I avoid GMO products to a certain degree, but not because I'm concerned that they may be unhealthy or dangerous.
A food crop could be modified to be dangerous I'm sure. And likewise I'm sure one could be selectively bred (over enough generations) to be dangerous. If someone engineers Sarin-secreting corn or something we'll figure it out pretty quickly and the issue won't be it being GMO, it will be human malevolence. But I really couldn't care less about that.
Rather, I like seeing GMO labels because it's the closest analogue for determining if my food is proprietary. I am incredibly against reproducing organisms that are a living patent violation, and I don't want to support such things if possible. Above so said, I would much prefer to see marking indicating that none of the product was patented, copyrighted, licensed, or otherwise encumbered.
Another thing I think that perhaps gets (erroneously) mixed into the GMO debate is biodiversity. Many people have concerns that monoculture is dangerous and somehow mix and/or conflate non-GMO with heirloom/native varietal foods.
Obviously the shadow over all of the above is the "organic" label, which blurs things a little but further. But the primary consumer for organic overlaps with the primary consumer for non-GMO which overlaps with the primary consumer for local/heirloom/native produce, and the net result is that all the terms get muddied.
Given the above, while I concur that GMO labeling is not ideal as is, and I concur that GMO foods are fine or mostly fine, we don't actually have a sufficient food labeling system. People want to know if proprietary organisms are in their food. They want to know if it was grown with pesticides. They want to know where it was grown. Etc.
In many ways food labels are a product of bizarre anti-consumer compromises. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to be able to get non-proprietary food grown with low pesticide usage. Complaining about the GMO label doesn't really seem to address this.
(PS: Love getting downvoted in the interval between posting my comment and refreshing the thread... almost like somebody didn't even read it.)
A food crop could be modified to be dangerous I'm sure. And likewise I'm sure one could be selectively bred (over enough generations) to be dangerous. If someone engineers Sarin-secreting corn or something we'll figure it out pretty quickly and the issue won't be it being GMO, it will be human malevolence. But I really couldn't care less about that.
Rather, I like seeing GMO labels because it's the closest analogue for determining if my food is proprietary. I am incredibly against reproducing organisms that are a living patent violation, and I don't want to support such things if possible. Above so said, I would much prefer to see marking indicating that none of the product was patented, copyrighted, licensed, or otherwise encumbered.
Another thing I think that perhaps gets (erroneously) mixed into the GMO debate is biodiversity. Many people have concerns that monoculture is dangerous and somehow mix and/or conflate non-GMO with heirloom/native varietal foods.
Obviously the shadow over all of the above is the "organic" label, which blurs things a little but further. But the primary consumer for organic overlaps with the primary consumer for non-GMO which overlaps with the primary consumer for local/heirloom/native produce, and the net result is that all the terms get muddied.
Given the above, while I concur that GMO labeling is not ideal as is, and I concur that GMO foods are fine or mostly fine, we don't actually have a sufficient food labeling system. People want to know if proprietary organisms are in their food. They want to know if it was grown with pesticides. They want to know where it was grown. Etc.
In many ways food labels are a product of bizarre anti-consumer compromises. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to be able to get non-proprietary food grown with low pesticide usage. Complaining about the GMO label doesn't really seem to address this.
(PS: Love getting downvoted in the interval between posting my comment and refreshing the thread... almost like somebody didn't even read it.)