Guest post by Cami Ryan, a Canadian agricultural researcher: Last week, an executive with a biotech trade group asserted in an interview that it wasn’t too late to win the hearts and minds of consumers suspicious of genetically modified foods. Biotech advocates just need to do a better job of explaining the technology and its…Continue Reading…
Whatever your opinion of the worldwide protest against Monsanto this past weekend, one thing is true: It deserved media coverage. Lots of noisy people with colorful signs took to the streets to voice their opposition to GMOs and the company that has come to symbolize them. It was an event tailor made for TV. So…Continue Reading…
The world is full of people who hold whacky views. This doesn’t make them nuts or stupid. We can mock Donald Trump for being a birther, but this doesn’t make him a crazy person. We can ridicule Senator James Inhofe for believing that global warming is a big hoax cooked up by a cabal of…Continue Reading…
Because the crazy train on genetically modified foods has already left the station, I’m puzzled by the headline of a recent post: Biotechnology Industry Organization: It’s not too late to change the conversation on GMOs That’s the equivalent of the IPCC saying, “It’s not too late to change the conversation on climate change.” If you…Continue Reading…
Mark Bittman, the popular food writer for the New York Times, has written a column that is almost beyond parody for its unintentional irony. The only way to fully appreciate his lack of self-awareness is to stop and marvel at numerous passages. Let’s start at the top: Things are bad enough in the food world…Continue Reading…
When the definitive history of the GMO debate is written, Jeffrey Smith is going to figure prominently in the section on pseudoscience. He is the equivalent of an anti-vaccine leader, someone who is quite successful in spreading fear and false information. (As David Gorski at the Science-based Medicine blog has noted, the anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements…Continue Reading…
There are two camps that favor labeling genetically modified [GM] foods: 1) The “Right to Know” people, who say they just want to know what’s in their food. This is a specious argument. The truth is they think there is something harmful about GMOs. Why else would they feel so strongly about labeling genetically modified…Continue Reading…
By now it has become clear, as British environmental writer Mark Lynas said in a speech this week at Cornell University, that controversy over GMOs represents one of the greatest science communications failures of the past half-century. Millions, possibly billions, of people have come to believe what is essentially a conspiracy theory, generating fear and…Continue Reading…
Guest post by Ramez Naam. Keith Kloor has graciously given me the opportunity to guest post here again. So let me cut to the chase: I support GMOs. And we should label them. We should label them because that is the very best thing we can do for public acceptance of agricultural biotech. And…Continue Reading…
Anti-biotech activists, like their fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine movement, are masters at pseudoscience. As I’ve previously discussed, the really clever GMO opponents put a veneer of science on their propaganda. One recent example that an anti-GMO website approvingly pointed to was so obviously absurd that I was sure it would be ignored by media.