Cultural Politics of Food Safety - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 574

Debates on labeling and food safety, together with ubiquitous non-GMO labels, kept
the category of GM food politically salient and relevant. Concerns about protecting
rice—and the culture and tradition surrounding it—emerged, slowing R&D efforts in
rice. The government eventually acceded to the Cartagena Protocol, which it had ear-
lier declined. Still, consumption risks remained the dominant concern, and this narrow
focus contributed to the ways in which new regulatory approaches were considerably
more lenient than those of the European Union or France.
The United States
The United States has consistently been a leader in modern biotechnology and its agri-
cultural application. On the one hand, the government has long considered agricultural
biotechnology as an essential industrial domain, and it has promoted it in various ways.
On the other hand, the US policy on GM products, established in the mid-1980s, has
significantly played down the use of genetic modification as a basis for a distinct regula-
tory category, and instead treated most GM food as equivalent to existing products. This
general stance remains intact at the federal level, with minor revisions: no legislation
has been created specifically for GMOs or GM food, and labeling has not been required.
Under this regulatory framework, GMOs have steadily spread into the US food chain
since 1994, without stirring up significant health-risk concerns among consumers.
Despite the majority of corn and soybean products coming from rDNA crops and their
pervasive use in processed food, the category of “GM food” does not officially exist—or
matter to most Americans.
Although opposition has existed since the 1980s and raised a variety of concerns—
ethical, ecological, and later food safety—it never reached the scope and contentious-
ness of its counterpart in France or Japan. It did not develop into a united movement
or a larger voice to question the technology as presenting a unique set of risks, let alone
representing non-risk problems. Still, opposition did succeed in preventing transgenic
plants from qualifying as organic in the late 1990s, and it also incited policy debates
about banning the cultivation of GM crops or requiring labeling on GM food at the
county or state level in the 2000s and 2010s. A cultivation ban was achieved in some of
these cases, and labeling became a significant political issue in some states.
Nonetheless, GM food as a category has never become as socially or politically
relevant in the United States as it has in countries such as France or Japan. GMOs
were widely diffused into American farms and food chains before concerns about
food safety—or any other aspects for that matter—became substantial and visible
enough to affect policy or the practices of mainstream food producers and dis-
tributors. Public awareness of GM food has been generally low despite pervasive
consumption, and much opposition effort went into the boundary politics of estab-
lishing the distinctiveness of GM food—whether via organic standards or labeling
requirements.