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truth in advertising
Nov. 27th, 2003 01:28 amI noticed an oddly misleading label on an otherwise innocuous container of baking powder this evening. "NOT GENETICALLY MODIFIED."
At first, I thought it was just silly in the same sense as putting "no salt added" labels on cooking oil and "low fat" labels on the packages of salt. Baking powder is a blend of inorganic chemical leavening agents -- if you wanted to genetically modify it, you'd have to find some genes, first. You might also want to come up with a reason for the modification. Unmodified baking powder does its job pretty well. If you run into a problem that unmodified baking powder can't solve, why would anyone go looking for genes to modify, and modify the baking powder, rather than looking for another leavening agent altogether? Or even doing chemical modifications of baking powder, as people do occasionally, for specialty applications.
But it's not just silly nonsense. It's threatening nonsense. It's not an argument that genetically-modified foods are bad or dangerous. The label takes it for granted that everyone knows genetic modification is so bad, the baking-powder company wants to distance themselves from it as carefully as possible.
At first, I thought it was just silly in the same sense as putting "no salt added" labels on cooking oil and "low fat" labels on the packages of salt. Baking powder is a blend of inorganic chemical leavening agents -- if you wanted to genetically modify it, you'd have to find some genes, first. You might also want to come up with a reason for the modification. Unmodified baking powder does its job pretty well. If you run into a problem that unmodified baking powder can't solve, why would anyone go looking for genes to modify, and modify the baking powder, rather than looking for another leavening agent altogether? Or even doing chemical modifications of baking powder, as people do occasionally, for specialty applications.
But it's not just silly nonsense. It's threatening nonsense. It's not an argument that genetically-modified foods are bad or dangerous. The label takes it for granted that everyone knows genetic modification is so bad, the baking-powder company wants to distance themselves from it as carefully as possible.
