Should individuals have the freedom to splice genes, even in plants? Meh. I believe "bioengineering" is a sin, but I believe Americans have freedom of belief.
Natural corn is a staff-of-life food for me. The Bacillus thuringiensis corn that puny little Zambia rocked the world by protesting, in 2002, hasn't done me any noticeable harm yet, so I didn't put a lot of energy behind other people's protests against it. E. coli ("Roundup-Ready") corn is a deadly poison for me. BT corn is poisonous for some other people, too, and other GMO's may be even worse for yet other people.
Maybe you have to have gone through the whole gluten/glyphosate reaction, from the "Why am I in such a vile mood all of a sudden?" through the double-over cramps all the way to the blood in the toilet, to realize how disgusting the unintended consequences of bioengineering can be. We are not talking about left-wing rumors here. We are talking about solid medical facts. If Professor Logomasini doubts these facts, she's welcome to join me in a public restroom a day or two after I've eaten unlabelled E. coli corn.
Professor Logomasini raises some valid points about political motivations behind some anti-GMO protests, but the demand that GMO products at least be clearly labelled is bipartisan, and no elected official can afford to ignore it. More than ninety percent of the people in every country want GMO food products labelled.
Yes, that may mean unnecessarily slow sales. Deal with it. Farmers can always cash in on the demand for the non-GMO food. (Would I pay a premium for this cornmeal mix if it could be marked, clearly and honestly, "GMO-Free"? Would the Pope be Catholic?)
Yes, it takes a little more work to tie nylon mesh over ears of corn, to keep out the earworms, than it does to spray poison on the corn or plant poisonous GMO corn...but if you want good-quality corn, it's worth that extra work. Anyway, if Senator Paul's constituents want to go GMO and glyphosate-free, I will personally haul this computer out to Kentucky and tie the nylon mesh on for them. Videotape it, too, if any Constitutional Civil Libertarians want to make a full-sized dare bet out of this.
I do recommend reading the study, if your computer reads PDF documents. I'll print it out, for the usual $1 per individual printout, if your computer won't open it. Those who suspect or know that E. coli grain products and/or glyphosate residues may be making you sick--which they may well be--need to know that, even though GMO labelling is a cause about as popular with all political parties as grandparents or puppies, GMO labelling can and will be exploited by people who want to expand it to support other things.
Glyphosate is killing a lot of birds and animals, sickening if not killing a lot of humans, and its use needs to be drastically restricted. How many parts per million of glyphosate can food safely contain? Based on some reactions I've had recently, I'd say one is too many. E. coli grain...if you think about splicing genes from bacteria that cause food poisoning into food, you probably don't need any experimental evidence to realize that it was basically a very bad idea. And, for testing this kind of thing--what could be better test subjects than the dumb animals in the chemical companies who develop and market ideas as fundamentally stupid as E. coli corn? I mean the ones walking around on their hind legs, wearing ties.
Does that mean every new product or technique should be subjected to twenty years of testing on convicts (the ones with no option of parole, the ones who half hope something does kill them)? Meh. We'd run out of convicts, and animal studies don't really tell us much about how things affect humans. (Even studies of Italian humans don't always tell us how things affect Irish humans.)
What about updating TSCA with a provision that, if a product has seemed to be safe under the current feeble test standards, if it is then released onto the market, and if people then start blaming it for actual symptoms they are in fact having, that product should be either banned or subjected to more exhaustive testing? For example, and this should be written into the law, Monsanto's glyphosate and E. coli corn products should be banned, and Monsanto should have to pay everyone who has been or may have been exposed to any of these products...down through the assets of the corporate decision makers until they're all standing around in one pair of shorts.
And if you think that sounds mean, talk to me in the hour when I first realize that, during the past 24 hours, I must have ingested some unlabelled E. coli corn product somewhere. I get sick, sadistic ideas, the details of which are banned under this web site's contract; if I were a young man and didn't know what was going on, I might even believe I wanted to act them out. I seriously believe that glyphosate is one of the ways the United States gets those sick, sadistic convicts who can never be released. Some of them may literally be...
Stand firm, Senator Paul. Be scientific. Be rational. And be brave enough to heed the will of the people. Some of the "chemical scares" Professor Logomasini discusses may have been merely "scares," but the hazards of unlabelled GMO food are real.
If I were a U.S. Senator, I'd demand that anyone associated with Monsanto publicly repent of having dumped unlabelled GMOs into the food supply, demand that any farm that uses Monsanto pesticides or grows Monsanto GMO crops label those crops as such, and lobby for GMO labels before that person could get into my office, send me an e-mail, or read my Tweets on Twitter.
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/Angela%20Logomasini%20-%20The%20Real%20Meaning%20of%20TSCA%20Modernization.pdf
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