Page 51 - Breeding Edge ebook

For example, when the Washington Post ran an opinion piece recently by Purdue University President
Mitch Daniels, a former Indiana governor, extolling genetically modified (GMO) crops and saying it is
immoral for society to prohibit them, the article generated 1,630 reader comments within two days.

The remarks were typically emotional, angry or
sarcastic and frequently displayed ignorance about
genetic modification processes and products.

But even though Americans get their dukes up over
GMOs, they may not understand why, says Michael
Specter, veteran science writer for the New Yorker.

“I don’t think there are many people in this
country who get up in the morning and say, ‘Oh,
my god, I’m so happy we have GMO corn,’”
Specter told people attending a gene editing
conference, called CRISPRcon, last August at the
University of California-Berkeley. Herbicide- or
insect-resistant corn, he says, don’t hit people where
they live, as would biotech remedies to wipe out malaria mosquitos and save lives.

“What matters is a connection to people on something they care about,” Specter said.

In general, Americans don’t like the idea of GMOs, even if they don’t know what they are. In a 2015
national survey, the Pew Research Center found that 57 percent of adults, including two of three women,
consider food products with GMOs to be unsafe. About half – especially women and folks under 30
years old – say they watch for GMO listings on labels at least sometimes.

What’s more, it seems that nearly 90 percent of U.S. adults want food labels to indicate the presence of
GMOs, according to a survey sponsored by Just Label It, a leading proponent of such labeling. Last
year, in fact, Congress ordered that products must disclose scannable or printed GMO information, and
regulations mandating such labeling are due out from USDA by mid-summer.

But those snapshots of Americans’ opinion on GMOs tell little about their understanding of food
products and how they are created.

A Michigan State University Food Literacy and Engagement Poll asked 1,059 U.S. adults last
summer, for example, if this statement is true: “Genetically modified foods have genes and non-
genetically modified foods do not,” and 37 percent agreed, showing that many people just don’t
know what genes or GMOs are.

Indeed, American consumers’ knowledge in biotechnology is hit and miss, agrees Dietram Scheufele, a
professor in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin. He noted
that Oklahoma State University pollsters, in their 2015 Food Demand Survey, asked a thousand
Americans if they want mandatory labeling of DNA in foods. The result: 80 percent said yes (See chart
on right.) Obviously, those respondents did not understand that DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is an
essential part of all living organisms - organic, non-GMO or GMO.

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