A Label We Don’t Need
For almost two decades, the CCFL [WHO Committee on Food Labeling] has dealt with the (unnecessarily) contentious issue of whether foods derived from crops modified with recombinant DNA technology should have to be labeled as such. The obvious question is whether these products are sufficiently unique or pose dangers that should require such labeling. The scientific community has known the answer for a very long time. As Nature editorialized in 1992, “the same physical and biological laws govern the response of organisms modified by modern molecular and cellular methods and those produced by classical methods…. [Therefore] no conceptual distinction exists between genetic modification of plants and microorganisms by classical methods or by molecular techniques that modify DNA and transfer genes”. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has explicitly rejected the labeling of food to indicate that it contains ingredients produced with recombinant DNA technology, as is the case for other genetic modification techniques.
Henry Miller, writing in Nature Biotechnology.
More evidence that it is the left that is anti-science.
Agree.
Fear of genetic modification of foods is based on irrational prejudices, not scientific analysis.
You might be right, Neil, but I don’t see how it would hurt just to have a small label on something that indicates genetic modification. I’m not a scientist, but there’s a lot that we don’t know and the effects of consuming genetically modified foods over time is something we don’t know enough about. Just saying.