Farm Bureau applauds House passage of food labeling bill

“Marketing is to determine what the consumer wants – not what you want to produce – but what they want so they will buy it”, he says.

In a break from last year, several large food manufacturers that had previously stayed out of the GMO labeling battle spent big lobbying Congress. These included Unilever ($640,000) and Ocean Spray ($100,000). Easily fooled and blind to their bias, these journalists focus on irrational or fringe elements in the movement to label GMO foods, celebrate commercially insignificant examples of GMOs, and cover up that over 90 percent of GMO food acreage is engineered by chemical companies to survive huge doses of weed killer. “Everyone thought it was good then all of a sudden we realized it was bad and nobody did anything until they started putting the warnings on the packaging and more people became more aware of it”. Most processed foods contain those ingredients, especially anything with corn, soybeans or sugar beets.

Vermont is the only state so far to adopt a GMO labeling law, which hasn’t taken effect yet. Ballot initiatives in Washington, Oregon and California have failed. This bill would make that entirely voluntary. Monsanto, the global biotech giant, along with big food and beverage companies like Pepsico and Kraft spent millions on lobbying the anti-labeling bill, as the companies fear the labels could keep hurt profits. Those interests also contributed three-and-a-half times more in campaign donations to lawmakers than the other side, according to Maplight, which tracks money in politics. This issue calls for real science, not junk law.

Currently, biotechnology seed companies and their advocates are oversimplifying the hundreds of factors involved in the GMO production process to broadcast the myth of a “scientific consensus” that GMO foods are safe. The legislation directs the Department of Agriculture to establish a voluntary nongenetically engineered food certification program that would govern labeling of non-GMO food products in a uniform manner across the country.

Pop indie group Small Pools played at the Chipotle Cultivate Festival, held in Kansas City on July 18. Its passage will protect and advance the economic interests of Monsanto and big agriculture by engendering consumer confusion as to which products are free of GMOs because many containing GMOs will not reveal that fact on the label.

The subject of Genetically Engineered Food and Food bi-products, commonly called (GMO) Genetically Modified Organisms that Moolenaar states is safe for consumption is a very complex issue with smoke and mirrors and many blind alleys on ones quest to understand it, because what you see necessarily isn’t what you get.

This stuff is routinely found in our food, air, and water.

H.R. 1599 would give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authority on the use and labeling of foods containing genetically modified ingredients.

Such labels can help consumers weigh the ethics that go into food processing, the health benefits (or lack thereof) of our food choices, and, of course, the cost of different options.

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