• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1250 0

and the higher content of solids in transgenic tomatoes meant that turning them into sauce and paste would be more efficient and less costly. European biotechnology companies that were genetically engineering their own tomatoes understood that such price advantages could be passed along to consumers. In the halcyon preprotest days of 1996, the British company Zeneca, which had obtained FDA approval for transgenic tomatoes the previous year, began to use them in tomato paste. The British grocery chain Sainsbury sold the paste with the prominent label shown in figure 23: MADE WITH GENETICALLY MODIFIED TOMATOES. Sainsbury and other retailers knew their customers. Before putting the labeled paste on its supermarket shelves in January 1998, Safeway, for example, spent 15 months consulting with consumer groups, conducting focus-group research, and preparing advertising materials. Its promotional materials, like those for Calgene’s Flavr Savr, reflected the company’s certainty that consumers would accept the product.

Scientists have now identified the gene that makes tomatoes turn soft during ripening, and they’ve also found a way of switching the gene off. This means that the tomatoes can be left to ripen on the plant until they have their full flavour and colour. . . . [They] remain firm after harvesting . . . with reduced wastage. As less tomatoes go to waste, best use is made of water, a scarce commodity in California where the tomatoes are grown. In addition, as the tomatoes contain less water, less energy is used during processing. Together, these improvements mean that Safeway’s tomato puree, made from genetically modified tomatoes, is available at a reduced price.51

FIGURE 23. British grocery chains sold genetically modified tomato paste labeled as such in 1998. As public opposition to such foods increased, retailers instituted GM-free policies and refused to stock products made with transgenic ingredients.

By mid-1998, Sainsbury’s had sold about 1 million units of the tomato paste, and a spokesman for Safeway said that it and Sainsbury’s “are adamant that their clearly labelled GM tomato purees have consistently out-performed the non-GM alternative.” He also said that 99% of people who bought the “GM” puree were aware of its origins.52 This last figure hardly seems credible, even for the British population, especially because one result of the publicity generated by Dr. Pusztai’s potato lectin research (discussed in chapter 6) was to surprise the public with the revelation that supermarkets were full of genetically modified foods.

The furor over that revelation and the subsequent events in the Pusztai affair led to consumer protests and a drop in sales of the transgenic paste. Retailers had plenty of other foods to sell and saw little reason to defend controversial items. Seven supermarket chains, Sainsbury’s among them, announced that they no longer intended to sell genetically modified foods, and planned to take “reasonable steps” to ensure that the products did not contain such ingredients.53 In this instance, the political implications of a safety issue caused a successful and cheaper product to be removed from the market. In the next chapter, we will examine how antibiotechnology advocates accomplished such GM-free policies. In the meantime, let’s leave the science-based approach of the FDA and consider a particularly political aspect of the EPA’s regulatory approach: how one of its regulatory targets, plant-pesticides, instead came to be called by a euphemism, plant-incorporated protectants.

THE EPA’S EUPHEMISM-BASED APPROACH

The FDA is not the only agency that has to deal with questions of labeling; the EPA has its own set of labeling problems related to transgenic foods. The Coordinated Framework makes the USDA and the EPA the primary agencies for deciding whether transgenic plants are safe to grow in fields. Under the framework’s curious division of responsibility, the USDA regulates herbicide-resistant plants such as those that are Roundup Ready, but the EPA regulates pesticides and, therefore, Roundup