I haven't been able to find a SINGLE case in the 30+ years of genetically modifying food where a person had an adverse reaction directly related to the genetic modification. Even if you up the requirements for testing to match what is required for drug companies with clinical trials, every single genetic modification we have done so far would have passed those trials with flying colors.

jbob2000• 10 years ago

Here's the thing about wanting more research; you can always do more research. There's no such thing as having a full understanding of something, so it's a bit of a cop-out to just say "ehhh, more research is needed". You can say that till the cows come home. And aside from that, we still don't even really understand "food", there's no "food science" that is even close to accurate.

There are millions of people involved in the food supply chain. At some point, if a GMO food becomes toxic to us, by sheer probability, someone involved in food will raise the alarms.

I think the caution around GMO foods is misplaced. GMO, Organic, or neither, the kid at the grocery store sprays chemicals all over them multiple times a day to keep them fresh. Vegetables and fruits are picked under-ripe and ripened with chemicals. The food is packaged in plastics and shipped along a smokey, polluted freeway. Of all the things to attack about the food supply chain, GMO is the last thing to worry about.

Kalium• 10 years ago

I feel for those who fear GMOs. Food is incredibly intimate. They're terrified that the stuff they literally subsist upon is being fucked around with in ways they don't understand by people they don't know for reasons they don't grasp. They feel their fears aren't being taken seriously and engaged with as reasonable concerns. They feel dismissed and belittled by people who look down on them.

There. Some sympathy. Feeling better? Cool. Because basically none of the concerns and fears that most consumers have are reasonable. Most of them are nothing more unjustified, baseless terror of the fishberries someone said are here to poison them.

How should I - or anyone - react to that? You cannot reason with a person possessed of such terror. I've tried. You cannot educate them. I've tried that too. You can't listen to them, offer sympathy and compassion and understanding, and then try to reason with them. I've tried that too, and it blows up in spectacular fashion.

patrickmay• 10 years ago

There is a voluntary solution -- follow the Underwriters' Labs model. The non-GMO (by whatever definition) suppliers should create or support an organization that provides a label for those suppliers that meet the non-GMO criteria. Consumers can choose to buy only food with that label. Misuse of the label will land an infringer in court.

Simple, straightforward, and not subject to politics.

oliv__• 10 years ago

I believe this exists already: it's called the Non GMO project [1]

[1] http://www.nongmoproject.org/

I Run a GMO Company and Support GMO Labeling

Related Stories