Food industry should modify its stance on altered food

MY primitive response to genetically modified foods is to ask, "What's wrong with the grub of the last 250,000 years?" Mucking around with genetic material to create new kinds of fruits, vegetables and animals seems somehow unnecessary. Cows have produced pretty good milk over the millennia using their cow genes. So why insert rat genes into a perfectly acceptable cow?

Call me old-fashioned, but given a choice between a traditional tomato and a tomato carrying fish DNA, I will select the former.

Are these genetically modified organisms (GMOs) safe to eat? I don't know. But regardless of the science, I remain an anchor in the stream of progress. I do not want GMOs on my plate for moral, ethical, emotional, religious, esthetic, sentimental and other reasons I haven't thought of yet.

Monsanto, I'm obviously not your customer. But I'd like to make a deal with you and the other food/biotech companies pushing all this gene splicing. Let me decide whether or not to buy genetically engineered foods at the store. Don't force me onto a farm in the woods where I must sit guard over my organic vegetable patch with a shotgun and a crazed look on my face. In other words, stop fighting proposals to label foods for GMO content.

The biotech-food-industrial complex opposes such labeling for sound business reasons: The world is full of people like me. Polls consistently show Americans objecting to genetically manipulated food by solid majorities. Some 93 percent of the respondents to a poll conducted for ABCNEWS.com wanted mandatory labeling of bio-engineered products.

That's why the complex pounced on a potentially path-clearing referendum in Oregon that would have required labels. Monsanto joined Kraft, Unilever and other opponents to outspend supporters 25-to-1. The proposal was soundly defeated following ludicrous claims that a labeling law would cost the average Oregon family $550 a year. (Similar laws in Europe, Japan and Australia have not noticeably raised the price of food.)

Actually, the U.S. trade representative will soon decide whether to drag Europe before the World Trade Organization over its restrictions on importing genetically modified corn and soybeans. Right now, 34 percent of corn and 75 percent of soybeans in America are grown from genetically manipulated seed.

With Europeans already inflamed by U.S. environmental policies, this seems a swell time for the Bush administration to bully them over their food supply, Europe's No. 1 cultural issue. Prince Charles is going around the kingdom condemning genetically engineered food as something that "takes mankind into realms that belong to God and God alone."

The Bush administration and Monsanto like each other a great deal, which is why we can't trust our government to give us the straight story on GMOs. Of course, they will never conquer dine-o-saurs like me. But if they want to win over folks concerned only about how GMOs might affect health and the environment, they're going about it the wrong way.

A U.S. Food and Drug Administration confident about the safety of these products would not have weighed in so loudly against the Oregon labeling proposal. And what possessed the administration to name Monsanto's former Washington lobbyist for GMOs as second in command at the Environmental Protection Agency?

Over at the National Academy of Sciences, a panel sung the praises of federal efforts to regulate genetically engineered foods. It turned out that six of the 12 panel members had ties to the biotech industry.

The complex showers the public with rather impressive claims for GMOs. GMO farmers can up food production for a hungry world. GMO crops reduce pesticide use. GMO cows (the ones with rat genes) produce milk that's better for the heart. Hey, they may be right in some cases.

All this matters not to me. Others may forge ahead with new culinary traditions. I won't chow down on GMOs and I will echo Prince Charles' call for "strong and sustained pressure from consumers to ensure that they keep the right not to eat them."

Our farmers produce beautiful and abundant food without putting moth genes into catfish. Why mess with success?

Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com.