Cultural Politics of Food Safety - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 578

farmers and GM food opponents, and it resonated strongly with the wider public in a
way that earlier attempts by the opposition failed to do. In May 1998 the USDA conceded
to excluding GMOs—together with food made with irradiation and sewage sludge—
from the organic category, acknowledging that the latter meant more than not using
synthetic chemicals. USDA organic labels launched in October 2002. GM food, how-
ever, still did not constitute a meaningful and salient category for either policymakers or
the American public.
Sustained Liberal Framework and Incremental Change
GM food attracted more US public attention than ever in 1999 and 2000. European
opposition grew so strong in 1999 that it began to affect wider segments of the American
food industry. The EU stopped authorizing new GMOs, while major European retail
chains and food processors started eliminating GM soybean and corn ingredients from
their products. As the media coverage of GM food markedly increased in the United
States, Heinz and Gerber pledged to remove GM ingredients from their baby food,
and the nation's leading grain processor, Archer Daniels Midland, shocked farmers by
requesting that GM crops be segregated and announcing that it would reject GM corn
varieties that Europeans had rejected. In addition, Frito-Lay told its corn suppliers not
to grow Bt corn. GM crop vandalism—in university and corporate research facilities, as
well as in test fields—spread from Europe to the United States (Charles 2001).
Furthermore, two high-profile episodes spurred domestic debates about risk. First,
the ecological implications of GM crops drew much public attention with the May
1999 publication of a controversial study in Nature , in which Cornell University scien-
tists reported on adverse effects of Bt corn pollen on monarch larvae in their experi-
ment. With monarch butterflies as a powerful symbol, opposition groups ran a series
of full-page ads in major newspapers across the country, discussing the risks GM crops
posed to the environment and human health, as well as their moral implications. The
EPA eventually demanded more data from Bt corn manufacturers. Then, in September
2000, the food safety aspects of GM food became further highlighted with the dis-
covery of the DNA of an unapproved GM crop in packaged food. The Friends of the
Earth announced that Kraft Foods' taco shells served at Taco Bell contained the DNA
of StarLink corn, approved only as animal feed, not for human consumption (Charles
2001; Pringle 2001).
In this context, some political and administrative efforts were made in the late 1990s
and early 2000s to institute stricter regulation of GM food. An important struggle took
place over whether the boundaries between GM and non-GM food should be strength-
ened in regulatory policy. Members of Congress introduced a series of bills to make
premarket safety assessment of GM food mandatory and to require labeling, while the
FDA reviewed its approach to GM food labeling and proposed making premarket con-
sultation mandatory. In the end, however, these developments did not lead to signifi-
cant changes in the perception, production, or consumption of GM food, nor in policy