“Just Label It”, an anti-gmo organization funded by the organic industry and founded by the chairman of an organic yogurt company, has put out a cute video demonstrating how difficult it would be for mothers to use their smart phones to identify products with GMOs in them using a QR code. (Just Label It wants big, obvious signage so that consumers will know to avoid those products.) Starring anti-GMO celebrity darling, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the yogurt executive who has made millions off the American food system he refers to as a “food prison, food apartheid, and food slavery”, the video perfectly encapsulates the privileged world of the anti-GMO movement.
On the surface, this video seems rather harmless. An exhausted looking woman with bratty kids is grocery shopping and all she wants to know is whether or not the can of soup she plans to feed her little darlings has GMOs in it. She doesn’t know what GMOs are but she knows that they will give her kids cancer, autism, allergies, and ADHD because Gwyneth Paltrow and organic executives said so. To find out about the GMOs, she’s forced to fumble through her purse for her phone in order to take a picture of a QR code.
You really do feel for her and many of us can relate to the nightmare of grocery shopping with obnoxious kids but here is where it gets stupid: If you’ve been in an upscale, suburban American grocery store recently, you’ve probably noticed that you can’t throw a watermelon without hitting something that says non-GMO or GMO-free. It’s everywhere and it’s on everything. Most of the stuff it’s on doesn’t even have a GMO counterpart available. And by USDA definition, anything certified as organic is non-GMO. It’s really not that difficult to find non-GMO food.