July 14, 2016
Eighty percent of consumers polled in a recent Oklahoma State University survey didn’t want no stinkin’ deoxyribonucleic acid in their food.
Labels on all food containing it. Better yet, signs on every supermarket aisle. It’s in everything.
What is this dastardly substance? It’s DNA, the genetic material that determines the makeup of all living cells, yet more than 75 percent of consumers in the OSU survey said they do not want it in their food. No DNA - no food - and no people.
This amazing statistic is another element in the bewildering torrent of insanity fomented from the GMO food labeling controversy that resulted in 90 percent of consumers vowing in a Rutgers University survey that they want food containing GMOs labeled.
A salient, recent Wall Street Journal article written by Richard Sexton, chairman of the UC Davis Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and his son, Steven Sexton, an assistant professor of public policy and economics at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, highlighted those inconceivable statistics in suggesting that agriculture and food manufacturers quit feeding the anti-GMO whackos by opposing GMO labeling and just identify GMO food.
After all, the Sextons say 70 to 80 percent of packaged foods contain GMOs anyway. Label it and quit fighting. Let consumers make decisions about what to eat. Label it GMO-DNA and let the misinformed and extremists eat air.
What is most troubling about all this is that the mass media has bought off on the lies and self-serving propaganda radical groups have been spewing for decades. These whackos walk into a newspaper newsroom or mug television cameras and spew deceit or hijack the Internet…and it goes unquestioned.
This propaganda puke goes unchallenged because most scientists, food processors, and farmers don’t battle back hard enough. Admittedly, you cannot fix stupid.
This is why it is heartening to read the Sextons’ piece. It is a sorely needed junkyard dog example of what should have been done long ago by many more.
Don’t expect “Contains GMOs” food labels any time soon; however, it could be the bullhorn that garrotes the whackos.
Shutting them up could remove a huge impediment to the goal of producing 70 to 100 percent more food needed to feed the world’s population in 34 years, as the Sextons point out.
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