For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Genetic Engineering page, Millions Against Monsanto page and our Oregon News page.

The media blitz is here.

You’ll be inundated with TV ads sounding the alarm that Oregon’s Measure 92 ranks in desirability somewhere between the Willamette’s algae bloom and the Ebola virus.

So far, opponents have branded Oregon’s GMO labeling proposal with causing mass confusion and misinformation, jacking up grocery bills, ruining farmers, hurting the poor, etc. What’s next, Bill Murray warning us that cows and pigs will be sleeping together? The fact that none of these dire predictions has happened in the 64 countries already labeling is just a messy little detail easily ignored.

But never make light of the power of millions of dollars of slick corporate PR. It’s transformed consumers’ common sense that they have a right to know what’s in their food into an irrational fear of their own best interests. This advertising was a major reason that similar labeling initiatives lost in California and Washington.

For example, one ad started this week said the initiative was
“. . . so full of exemptions that it wouldn’t even give consumers reliable information about which foods contain GMO’s and which don’t.”

There are good reasons for certain exemptions, and for meat and dairy animals, it’s not even an exemption, it’s a distinction:
they aren’t genetically engineered. Eating GMO feed doesn’t turn animals into GMO’s themselves, just as eating GMO food doesn’t make us genetically engineered.

If GMO salmon gets approved – a real possibility – the FDA wouldn’t mandate labeling it. But Oregon’s Measure 92
would require it, since it’s the animal itself. This would seem at least as important as the current requirement that salmon sold in grocery stores must be labeled wild or farmed.

The initiative’s exclusions are consistent with which foods don’t require full nutrition and ingredient labels now, such as those served in school cafeterias, restaurants and bake sales. This system, with a few modifications, has been in place for nearly 25 years.

To argue that consumers will be misled or misinformed because some foods would require labeling and others wouldn’t is Moby Dick-level fiction, but admittedly it does have an element of humor. Out of one side of their mouths, opponents complain that the proposed labeling is too burdensome and goes too far. Out of the other side, they complain that it doesn’t go far enough.