Another Phony Cause

Another annoying trendy useless activity that is driving me (even more) crazy is this liberal crowd notion that food has to be labeled as GMO or non GMO. But why? It's silly to think that  food products that have been bred to be more resistant to disease and spoilage are any more "dangerous" to eat that the few non GMO crops left. Using science to make crops more resistant to drought or insects builds on the ancient practice of selectively breeding plants to produce better and tougher characteristics. It's normal!

And doing this in a lab at the genetic level makes it faster, more precise and more effective. But it also makes the climate change alarmist in the bubble types think that something devious is being done when science improves agriculture. The result is the same kind of "save the planet" misinformation and fear mongering we see in other trendy social causes,  The GMO critics are using such ignorance to make people afraid of what is good for them to eat and has saved from starvation hundreds of millions of people in third world areas.

The GMO fear mongers say that forcing companies to label genetically modified foods is simple. Don’t consumers have a right to know what they're eating, they exclaim? But labeling food  that way has risks and consequences its backers rarely acknowledge. On balance it's a bad idea. A key reason is that it validates the notion that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are dangerous. This is absolutely false. But then, when did the environmental extremists ever use reason as a basis for their spurious claims. After looking at more than 130 research projects over a quarter century, for example,  the European Union found that GMOs “are not per se more risky than … conventional plant breeding.”

The risk from mandatory GMO labeling is the promotion of unfounded fear and the fact that the food industry will have to respond by producing fewer GMO products. That could have a particularly murderous impact in poorer parts of the world, where food is already scarcer and more expensive, where GMOs mark the difference between eating or starvation I say, let the GMO fanatics use those voluntary labels that sates boldly that a product is  non GMO. The manufacturers are happy to deceive consumers into wasting their money on expensive non GMO products and can selectively label their pitch toward the gullible "save the planet" crowd.

It's bad enough that shoppers today must sift through all the phony claims that are labeled on food. From "all natural" to "natural" to "organic" to the seemingly endless other specific food labels. I say the only sensible label to require today is "FSO". That would be "For Stupid Only" consumers who believe every idiotic claim made by every charlatan who dips more deeply into their pockets with each label.