We have Sainsbury’s and Safeway to thank for the fact that there are no GMOs in our food, (though still in animal feed).
One of the first GMO foods to hit the market, back in 1995, was the Flavr-Savr tomato, created by a company called Calgene. The idea was that that tomato would stay fresh on the supermarket shelf for longer. Nobody checked how it travelled and the first shipments to American supermarkets ended up soggy and bruised due to some unforeseen aspect of genetic engineering and despite all the research showing no evidence of health risks.
Tomato growers in California weren’t happy but the huge planting of tomatoes in 1996 got turned into tomato puree and was sold in tins at Sainsbury’s and Safeway at a considerable discount to the normal tomato puree price. In other words, it was dumped on the British market to try to salvage a GMO disaster. The supermarkets proudly labelled the puree as ‘Made with Genetically Engineered Tomatoes’ and consumers, who had never heard of GMO, just bought them because they were so much cheaper. Then in 1998 Dr. Arpad Puztai, one of Britain’s most renowned and trusted experts on food safety, spoke out on TV about his research on the dangers of GM potatoes. The rats had shrinking brains, livers and hearts and he said he wouldn’t eat a GM potato unless more research into its safety was completed. Puztai was promptly sacked from his job at the Rowett Research Institute and gagged, with the threat of losing his pension. Then they sacked his wife. This happened allegedly after Monsanto phoned Clinton who phoned Tony Blair who phoned the heat of Rowett Professor James and told him to gag Puztai. Puztai’s career was ruined, he had a couple of heart attacks and continued to campaign for his research to be duplicated, which has never happened. The Government set up a ‘Biotechnology Presentation Group’ to try to mask the reality about GMOs.
But it was too late. The Soil Association and its European counterparts lobbied strongly for labelling of GMOs and got their way. After all if it was good enough for Safeway and Sainsbury’s customers, what about everyone else? Labelling was agreed at an EU level and nobody ever tried to sell a GM product again. The public were on high alert after the Puztai scandal and weren’t going to be duped.
In the USA it was different. Americans didn’t know what GMOs were, although they were in their corn chips and other staple foods. When the realisation came the Organic Consumers Association campaigned for labelling so people could choose. Eventually, after heavily contested votes in California and Washington the little state of Vermont (Bernie Sanders’ home state) passed a law saying GMOs needed to be labelled. Some food manufacturers complied. Then came the DARK Act. (Denial of Americans Right to Know). This was introduced in Congress to prescribe that any GMO information can be reached via the QR code on the packaging and shoppers could simply check the QR code to find out what GMOs were in their prospective purchase. Hmmm…so this is how that would work. Well, you scan the QR code and go the manufacturer’s website, where you are greeted with an array of products you might like to know about, then you choose the produce you are scanning and get to a list of ingredients and more advertising, then you can click on each ingredient to see which one is a GMO. Then, after about 10 hours of shopping, you have a basket full of food that is GMO free. Or you just buy organic.
The new law was signed into effect by Barack Obama who, as a presidential candidate, promised that he would bring forward GMO labelling. He has the support of 93% of American consumers, who a respected ABCNews poll recently showed want labelling.
Here in Britain and in Europe we take GMO labelling for granted. In the world’s beacon of freedom and democracy the will of 93% of can be blocked by the resistance of a handful of companies with political influence that dwarfs that of the citizenry. I wonder how the 93% of Americans who thought they were on the way to having GMO labelling, 20 years after we secured it in Europe, must feel now. Where there were referendums on GMO labelling, as in California, more than $30 million was spent with scare advertising to deter voters
