Reporting on Biotech Could Use a Warning Label

By Michale Fumento
Copyright 1999 Sun-Sentinel (Ft. Lauderdale, FL)
September 15, 1999

On a recent visit to France, I saw a magazine cover depicting a tomato with a burning fuse and La Cuisine du Diable spelled out in big bold letters. It wasn't about a recipe for devil's-food cake with tomatoes, but about food developed through biotechnology.

A more influential magazine contains an article that could be called La Cuisine du Diable Lite.

September's issue of Consumer Reports presents a more honest look at biotechnology than the French magazine. Considering the magazine's growing tendency to find corporate-produced horrors behind every bush, that's an achievement.

Indeed, the article stated, "There is no evidence that genetically engineered foods on the market are not safe to eat," adding that genetic engineering could lead to consumer benefits like lower cholesterol and increased resistance to cancer.

But like Darth Vader, Consumer Reports embraces the dark side. It repeats false claims about biotech foods, says biotech development doesn't have nearly enough safeguards and recommends mandatory labeling of foods containing genetically engineered ingredients.

You can be sure that Consumer Reports (published by the nonprofit Consumers Union) wasn't about to weaken its case by explaining that there is no inherent difference between bioengineered food and nonbioengineered food.

Virtually nothing we eat is truly "natural." Few things we consume are as nature made them. From cattle to corn, apples to artichokes, today's food is the result of cross-breeding experiments dating to the dawn of history. Many of the plant varieties we consume didn't exist even a century ago.

With biotechnology, you isolate a specific gene or genes with the desired features and splice them into the organism you want to improve.

It's faster, surer and safer than the old technique of crossbreeding. Henry Miller, a former official with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, notes that the few harmful plants developed before gene-splicing would have been much less likely to occur under biotechnology.

Can biotechnology guarantee food that is utterly, absolutely, 101 percent safe? No. There is no technology that can. Miller informed me that biotech food regulations are always at least as tough as those for other foods and often needlessly tougher.

Miller says that since biotech is merely an extension of the sort of food development that's always been going on, there's no justification for additional scrutiny.

That's also the FDA's view. But the heavily politicized Environmental Protection Agency takes a different tack, discriminating against biotech food and burdening it with worthless tests.

Steve Taylor, a food scientist at the University of Nebraska, chairs an international panel of scientists given the job of coming up with standards for biotech food safety evaluation. "The testing done by major U.S. biotech companies meets or exceeds those standards," Taylor says.

Government regulators aren't the big problem for companies investing billions of dollars in these foods. Rather, they suffer under a constant barrage of false claims from environmental activists, organic farmers and media crusaders.

They are besieged by European governments that perceive (correctly) that their heavily subsidized farmers will need even more subsidies to compete with cheaper American biotech crops.

If companies actually committed the sins they're accused of, the resulting media attention and lawsuits could destroy them.

So the food is safe. Why label it then? Simple, says Consumer Reports: "Consumers have a fundamental right to know what they eat." That sounds nice but doesn't mean much.

Consumer Reports and other biotech-labeling advocates note many European governments mandate biotech food labeling. Yet few mandate nutrition labels on food the way the United States does. It is the United States, not Europe, that provides consumers with the most important information about their food.

Why don't we require labels informing us where the individual ingredients were grown, slaughtered or synthesized? Why not tell us the specific variety of blueberry in that muffin, or grapes in that juice? Because it's not important.

Since biotech food differs from other food only in the way it was developed, there's no purpose to labeling it. No nonpolitical purpose, at least. But activists and their media allies will continue to fight for such labels, in hopes that a biotech label will scare consumers away.

Furthermore, because labeling requires food testing at every stage of transport from picking to processing, it increases the cost of those foods by as much as 30 percent.

What the public really needs is a label on all the scientifically inaccurate articles and press releases on biotech food. Perhaps something like: "The following piece contains 5 percent half-truths, 10 percent obfuscation and 85 percent rubbish."

Michael Fumento is a senior fellow in Washington for the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute and specializes in health and science issues. Send letters to Sally Heinemann, editorial director, Bridge News, 200 Vesey St., 28th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10281.