USA and GMO

In the recent California initiative to label all genetically engineered foods the campaign in favor of the labeling argued that 61 countries had genetically engineering labels already. (The initiative lost.)

This ad was playing on the Americans’ fallacious assumption that other parts of the world are more advanced than the US.

In this domain, the United States is half a century ahead of the rest of the world.

We had the hippies. The hippies invented organic agriculture. The hippies were fanatic health food nuts.

When GMO (genetically modified organisms) foods came along, I had no problem organizing hundreds of thousands of hippies to get the Department of Agriculture to define organic as excluding GMO.  As a consequence, the entire domain of organic has been legally free of GMO for 20 years.  

Since the rest of the world was not blessed with a gigantic population of hippies they did not get the benefits of organics and they had no political solution to distinguish organic from GMO as we Americans did.

In this regard, America was and is far ahead of the rest of the world. Of course nearly everything else the hippies gave us was copied worldwide from music to bluejeans.