With all the hoopla around the President and the senate elections, a small proposition in California almost got lost in the shuffle.
Proposition 37, the Label Genetic Foods bill (often called the “Right to Know” bill) failed. Almost 53% of the people voted against it.
This is a good thing. That bill wasn’t about the ‘right to know’ what’s in your food. It was a pretty blatant attempt to restrict grocery stores to organic foods. According to the bill, you would only have the right to know if your food contained GMOs if you were in the grocery store. Foods in restaurants, including medical centers, would have been exempt from the labeling law.
It also did away with the entire way that suits have been run in the lifespan of the country. Because of this bill, you would not have had to show harm to bring suit against a grocery store. Which is good because no GMO that is currently on the market can be shown to cause harm.
Because of this bill, the grocery stores would have been required to accept a ‘sworn statement’ from farms and/or suppliers, but would have been the ones on the chopping block of the suit.
Finally, because the bill does not require testing under any conditions, there is no way to actually check the GMO content of food. Things like sugar would have been required to have a label, but there’s no difference between the sugar from a GM sugar beet and from an organic sugar cane. Sugar is sugar. Except when applied by this bill.
I’m pleased that more sanity has spread through the country.
