Defeated anti-GMO coalition resurrected as GMO Inside

goldfishDefeated at the polls in California, anti-GM forces behind Proposition 37 have resurrected their campaign under the moniker GMO Inside. And they’ve come out guns blazing, backing a lawsuit that claims Goldfish crackers shouldn’t be labeled as “natural” because they contain genetically engineered soybean oil.

GMO Inside appears to be a rebranding of the coalition that lost 52-47% in November. The GMO Inside’s steering committee include many of the same organizations behind the California initiative: Green America, Food Democracy Now!, Nature’s Path, Nutiva and even the scientifically discredited Institute for Responsible Technology.

All of the same campaign elements of the original effort appear intact. They are demanding that all raw or processed foods offered for sale to consumers be labeled if its genetic material has been altered in a laboratory process and the banning of advertising of any transgenic food as “natural”. They are promoting the new effort on Facebook and Twitter.

Their first post-defeat initiative was an attack on Thanksgiving—a news release warning consumers to screen their turkey spread to make certain that genetically modified foods would not be “an unwelcome and hidden guest at your Thanksgiving celebration.” What if you had already bought a food with GM ingredients, which is almost a certainty? “[Y]ou can print GMO’ labels, place them on food, photograph and upload the photo to social media to warn family and friends,” suggested GMO Inside

The campaign strikes the same strident chords that turned off many California voters. Alisa Gravitz, CEO of Green America, which is the point NGO on the new effort, blamed their defeat on “corporate America” and accused corporations for using consumers as “lab rats” for genetically engineered foods.

The new website slams specific companies and products as being “suspect for GMOs” and provides lists of supposedly known non-GMO alternatives. Rick Keller, an agriculture reporter, notes that GMO Inside echoes the “don’t let a friend drive drunk” campaign by telling the public to warn their friends and families of GMO ingredient products—don’t let friends eat GMOs. “The suggestion is to use social media to post product pictures of those thought to have GMO ingredients,” he writes.

gmoTheir first viral attack came last week against Cheerios, which has a long-running Facebook promotion. General Mills launched a new “app” on their page allowing fans to post their thoughts about the cereal, which like most cereals contains genetically modified ingredents. GMO Inside jumped on the opportunity, launching a counter campaign urging anti-GMO activists to post negative comments on the company page—which is now filled with anti-GMO diatribes.

GMO opponents have also doubled down on their favorite weapon: litigation. This time they are targeting Pepperidge Farm, Inc., owned by Campbell Soup. A class action, filed in federal court in Colorado, alleges that Pepperidge Farm “has mistakenly or misleadingly represented that its Cheddar Goldfish crackers … are ‘Natural,’ when in fact, they are not, because they contain Genetically Modified Organisms … in the form of soy and/or soy derivatives.”  

The California initiative would have banned bioengineered foods from being labeled as natural, but the language of Prop 37 was so sloppy that almost all foods made with soy oil—perhaps the most popular oil used in the food industry—would have been prevented from using the word.

A hidden battle here, as an editorial in the Los Angeles Times notes, is over the word “natural.” Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, a GMO opponent and a favorite of anti-GMO activists, was forced to drop the world “natural” from its label because its ice cream contained, among other things, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, which is made through a chemical process and has been implicated as an artery-clogging ingredient to be avoided. In contrast, there is no evidence that genetically engineered foods pose any harm to human health and there has not been one reputable study that suggests any harm is likely.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has never defined the term “natural” and has only stepped in when it’s used to describe products containing artificial coloring, flavoring or “synthetic substances.” Although it did not refer to Prop 37 directly, the FDA has said that a labeling policy like the initiative would be “inherently misleading.”

 Should the FDA change course based on the simple idea of a “right to know,” as anti-GMO activists contend? Biofortied, the most prominent blog in the Green Genes” movement that promotes the sustainable qualities of genetically modified crops and foods, has deconstructed that perspective. Safety, contends Rob Hebert, has always been the main labeling concern of the FDA. The agency determined it had no reason to single out bioengineered foods for special labeling because recombinant DNA techniques were really just extensions of traditional methods for developing new plant varieties–such as hybridization–which had not received special attention in the past. Curiosity alone shouldn’t be enough to spur new FDA labeling requirements, he wrote:

First, it places an enormous financial burden on industries that would have to investigate, document, and label the “level” of bioengineering that went into their product; second, it may mislead consumers into thinking that bioengineered crops are somehow less safe than their conventional counterparts; third, it places a burden on the FDA itself which must then divert efforts from safety labeling issues to consumer curiosity labeling issues; and fourth, it places no end on the information that consumers could require manufacturers to disclose

Additional Resources:

GMO Inside News Release

• Natural Products Insider

• Don’t Be a Lab Rat

Goldfish Suit

Sarah Fecht is a writer and editor at the Genetic Literacy Project.

Jon Entine is executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project and senior fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication at George Mason University.

7 thoughts on “Defeated anti-GMO coalition resurrected as GMO Inside”

  1. Harm is not the standard for natural. The standard for natural is whether it was created using natural processes (breeding) or unnatural techniques in the lab. The creation of GMOs certainly goes way beyond hydrogenization in terms of laboratory techniques.

    Reply
    • So by the standard of “unnatural techniques in the lab” are you against against mutation breeding, marker assisted breeding, and polyploidy? If you are, you should know that there are thousands of crops that have used these techniques on the market.

      I also disagree with your statement that a plant that makes a new protein is somehow more unnatural then a altered molecule. For the most part, the body treats all proteins the same, they’re all broken down for amino acids, however a few new atoms can completely change the effect of a molecule on the body. Take a carbon and two hydrogen away from ethanol and you get poisonous methanol, add a carbon and nitrogen to a sugar molecule and it will release cyanide when digested, swap three groups oxygen and hydrogen for chlorine and you’ve changed table sugar to sucralose and removed it’s ability to be digested.

      Reply
  2. It appears that anti-gmo’ers definition of a natural compound is any compound that came into being without any conscience intent and conscience intervention. But, as soon as you intend that compound to be formed, even if it is by the same process that you used before, but didn’t mean that compound to be formed, then, from then on, that compound formed by that process is unnatural.
    By this definition, cooking is natural, so long as you don’t actually know what compounds are formed and don’t intend to form those compounds. But, as soon as you know and then announce you will make those compounds by that cooking, then that particular batch of compounds are rendered unnatural, even though they are identical in every respect to the previous, but unintended, batch made by the same cooking process.
    The anti-gmoers’ position on what is natural is, given the above, the essence of anti-science.

    Reply
  3. It has come to my attention that a most hideous genetically modified product is about to hit the markets. It is GM salt. Unlike regular salt, which is conventionally mined or dried from seawater, this salt is derived from salt purifying GM organisms. Most devious of all is that, unlike natural salt, GM salt reverses the order of the sodium and chlorine atoms in the salt molecule. Hence, you would be eating unnatural Chloride-Sodium rather than natural Sodium-Chloride. This left-right reversal of the non-handed salt molecule is predicted to cause autism, cancer, motor dysfunctions, AD, ADD, ADHD, ASD, HIV, MS, ALS, COP, CFS and most other diseases known mostly by their abbreviations. Since salt is used throughout the body, almost anything imaginable can and will go wrong with the intake of such atomically reversed molecules such as Chloride-Sodium. Beware !

    Reply
  4. Labeling GMOs will give the bio-techs license to proceed with impunity – until the food supply is damaged beyond repair. GMOs cross pollinate with natural species. If this is allowed to continue, eventually the entire food chain will be contaminated. The ONLY solution is to ban GMOs entirely and burn the remaining crops in the field. The bio-tech companies themselves are the driving force behind these very labeling initiatives. It’s a mind game. They are herding the public toward their agenda by convincing you it’s a good thing.

    The following links identify some of the culprits behind the faux labeling initiatives.

    http://www.nickbrannigan.com/articles/is-just-label-it-controlled-opposition.htm

    http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2012/12/11/yes-on-prop-37s-biggest-supporter-was-monsanto/

    http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/yes-on-prop-37-was-classic-controlled-opposition/

    Reply

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