Top Ten Reasons NOT to Label GMO Food
Mar 26, 2012Charles Margulis
Those nauseating food police are at it again. They say that GMO food may be harmful to our health, and they complain that without labels it is almost impossible to determine what harmful effects these untested foods may have. Sure, our children are the first generation who have been eating these foods for their entire lives, and without labels, there is no way for parents to choose to avoid this force-fed experiment. Yes, people may have a right to know what’s in their food, and a right to choose safe food for their children and families – that may be why 93% of Americans support labeling of GMO foods.
BUT, there are also a lot of reasons NOT to label GMOs – with labels we would all miss out on the biggest uncontrolled food experiment in history! After all, when you don’t know what’s going in your mouth it can’t hurt you, right?
Organo-activist wimps may want GMO food labels, but here are our Top Ten reasons NOT to label GMO food:
- Corn with firefly genes can also be used as a nightlight
- GMO crops create jobs for out-of-work weed-pullers
- Foods with untested genes from viruses, bacteria, and petunias are tasty and make a lovely floral centerpiece
- Fishberry named favorite new pet of 2012
- New cereal with jaguar genes makes kids run faster!
- Toxic genes in GMO peas don’t matter since kids won’t eat their peas anyway
- Rice-A-Roni capitalizes on human genes in GMO rice with new slogan, “Cannibals Love It!”
- Pesticide-resistant insects love to munch on GMO crops – and on your arm!
- Organic farmers love to spend long winters playing “guess the genetic contamination”
- Unpredictable childhood allergies from GMO foods keep parents on their toes through every meal.
On the other hand, if you agree with 93% of Americans who say they want labels on GMO food, click to add your name to the petition to FDA calling for labeling of GMO foods.
Footnotes:
(1) Experimental (not yet marketed) corn with genes from fireflies has been grown in field trials.
(2) Farmers across the country have suffered from widespread “superweeds” created by GMO crops that promised them clean fields without weeds. In this 2010 report, a Georgia scientist noted seeing “numerous hand weeding crews in full force across the state” thanks to weeds created by GMO cotton.
(3) Monsanto’s GMO soy, the world’s most widely grown GMO crop, contains genes from petunias, virus, and bacteria – and in 2001, a peer-reviewed paper found it also contains unknown DNA never disclosed to regulators.
(4) Experimental strawberries and tomatoes engineered with fish genes (for frost-resistance) have also been grown, though not marketed.
(5) There may as yet be no foods with jaguar genes, but pro-GMO, pro-human cloning advocate Lee Silver of Princeton University told ESPN that parents may one day be able to engineer their children for speed using jaguar genes.
(6) Australian scientists thought that their gene-altered peas with genes from beans would be safe to eat (see a video with the lead scientist boasting that the peas will be safe because “we’ve been eating beans for a long time…”). Unexpectedly the experimental GMO peas proved toxic and had to be shelved.
(7) Human genes have been used in many human foods, including rice with human genes grown in open fields (risking genetic contamination of human and/or animal food) for production of experimental drugs and food supplements.
(8) In 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported that bugs were eating Monsanto’s “insect resistant” corn in four Iowa fields. When marketing GMOs in the mid-1990’s, the biotech industry claimed such resistance would not happen, or would take decades to occur. By 2005 at least one problem insect had already shown resistance evolving from GMOs, and scientists warned that resistance could worsen.
(9) In 2011, organic farmers, seed companies, and others filed suit against Monsanto for protection against contamination by the company’s GMOs, which costs them lost sales and the potential for loss of their organic certification.
(10) In 1996, an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine said that allergies from GMO foods could be “uncertain, unpredictable, and untestable,” and called on FDA to tighten its testing and require labeling.
