This Molly Ball piece on the fight over GMO labeling is a perfect example of how culture war gets into everything, and more, how that culture war is ultimately operating at a different level than partisan or ideological politics.
I don’t really care about this issue. It seems, from my perfectly amateur vantage, that there’s no scientific evidence that genetically modified food is bad for you, and I think there’s a lot of junk science and fear-mongering going on out there. On the other hand, I have not encountered a compelling argument for why labeling is bad. I’m perfectly willing to listen to an actual anti-labeling argument, rather than a pro-GMO argument, which is a separate thing. Instead, what you constantly get are people saying that we shouldn’t label GMOs, then writing arguments about why they shouldn’t be banned. Scroll down and look at the comments on Ball’s article: again and again, sneering commenters mock GMO labeling proponents, and then proceed to make arguments not against labeling but against banning, which simply is not the same discussion. Why it’s supposedly anti-science to want people to have the information necessary to make their own choice, I don’t know. If you think the choices that they make in light of that information are irrational, you can blame them for their choices, but the information is neutral.
But I suspect that the substance of the issue are incidental. Ball writes about the fact that the anti-GMO movement is cross ideological, but then so surely is the pro-GMO contingent. And what unites them is not so much support for genetically modified food but rather contempt for what they perceive the anti-GMO movement to be. Ball quotes an organizer, “I talk to Tea Party people, Occupy people, churches, everybody. Everywhere I go, people want labeling.” What unites the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, the religious? They are all groups that are typically treated with derision by media elites. They’re too grass roots, too passionate, too uneducated, too defined by cultural and social signifiers that are anathema to the bourgie, educated, arty-but-not-pretentious-about-it, smart-but-anti-academic types who write the internet. The anti-GMO movement ticks the right boxes: associated with both crazy Christian homeschool types and crunchy Whole Food liberal types, conveniently labelled as anti-science with all of the pretenses to objectivity and intelligence using that label brings, and generally not a threat to your professional or social standing if you criticize them. They’re an easy target and a risk-free one, if you’re a professional journalist or political writer.
If anything unites the presumed readership of our national newsmedia, it’s not ideology, but rather cultural and social positioning– the ideology of the elite. And the anti-GMO labeling position unites liberal journalists and writers, conservative journalists and writers, and libertarian journalists and writers in a shared distaste for the political machinations of those who they don’t deem up to their cultural standards. You can have whatever stance you want to about abortion (to pick one example) and function as a media elite, but you cannot, by definition, be a non-elite media elite. That is the underlying, tacit bias that pulses within our media.
What makes all of this dangerous is that our media has no vocabulary for talking about this. However useless it may sometimes be, there exists a long and passionate conversation about partisan and ideological bias in media– complaints about our liberal media, complaints about Fox News, complaints about coziness between foreign policy journalists and the governments they cover. We have people like Jay Rosen to write and think about bias and neutrality. But there’s far less conversation about what it means that essentially everyone who writes for prominent national publications went to college, likes the same kinds of music and movies, has the same attitudes towards food and fitness, and speaks with the same vocabulary, the same codes. And since proving you can write for one of these publications typically means proving you can use that vocabulary and those codes, it’s hard to imagine a lot of people getting into the conversation and forcing a real discussion about this type of bias.
I’ve been formulating a variation of this argument in my head for awhile now, only in regards to what we see as a “normal” lifestyle in movies and television…
I would argue that most of the Boomers who dominated media in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s grew up in your standard American middle-class homes. Their parents had lived through the Depression, or maybe worse. So you watch movies and TV shows from that 30-year period, and you’ll note that the set dressing is fairly modest and believable. E.T. is a perfect example: the divorced Boomer mom, the plain, middle-class tract house with the hodgepodge of toys, the Gen-X kids with their unstructured free time. I actually didn’t watch E.T. for the first time until a few years ago, and when I saw that first scene in the dimly lit living room, I felt a stab of nostalgia for my childhood so painful I almost started sobbing.
What has happened now though, is that the Gen-Xers and Millenials who have taken the helm of the media didn’t have the modest upbringings of their Boomer parents. In fact I would argue that they are mostly the children of wealthy Boomers who themselves spent their careers working in media. Take a look at the set dressing of a show like Modern Family. The title implies a kind of “the way we live now” universality to it. But the lifestyle of the three families is one that is really only available to someone who is very, very well-off, particularly if one lives in Los Angeles as the show’s protagonists do. But the culture makers don’t have that middle-class frame of reference anymore. And you can bet that if the set dresser for Modern Family had tried to make the Dunphy’s house look more like a middle-American 3-child household, you can be sure that the “suits” would have told her that the place looked like public housing.
I don’t know. Maybe a little O.T. But I think it all ties together.
Shorter version of my earlier post: “Old media” held a mirror up to America. “New media” holds the mirror up to itself.
Okay, here’s my argument: the information in and of itself may be neutral, but promoting it to people’s attention by inclusion on a label is not, when there’s huge numbers of other facts about the food that are not so included. We don’t require labels saying whether the crops were irrigated with sprinkers or drip systems, or whether the harvesting was done by machine or by hand, or what type of fertilizer was used, or any of a million other details. Requiring labels on GMO foods implicitly privileges the hypothesis that GMO-ness is a relevant property when determining the food’s safety, when there’s no actual evidence that that is the case.
People use “is this food GMO” as a proxy for “is this food safe”, but that is actually an extremely poor correlation. “GMO” does not form a natural category, after all; that includes everything from rice with higher levels of vitamin A, to corn which produces pesticides internally, to tomatoes with slightly better frost resistance, etc. Safety has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis — some modifications may be safe, some may not be. If there’s a specific concern, with actual evidence backing it, sure, label that. If there were some peas, say, that had genes from a peanut plant added for some purpose, and that also happened to make them produce a protein that could trigger allergies in people allergic to peanuts, absolutely that should be labeled. But a blanket “is/is not GMO” doesn’t really help anyone.
“GMO” does not form a natural category, after all; that includes everything from rice with higher levels of vitamin A, to corn which produces pesticides internally, to tomatoes with slightly better frost resistance, etc. Safety has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis — some modifications may be safe, some may not be.”
If some modifications are safe and some aren’t but there is no currently existing mechanism for warning on a case by case basis, then the choice between labeling and not labeling isn’t really whether we should include a false warning, but a choice between over-warning and under-warning. Neither of which is ideal, but over-warning seems to be a safer approach (from the consumer standpoint at least).
“If some modifications are safe and some aren’t but there is no currently existing mechanism for warning on a case by case basis…”
But there is an existing mechanism and it’s the extensive testing regulations GMOs must endure in order to clear FDA approval.
Perfectly stated, Jim. It’s not that I’m against having “more information” on food labels. I just want that information to be relevant, and not distract from the fact that there are other, far more troubling, issues in our food supply that should be at the front of the discussion.
The anti-labeling argument is essentially that there’s absolutely no reason to privilege the “GMO or not” distinction as worth being labeled, and that doing so gives credence to the idea that it’s an issue at all.
It’s as if there was a movement pushing for companies to certify that their foods were not cursed by witches. People who consider themselves naturalists or rationalists would object to such nonsense; not because they support hexes, but because they are mortified at the idea that we’d even give any credence to the idea.
The witch apologists strike again!
I would add (as someone with no expertise and no particular opinion on the issue) that if you believe that GMOs are a positive good in the world, and you also believe that people would be less likely to buy products labeled “GMO”, thus leading to fewer GMOs being available on the market, that would be a perfectly rational reason to oppose labeling.
What about a requirement that foods be labeled as containing animal products? Or one that specifies if pork, beef, etc are included in the food? The desire for this information comes from either a religious or secular moral motivation, such as veganism, rather than an empirically grounded safety concern. Would that be a valid reason for a carnivorous atheist to be sufficiently mortified to oppose labeling?
It’s one thing if you think someone is wrong and it will cause harm, but I think being mortified by the irrationality of another human being is kind of dehumanizing them. Which is a far shittier thing to do than simply be wrong.
I think that conflates two issues. Ingredient lists are a helpful form of labeling that serves many masters.
On the other hand, I don’t think there is any requirement that kosher goods be labeled. Instead, there’s a certification available for those that care about that sort of thing.
I’d say on the anti-labeling front that we shouldn’t mandate labels with no clear public health benefit. On the pro-label front, I think it’s reasonable that anti-GMO people should be able to develop their own certification program and that products that wish to be certified should certainly be able to prominently display that. Will that hurt sales of goods that don’t have that labeling? Sure, but the GMO stuff will be cheaper and available in more seasons and can tout other benefits.
All that aside, if I can put on an economic determinist hat, I think this is in good part about U.S.-E.U. trade disputes. That brings out the big guns on both sides.
My apologies, I should have been clearer. I was using the animal product labeling requirements as examples of hypothetical labeling requirements based on subjective rationales, such as a belief system (as opposed to empirically determined safety reasons). The point I was trying to make wasn’t that we should or shouldn’t require these labels (to the best of my knowledge we have no such requirements currently), just that these are subjective belief systems motivating food choice that we do not view as being inherently ridiculous or anti-science.
I have no problem with someone opposing labeling from the perspective that the government shouldn’t require labeling in the case of insufficient proof. I do have a problem with viewing people as ridiculous for having beliefs we find to be insufficiently empirically supportive. Maybe the distinction is between being anti-labeling and anti-labeler? Hate the label, love the labeler and all.
(as a sidenote, I think that ingredient lists are only effective for the animal product question to the extent the consumer is knowledgeable enough to recognize whether some of the more esoteric ingredients are animal products).
That all makes sense, thanks for the clarification.
And I think you’re right about the ingredient lists, but my experience has been that people that care strongly can be quite capable of doing the necessary learning. Admittedly, that might be the crowd I run with, but even the obscure ones are often repeated, e.g. gelatin for some vegetarians.
The problem with your comparison is simple: there are vast swaths of research on the health risks and/or benefits of animal vs. plant-based diets (not to mention mad cow scares and e coli outbreaks). It’s not a “belief system” when there are decades of research on the subject, and, even then, it’s possible to choose the degree and kind of animal products a person wishes to consume. Many people avoid animal products because they don’t want to kill/harm animals, which is a moral question, not a scientific one. The idea that GMOs are harmful is an assumption; the health and moral implications of eating meat are not.
At this point there’s not much (if any) evidence that GMOs are unsafe to eat. There are many, many indications, however, that GMOs are disastrous for agriculture. My “but, Science!” friends seem to have a hard time making this distinction.
And it doesn’t surprise me at all that the position that would most benefit enormous corporations is the one taken by the media elite. Disdain for the audience is certainly one factor, but let’s not forget good old-fashioned shilling.
Mac, let me tweak your sentence a bit: There are “many indications that [the handful of] GMO [crops that we currently use] are disastrous for agriculture.” Don’t make the mistake of assuming that all future versions will have the same problems and be applied to the same ends. I’m on board with anyone who wants to oppose RoundUp Ready soybeans and other crops that encourage pesticide use and monoculture. But it’s the pesticides and monoculture that’s the problem, not the technology itself. Rather than label and stigmatize GMOs as a whole, I’d like to see us place reasonable restrictions on how the science can be used, and come up with better applications than what we’ve used it for already.
It is peculiar that so many people have such a strong opinion on the matter, even though their position on it suggests they have nothing at stake (why, all of the sudden, are we so concerned that one segment of the agricultural market might have a marketing advantage over the other?)
The tone of this piece suggests to me you are vying to be the next David Brooks.
I agree with Jim and some other commenters that if the only concern about GMOs is that they might be bad for individual consumers, when there is no evidence that this is the case, adding a label is not actually a neutral act. However, as Mac M notes, this is not the only concern. I think about organic labeling: I am not at all convinced that organically produced meat and dairy are better for me personally, but I do worry about the use of antibiotics in farming and the effect that could have on humanity as a whole through accelerating bacterial resistance to drugs. So I buy organic animal products when I can because I don’t want more of us to die of MRSA. The label probably foments more fear about pesticides or whatever than I personally experience, but it’s still useful to me.
I don’t know what the ecological impact of GMOs is going to be. I have vague trepidations having to do with invasive species, the risks of monoculture, and what happens when you patent something that used to be a free way to feed yourself. But these things are all entwined and it’s not technology that’s at the heart of them, it is bigger picture stuff like power, and the tradeoff between efficiency and diversity. As a result I’m not sure that labeling GMOs would really do for me anything analogous to what the organic label does. I would probably do more for my conscience by buying fewer processed foods containing corn derivatives. I suppose the controversy over labeling could raise these issues but I’m not sure that it has, in the general public.
Incidentally there was a really awful lecture at my university a few months ago by some anti-GMO activists pretending to be scientists — it was like a play by play of “how to lie with statistics,” complete with insinuations about a conspiracy to suppress white fertility (I am not making this up). When you talk about freedom of speech on campus, it is those guys who come to mind. I’m sure their CVs now include the line, “Invited talk at [R1 University].” Well, I suppose anyone who uses such proxies as the sole determinant of credibility deserves what she gets.
In my mind the main reason to oppose GMO labeling is that it redirects funds toward a nonproblem. The USDA (or the FDA or whoever would be in charge of enforcing the labeling) would have to spend resources to make sure people are complying. Those funds could be better used for all sorts of purposes (eg more inspections for E. coli).
Now, as a fraction of the whole economy, these costs would be small, so I don’t think labeling is something to get all up in arms about. If a company does want to highlight that they don’t use GMOs, there are plenty of voluntary certifications that producers can obtain.