Cultural Politics of Food Safety - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 579

regarding it. The biotechnology and food industries carried out intense campaigns
against legislative efforts and other attempts to tighten regulatory requirements. The
government maintained its risk-centered, product-oriented stance. Despite the strong
public support for mandatory labeling expressed in over 50,000 written comments
it received, the FDA concluded that there was no evidence of adverse health effects
of GM food that would mandate labeling. The agency even warned that “GMO free”
labels might be misleading because of the potential accidental presence of GM mate-
rial, as well as the implication that the labeled food is superior to nonlabeled food.12
The agency also dropped its proposal to require premarket consultation in 2003 (Miller
and Conko 2004). Meanwhile, in 2001, the EPA clarified its position to regulate the pes-
ticidal properties associated with the modified plant, rather than the plant itself.13 For
herbicide-resistant plants, the agency regulates the herbicide used with them, and coor-
dinates with the USDA and FDA (McHughen and Smyth 2008). Such practices further
underscore how the regulatory focus is on the characteristics of a product, not the pro-
cess used in its production.
In the United States, much of “GM food” is still treated simply as “food.” Genetic
modification is considered one of many methods in food production and does not serve
as a basis of a distinct social or regulatory category. Against this challenging backdrop,
since the 2000s the opposition intensified their efforts to raise public awareness of GM
food through campaigns at the county or state level. Some local opposition actions suc-
cessfully achieved a ban on cultivation, but none of the state initiatives or bills led to
labeling requirements yet (as of July 2013).14 Americans continue to grow and consume
GM food, mostly indifferent to its presence, risks, or meanings.
Summary
In the United States, the food safety aspects of products made with rDNA crops have
not reached the level of contentiousness or public awareness that they have in France
and Japan. One reason is that the very category of “GM food” has not become widely
salient either socially or politically outside niche communities and movements. These
understandings are consonant with a regulatory framework that has consistently
rejected a systematic distinction between GM food and non-GM food. With policy
focused on the product's certain characteristics—what the US regulators consider sci-
entifically measurable, such as chemical composition, nutrients, and risks to human
health and the environment—fundamental critiques of the technology made little
headway, and evidence of specific risks failed to be established through mainstream
science. Despite a few high-profile incidents that highlighted the issue of food safety
and ecological risks, the general policy framework remained intact: labeling and food
safety assessment did not become mandatory, nor did ecological risk assessment,
for most GMOs other than those producing insecticidal proteins, regulated by the
EPA. Social and political salience has thus remained consistent with the regulatory
approach.