When the U.S. House of Representatives advanced the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015, it came to be known as the Denying Americans the Right to Know (DARK) Act. Critics on both sides claimed the premise of the legislation was misleading. But the recent defeat of DARK in the Senate is overwhelmingly considered a victory in the fight for greater food system transparency.
Organizations like Environmental Working Group (EWG) played a key role in defeating DARK. Following its advancement to the Senate for consideration, Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs for EWG, accurately predicted its demise: “We’re confident the Senate will defeat the DARK Act. We continue to hope that thoughtful companies that listen to their customers will work with consumer groups to craft a non-judgmental GMO disclosure to put on the back of food packaging. Americans should have the same right as citizens of 64 other countries to know what’s in their food and how it’s grown.”
Debates over GMO-labeling are not likely to end any time soon. But in the meantime, citizens in states like Vermont will get what they voted for—transparent labeling. Producers and manufacturers will have to determine the best path forward. Follow the lead of companies like Campbell’s Soup? Continue pouring millions of dollars into fighting the will of consumers? Or what about advancing the GMO conversation by taking transparency to the next level?
One thing is clear: the majority of Americans lack knowledge of the big picture when it comes to GMOs. Special interest dollars have been hard at work to narrow the discussion of GMOs in the media. We’ve all read statements along the lines of “there is no evidence that GMOs pose health risks.” Aside from the fact that there is no evidence that they DO NOT pose risks, this is just one of many concerns under the umbrella like the long term impact of GMOs on the environment.
Consider the following. James Hamblin of The Atlantic mentions in his 2015 article entitled “No One Is Denying a ‘Right to Know’ What’s in My Food’” that the Non-GMO Project identifies “genetically modified organisms” as those “artificially manipulated in a laboratory.” He offers up the creation of the (now ubiquitous) sugar snap pea in 1979 as an example of the vast bio-engineering domain, stating that “…most any act of agriculture could be considered an imposition of ‘unnatural’ activity into malleable, unassuming ecosystems.”
The challenge here is that the Non-GMO Project’s definition is actually quite a bit longer: GMOs (or “genetically modified organisms”) are organisms whose genetic material has been artificially manipulated in a laboratory through genetic engineering, or GE. This relatively new science creates unstable combinations of plant, animal, bacteria and viral genes that do not occur in nature or through traditional crossbreeding methods.
If this type of oversight can occur in an article written by a respected senior editor for respected national publication, then what is being communicated elsewhere? On the heels of DARK’s defeat—a significant first step—we can only hope that the move toward greater transparency involves a more substantial discussion about the big picture. We’ll be keeping tabs.