Monsanto and GMO Corn: It Aint Easy Bein' Sleazy

In case you haven't heard, while the American public was distracted by the supreme court case on Prop 8 the federal government sneaked an addition to the 2013 agricultural appropriations bill essentially protecting Monsanto and other distributors of GMO seeds. Now it was a last-minute addition, so it's not entirely fair to blame congress for passing it or Obama for signing it in to law, because it was just one point on a much larger bill, but on all levels, it really was a disservice to the American people. The provision basically states that judges can't halt the planting or sale of GMO seeds even if they pose an imminent health risk. This comes a few months after prop 37 was voted down in California, meaning that food products containing GMOs do not have to be labeled. A friend and I were lamenting this today, and he basically said that if GMOs had to be labeled, the free market would decide whether or not GMOs foods will continue to be sold; if they are as destructive as opponents claim, then the market forces will no longer make them commercially viable.

This is the friend of mine who worked at a libertarian think tank and once wrote an article for their publication that was against government restrictions on genital mutation. So I think it's safe to say he's all for a free market. (He is by no means pro-genital mutation. He just treats it as would Voltaire.) Now, I enjoy and appreciate our free market system as much as anyone. But I think in the case of GMOs, and destructive foods in general, the free market will not save us.

Let's use Flamin' Hot Cheetos as an example. If you know something about food, you know that Flamin' Hot Cheetos are bad for you. The ingredients are required by law to be on there, tucked away somewhere on the back in fine print. It's labeled, and if you read it, you realize there are some unholy things on the back, including hydrolyzed soy protein, disodium guanylate, and red 40 lake. You can't stop people from eating Flamin' Hot Cheetos. I once witnessed another friend of mine (now you know I have at least two more friends than you thought I did) down almost an entire bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos. She would have finished the whole thing herself if I hadn't helped out and subsequently got Flamin' Hot Cheeto dust up my nose, killing my sense of smell for a week. Short of a big neon label on the packaging saying CAUTION THIS WILL MAKE YOUR THIGHS BLOAT AND YOUR TESTICLES SHRIVEL! I don't think there's any warning they could slap on it that would discourage consumers.

A century ago, people were able to successfully vote with their wallets against the Chicago-based meat packing industry, thanks largely to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. It exposed what really went into the meat people were consuming: rat tails, bits of rope, the severed hands of Lithuanian immigrant meat packers, etc. But this was something on a macro scale. We can't even visualize what's going into our food this time around. Rat tails. Everyone can picture it and no one wants to eat it. But a protein that acts as a pesticide caused by the introduction of a vector of bacterial DNA to the genome via a retrovirus? It sounds kind of scary, but what is it to you? Looks like corn. Tastes like corn. It's not as nutritious as corn, and it might give you cancer, and it's making livestock infertile, and it's contaminating the gene pool and contributing to bacterial evolution in a way that is bad for humanity, but hey, at least it's not a rat tail.

People will do things that are bad for them if it makes them feel good. You have probably ate something with GMO corn in it. And it was probably delicious. Labeling is the first step. It will get the health-conscious and the people who can afford regular corn to shy away from GMO. Because standard corn WILL become more expensive and I believe we'll see a day when only the well off can afford non-GMO corn. Don't believe me? All vegetables used to be what is now considered "organic." Now you have to pay more for it. The next step is being able to criminally prosecute irresponsible GMO companies, and make them liable for the ecological and health damage they cause. I would like to trust the free market. I would like to trust the wisdom of the crowd. But we're the same species that can eat a whole bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos in one sitting, that smokes a pack a day, that gets addicted to heroin. This is the species that has caused desertification, mass extinctions, and once punched a hole in the Ozone Layer all for the sake of sustained exponential growth. I don't know if we can trust ourselves to stop Monsanto.

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