Pollan on Prop 37

Photo by Nuclear Winter via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Last Friday I posted about Mark Bittman’s trip to California’s Central Valley that was featured in the current Food and Drink Issue of The New York Times Magazine. Today I thought I’d link to one more entry from that issue: Michael Pollan’s piece on the voter initiative in California called Proposition 37, which would require labeling of most genetically modified foods.

As Pollan writes,

Americans have been eating genetically engineered food for 18 years, and as supporters of the technology are quick to point out, we don’t seem to be dropping like flies. But they miss the point. The fight over labeling G.M. food is not foremost about food safety or environmental harm, legitimate though these questions are. The fight is about the power of Big Food. Monsanto has become the symbol of everything people dislike about industrial agriculture: corporate control of the regulatory process; lack of transparency (for consumers) and lack of choice (for farmers); an intensifying rain of pesticides on ever-expanding monocultures; and the monopolization of seeds, which is to say, of the genetic resources on which all of humanity depends.

These are precisely the issues that have given rise to the so-called food movement. Yet that movement has so far had more success in building an alternative food chain than it has in winning substantive changes from Big Food or Washington….

Yet. Next month in California, a few million people will vote with their votes on a food issue. Already, Prop 37 has ignited precisely the kind of debate — about the risks and benefits of genetically modified food; about transparency and the consumer’s right to know — that Monsanto and its allies have managed to stifle in Washington for nearly two decades. If Prop 37 passes, and the polls suggest its chances are good, then that debate will most likely go national and a new political dynamic will be set in motion.

As usual, it’s an engaging and thoughtful essay, so check out the full piece here.

For more on Prop 37, check out just some of the editorials and reporting at these links. Finally, view the (pro-Prop 37) video below and join the campaign to tell the FDA to require agribusiness to “Just Label It.”

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