Friday, September 19, 2008

Grab your torch and pitchfork!

Apparently we need to form a mob and march on the castle of Dr. Frankenchicken.

I just found out that the FDA is going to start considering proposals to sell genetically engineered animals as food. Here's an AP article from Thursday, Sept 18th.

Now, I'm not totally against people raising frankencows if they want to. But if they do, and they want to sell them as food, they should be required to label their frankenbeef as such. As of now, the FDA has no plans to require genetically modified meat to be labeled in any way, unless it makes some health claim, like, say, low-cholesterol T-bone steak. If they don't claim a health benefit, they don't have to label it as genetically modified.

I don't know about you, but I want to be able to decide for myself whether I eat a frankenburger or not, and I can't do that if the meat isn't labeled. We can't even trust the government to allow the non-GM meat producers to label their meat as franken-free. Remember the legal battles about whether dairies could label their milk as hormone-free?

So what do we do about it? Well, you can get a draft of the proposed rules for frankenmeat here. Scroll down to the line that says
Draft Guidance for Industry #187 - Regulation of Genetically Engineered Animals Containing Heritable rDNA Constructs | html | pdf |
and click on the format you like best to get a copy of the proposed rules. Once you've read them, you can go to this site and type "Docket FDA-2008-D-0394" in the search field. When the document comes up, click the link that says "Send a Comment or Submission." A page will appear with a bunch of blank fields for you to fill in. Whatever else you may have to say about frankencritters being sold as food, I hope you'll tell the FDA that any genetically modified animal product sold as food must be clearly and prominently labeled as genetically modified meat.

Of course, you can easily avoid GM meat by raising your own, buying all your meat directly from the farmer, or ordering it from La Vida Local.