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GMO and Soda Votes

I have been keeping an eye on several ballot initiatives in yesterday's election.  Not all results are finalized, but here's what we know so far:

In Colorado, mandatory GMO labeling was defeated by a wide margin, 66% to 34%, with 93% of precincts reporting.

In Oregon, mandatory GMO labeling is very close and still up in the air.  With 88% of the votes counted, the "No's" are ahead by about 26,000 votes (659,404 to 633,132), giving the "No's" a current 51% to 49% margin. 

A vote in Maui, HI to ban cultivation of GMOs is too close to call

Berkeley, CA passed a soda tax (75% in favor vs. 25% opposed)

The majority of voters in San Francisco, CA favored a soda tax (55% in favor), but the initiative required a 2/3 majority to pass. Thus, the soda tax failed in San Francisco.  

Why haven't GMOs lived up to their promise?

“next time you hear someone say GMOs haven’t lived up to their potential, much less contribute to food security, remember the biotech crops and foods that never made it to market, and how Kimbrell [the founder and executive director of the Center for Food Safety, which for years has spearheaded opposition to biotechnology] and his fellow anti-GMO activists proudly take ownership of that.”

The evidence?  The anti-GMO activist presents it himself at a recent anti-technology conference in New York:

““We stopped GMO potatoes, we stopped GMO wheat, we stopped genetically modified rice, and we stopped genetically modified salmon,” he said. (The last one has been in regulatory limbo for over a decade.) It’s impossible to quantify how much credit biotech opponents should receive for the failed commercialization of the aforementioned GMOs.”

Anti-biotechnology activists complain biotechnology hasn't lived up to its promise all the while fighting the approval of the most promising biotechnologies.

When chefs meet geneticists

“One would think that the people who create new foods and the people who whip up new ways of enjoying them would have long been partners. But cooperation between plant breeders and chefs is historically rare; traditionally, breeders stick to the field and chefs to the kitchen, opposite ends of an increasingly long and complicated food chain. Lane Selman, an agricultural researcher at Oregon State University (OSU) and the emcee of the Portland feast, wants to change that. She recently founded the Culinary Breeding Network (CBN), a first-of-its-kind organization that fosters collaboration between cooks, farmers, plant breeders, and seed growers. Breeders are often “making a lot of the decisions alone, guessing what the consumer, chef, or institutional kitchen cook needs and wants from their produce,” Selman explains. She has chefs tour breeding plots to “witness diversity with their own eyes, hands, and mouths” and give breeders direct feedback. It’s a kind of immediate and powerful synergy that just makes sense: “Breeders bring knowledge of stored seeds and wild relatives. Chefs know how to evaluate flavor much better than we do.” Case in point: Mazourek was microwaving squash for taste tests until a chef educated him in proper roasting techniques.”

That's from an interesting article in Pacific Standard arguing that fruits and vegetables are about to enter a flavor Renaissance.

Some recent writings

A few pieces I've put out in the last week or two:

1) In Defense of Frankenfoods.  Milken Institute Review.  An excerpt:

“While it is possible to be pro-biotechnology without being pro-Monsanto, such a nuanced position is difficult to maintain in the current atmosphere. It seems that many suffer from what might be called Monsanto Derangement Syndrome, buying into all sorts of conspiracy theories. Yet genetically engineered foods are no more synonymous with Monsanto than hamburgers are with McDonald’s. When anti-Monsanto became de facto anti-biotechnology, many left-leaning commentators chose to swim with the tide. Thus emerged a (justifiable) belief that many on the left were anti-science on the issue of biotechnology. In the words of journalist Keith Kloor (writing for Slate), opponents of genetically engineered food “are the climate skeptics of the left.” Although there is some truth to this observation, the political reality is more complex.”

2) Consumer Acceptance of Controversial New Food Technologies: Causes and Roots of Controversies with Jutta Roosen and Andrea Bieberstein in Annual Review of Resource Economics. An excerpt: 

“The dread/control framework may partly explain aversion to new food technologies, particularly in our modern society. In most developed countries, only a very small fraction of the population makes a living by farming. That many consumers today have little connection to and knowledge of modern production agriculture means that new practices adopted by farmers are likely to seem foreign, unknown, and—from the consumer’s perspective—uncontrollable (Campbell & Fitzgerald 2001, Gupta et al. 2011). It has been argued that many consumers have a “romantic” notion of farming (Thompson 1993) and that agricultural literacy is “too low” in the population (Pope 1990). Empirical research suggests that agricultural literacy is loweramong urban children than among rural children (Frick et al. 1995). Thus, when consumers become aware of a new technology—e.g., lean, fine-textured beef or Roundup Ready soybeans—it may be interpreted as a signal of dread and of unknown risk, which Slovic (1987) argues is most aversive and prone to
elicit public panic.”

3) New Tool (FooDS) Identifies Consumers' Views on Food Safety with Susan Murray in Choices.  An excerpt:

“Figure 4 plots the FooDS price expectations index for beef, pork, and chicken against the same-month price data from the BLS on ground chuck, all pork chops, and boneless chicken breasts. For the first two meats, the correlations—a statistical measure of association, with 1.00 being a perfect correlation—between price expectations and actual prices are 0.72 and 0.83, showing a high correspondence between consumer expectations and actual prices. The correlation for chicken, however, was only -0.26. This latter result likely arises because actual prices for beef and chicken have trended up over this time period while chicken prices have not. However, consumers do not differentiate much between meat categories in their price expectations; the correlations among price expectations for beef, pork, and chicken are all above 0.89.”