Campbell’s Soup, the definitive canned food company in American history, has decided to start indicating which ingredients in their products are genetically modified on the labels of its cans.
This is a pretty big deal, it seems. The announcement sets Campbell’s in oppostion to such powerful companies as Monsanto, PepsiCo and Kellogg, which have long resisted calls to be more transparent about GMO ingredients in the face of persistent questions about possible effects they might have on human health and the environment. They’ve spent millions of dollars in lobbying efforts to defeat GMO-labeling ballot measures in states such as Oregon, Colorado, Washington and California. The food makers say that labeling would add unnecessary costs.
Nevertheless, the labeling movement has gained ground in recent years, as the notion of organic sustainability has wormed its way into the public consciousness. Vermont became the first US state to require GMO labeling in 2014.
Campbell’s willingness to label is, I suppose, good news. Greater transparency is generally better in all facets of life and society. At the same time, this particular step towards transparency feels like it’s coming about 20 years too late.
At least for old hippies like me. I was infuriated back in 1992, when the FDA issued its decision allowing genetically altered vegetables to be sold unlabeled, indistinguishable from any others a consumer would find in the produce section at the market. I remember thinking this was one of the most flabbergasting decisions our government had made during my sentient lifetime. I was enraged, and ranted about it to anyone within earshot. That’s when I gave up on the prospect of living “purely” in a world that was changing faster than I could keep up with. Makes sense. I was 21 years old. (Sidenote: I have come to think that resignation is better, really. Purity is a stupid idea.)
My basic stance was what Dr Michael W Fox, author of Superpigs and Wondercorn, a book about the ethics of biotechnology, told Molly O’Neill for a story she wrote about the issue for the New York Times.
“The marketplace should be the voting booth where the public should be able to cast a ballot either in favor of eating whole, natural foods or in favor of eating gene-altered, analogue food.” If, as the Bush Administration has recommended, genetically altered food is not labeled, and the public is none the wiser, Dr. Fox reasons, how can the public vote? He also worries about what happens to the active nutrients, the vitamins and enzymes whose development is suspended along with the ripening process in some genetically altered tomatoes. He worries about the delicate biochemical relationship between the physiology of humans and the foods they eat that has evolved over ages.
As things are, the onus is on food companies to ensure consumer safety. The FDA website provides valuable “guidance to the industry” under the heading “Voluntary Labeling Indicating Whether Foods Have or Have Not Been Derived from Genetically Engineered Plants”.
Last year, you might remember, the big news in this field was about the introduction of genetically modified salmon into the market. A company with the perfect dystopian name of AquaAdvantage developed salmon that could grow to full maturity in half the time that it took normal salmon. This was the first time a GMO animal was available for sale, as opposed to vegetables.
That got some antennas perking up. (Or, well, ears. Humans don’t have antennas growing out of their heads yet.) Though I think a lot of the attention was due to the fact that genetically-improved salmon brought to mind images from the 1995 Renny Harlin movie Deep Blue Sea, wherein a mishap in the process of genetically modifying sharks leads to supersize, hyper-intelligent sharks that threaten to destroy mankind. Those sharks were really scary! Remember when one of them ate Samuel L Jackson? God, I love that movie.
’Cause concerning what we’ve been eating, as opposed to what might be eating us, the damage is done. How many tomatoes have you eaten since 1992? How many dishes of pasta with tomato sauce made by big companies? How much ketchup have you dipped fries into?
Did you ever read Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People? It’s a really interesting play about a scientific report that indicates that a town’s water supply is being slowly poisoned. What are the doctors’ responsibilities in such a situation? What about the politicians’? What about the business leaders’? (Come to think of it, a lot these same ideas were explored in Jaws. It bring up questions about our responsibilities to the truth and doing good in the world when the truth as we know it is so mutable and ephemeral.
“A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, as a rule seventeen or eighteen, or at most twenty years,” Ibsen wrote in his play, “seldom longer.”
We’ve been eating this stuff for 24 years already. The best we can do now is keep our fingers crossed and hope that genetically modified organisms turn out to be relatively harmless in light their scientific and/or economic benefits.
Who knows, maybe the costs the big food companies save by not labeling genetically modified food can be invested into developing practices that are more sustainable in the long run? Maybe genetically engineered salmon will help us end starvation? And if, in a hundred years or so, human beings have skin tone the color of the pants rich people wear on Nantucket and breathe through gills that have opened up on our necks, well, maybe that won’t be any worse than the way we look and breathe today. And it worked for Kevin Costner in Waterworld.