Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety by Marion Nestle

Author:Marion Nestle [Nestle, Marion]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cooking & Food, food, Nonfiction, Politics
ISBN: 9780520946309
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2010-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

THE POLITICS OF RISKS AND BENEFITS

When dealing with questions about the risks of genetically modified foods, industry leaders are fond of saying that nobody has died yet from eating them. This may be a correct assessment, but it misses the point. In a situation in which the risks of genetically modified foods are questionable but so are the benefits, point of view becomes the critical factor in interpretation. Regardless of the remoteness of safety concerns, the intensity of criticism—and the vulnerability of the industry—have prompted government agencies to take safety issues seriously. In 2002 alone, the General Accounting Office (GAO) chided the FDA for not doing a better job of validating information provided by food biotechnology companies, disclosing its evaluation methods, and developing new testing methods to ensure the safety of genetically modified foods. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy asked the FDA, EPA, and USDA to strengthen restrictions on field testing to prevent escape of transgenes, and scientific panels of the National Academies urged more careful safety evaluation of genetically modified plants and animals.62

Regardless of the outcome of such actions, the safety questions discussed here—whether genetically modified foods cause allergies, antibiotic resistance, higher production of lectins, or the death of monarch butterflies, and whether they decrease or increase the use of pesticides—are not necessarily the primary issues. Genetically modified foods already pervade the food supply. The experiment is in progress; its results will emerge in due course. Whether such an experiment is in the public interest—or for that matter is in the interest of the industry—will also be revealed in time. If food biotechnology is political, it is because the public has no choice but to participate in this experiment. Thus, the important question is who gets to decide. In the next chapter, we will consider how agricultural biotechnology companies—particularly Monsanto—convinced regulatory agencies that questions about societal risks and benefits do not need to be addressed before planting transgenic foods, that the foods require no special labels, and that the public has no choice about whether to consume them.

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