labeling
pronald | May 30, 2012Listen to an informative interview on NPR with University of California, Berkeley geneticist Peggy Lemaux regarding the California initiative on Food labeling.
"If youre looking to know whats in your food, well theres a lot of stuff in your food, and theres already a lot of stuff on the label," says Lemeaux. "And a lot of people already dont read the label."
For more information, check out her science-based website here.
It is a great site, which answers just about any question concerning genetically engineered crops.
pronald | May 29, 2012Just read some of the comments on Amy Harmon's #GMO labeling story from Friday's NYT. Guess people care about this topic.
Here are some excerpts:
"Unless you are foraging, eating wild-berries, game, etc... then you are consuming GMO food. There is no logical definition of #GMO food"
"Conservatives deny data on global warming; Liberals deny data on #GMO safety Each side discards reason when it doesn't suit their politics"
"The FDA should require stringent testing of GMO products and label only those found to be harmful"
"You think you have pesticides being applied now? Wait until the demise of…
lborkowski | October 21, 2011The Institute of Medicine has released a report recommending that the Food and Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture consider "a fundamental shift in strategy" when it comes to nutrition labeling." While the recommendation for a "front-of-package" (FOP) labeling system is not new, the IOM authors don't just want the usual nutrition facts to be moved from the back of the package to the front; rather, new labels should specifically encourage shoppers to choose healthier products.
The authors cite EPA's Energy Star program as a successful government labeling system, because it…
pronald | December 7, 2010Click here to see the Dr. Oz show on GE crops with yours truly.
I tried to provide a science-based perspective to the audience.
It was a tough go, though, because one of the other panelists (Jeffery Smith, a former Iowa political candidate for the Natural Law Party with no discernible scientific or agricultural training) believes that eating GE crops causes infertility, organ damage and endocrine disruption. Of course, the scientific evidence for these statements is about as strong as saying that looking at carrots will give you brain tumors.
Can the audience glean that from the information…
pronald | July 7, 2010Clearly, transparency is critical but how much does the source of funding matter if it is fully disclosed?
Among the scientific community, government funded research is generally considered trustworthy and as a benefit for the public good. Still, that view is not universal. I have been accused of "taking government funding" for my research (which is funded entirely from government sources: DOE, NIH, USDA, and NSF). The person asking clearly felt that the US government was not to be trusted and therefore the research funded by the US government was not to be trusted. But what is the…
pronald | January 5, 2010Thanks to Alex Palazzo for alerting me to the article The Paranoid Style in American Science by Daniel Engber of Slate.
This is a three-part series on radical skepticism and the rise of conspiratorial thinking about science. Unfortunately it is all too familiar. As Alex notes, the series discusses how certain people (i.e. climate skeptics, the ID movement, and the tobacco industry) have cultivated a notion of super-skepticism in an attempt to discredit current scientific consensus. Sadly, crop genetic engineering has also often been the target of such attacks.
The book I wrote with my husband…
pronald | November 8, 2009
Guest blogger Rob Hebert is a second-year student at Georgetown Law. Before moving to DC, he lived in Brooklyn, NY, just blocks from a bar that had over twenty-five beers on tap and thirty arcade machines that all played for a quarter. He can draw you a pretty interesting graph relating "Drinks Consumed" to "Last Score on Pac-Man."
Consumer advocacy groups are a strange animal. It seems that for every influential lobbying group with a senator's ear, there are hundreds or thousands with only vague mission statements and no clear agenda for attaining their stated goals. I once spent a summer…
pronald | November 4, 2009
The Changemakers international online community selected biofortified, a group website devoted to providing factual information and fostering discussion about plant genetics, especially genetic engineering, as the grand prize winner in the GMO Risk or Rescue Competition. This would not have been possible without the leadership of Karl Haro von Mogel, graduate student and blogger Anastasia Bodnar, our Australian colleague David Tribe and the votes of the science blogging community. Thanks all.
Here is the announcment:
Our entire team is excited to highlight your idea and your efforts on…