Here are the results of a survey on food policy. It’s revealing.
Some things seemed reasonable, others a bit crazy. I thought the idea of a tax on sugared sodas was a good one, but it’s the least popular idea on the list. Almost half the people support a ban on marijuana, which is silly and destructive.
But the one I boggled at was the seventh one down. Mandatory labels on food containing DNA.
80% of those surveyed thought that was a good idea, only slightly less than those demanding mandatory labels on GMO foods. But, but, but, you splutter, that’s basically everything. If it’s food that’s made from organisms, it’s tainted with DNA. I tried to think of what I could buy at the grocery store that might be DNA-free, and I came up with…heavily sugared sodas, maybe? Those cheese products that taste like they’re made from petroleum? Bottled water?
All those lovely things touted as good and healthy for you — fresh fruits and vegetables, for instance, and even those things that might not be so good for you, like bacon — are full of DNA.
Oh, well. I can think of one question that would probably produce even worse responses from an ignorant public.
Should we have mandatory labels on food containing chemicals?
refined table salt should be more or less free of dna, except for the fact it’s often packaged in cardboard boxes, which likely contaminates it.
“DANGER! This product may contain protons, electrons, and/or neutrons. Take all appropriate precautions.”
You beat me to it with the gag about food containing chemicals.
This reminds me of a hilarious label I saw recently. Soy sauce with the label “no msg added.” Soy sauce is one of the biggest natural sources of glumatic acid to begin with, who would think of adding MSG to it?
More on topic of the OP, I’m surprised so many democrats want raw milk banned. Also on transfats: Is there any real evidence that they’re worse for you than naturally saturated fats?
I assume everything is tainted with DNA unless it’s handled in unusual ways. I’ve read that DNA contamination is a problem when researches analyze DNA extracted from fossils. Even the products not derived from plants and animals are handled by humans, in contact with rodents, and surrounded by microbes containing DNA or pieces of DNA. I suspect some DNA is blowing in the wind and swirling in the water. It’s at least plausible that DNA is on every product we encounter in our everyday lives. Great idea for labeling and printing businesses, though.
And what about foods containing molecules? I want to know that!
I’d take bets that if you did a general survey asking whether people thought that foods containing baryonic particles should be banned, you’d get a lot of support.
A ban on di-hydrogen monoxide is long overdue.
@ 4 sugarfrosted
This is why banning raw milk is a good idea: http://www.fda.gov/Food/ResourcesForYou/consumers/ucm079516.htm
The thought that people are so stupid as to not understand that pretty much everything they eat contains DNA — and, in fact, should contain DNA; if you aren’t munching on DNA on a regular basis, there’s something seriously wrong — is appalling. Do we know whether the phrasing of the labels on the bars is actually the phrasing used in the survey? (I wouldn’t be surprised if it was, but it would be nice to think that this is slightly misleading, somehow.)
@8
Beat me to it. On of the most lethal substances on Earth, and more than 90% of that lethal soda everyone’s guzzling.
.
and the soy-sauce minus MSG baffles me too. MSG is extracted from soy. And MSG allergy is mostly psychosomatic. Why so many opposed to MSG baffles me.
” MSG is extracted from soy. And MSG allergy is mostly psychosomatic. Why so many opposed to MSG baffles me.”
Well, I can only guess that you are not allergic to soy. Trust me, it is NOT psychosomatic. I guess it baffles you because it has never affected your life or someone you know. However ignorance is never a good basis for making judgements.
But what about mon-basic glutamic acid?
It really depends on how the DNA got in there….
If you are allergic to MSG, do you have a sensitivity to wheat, which is 30% glutamate? Reality check.
re 12:
No, I am not allergic to soy (which would naturally lead to MSG allergy). My comment is based on an old memory of reading a summary of a clinical study of soy allergy occurrence among those who claim MSG allergy. The conclusion was what I stated: most claims of MSG allergy are fabricated, not actual allergy. I apologize for making that statement without proper documents to cite. Sorry to derail another’s comment about MSG-free soy sauce.
sugarfrosted wrote:
while most of the raw foods crowd may be likely to vote democrat, that doesn’t mean all or even most democrat voters are raw foods idiots. and unless you’re making cheese, there aren’t many good reasons to use raw milk over the pasteurized kind.
I mean, I guess I’m in favor of mandatory labels on foods containing DNA, in that I’m generally in favor of labels on foods…
@Robro #5
Maybe a label for those of us who’ve seen Soylent Green too many times, something like “This product contains no human DNA.” Though considering that nearly every type of food is still handled by people–at least until we get a robot army up and running, like in I, Robot–something like “This product contains no added human DNA.” will do.
Of course the cynic in me still suspects there are weirdo food woo-meisters out there that would (secretly) start resorting to cannibalism if they believed it was the new of the month.
Linus Van Pelt’s take on it:
http://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/2013/04/04
sugarfrosted
Because when the false health scare around MSG started it was Chinese restaurants that were targeted (even though other places like McDonald’s and grocery store items included it) so now people worry all Chinese (and Asian food because American’s are stupid fucking racists) food contain it. Not just that it’s bad for you, but the MSG makes you addicted to their food. Like it’s nicotine or caffeine.
A social justice perspective
From Wiki:
Here’s a more thorough account with a look at how unami is becoming hip via The Angry Asian Man.
Just can’t please people. First they want Organic Food. Now they want food with no DNA. There’s just no pleasing them.
Going back to my diet of inorganic salt water.
I grew up on raw milk because I lived on a dairy farm, but the milk was always of immediate freshness, our dairy was rated Grade A, and the milk didn’t have to travel to get to the consumer. Raw milk cannot be a consumer product without rigorous safety standards.
Baking soda. Sal ammonium. Gold leaf.
Trans fats are far worse for you than saturated fats. The National Academy of Sciences has concluded that there is no safe level of trans fat consumption. What’s really annoying is that they have no real purpose in food. They are easier to ship and handle but taste the same and provide no benefit to the consumer.
sugarfrosted asked: “Also on transfats: Is there any real evidence that they’re worse for you than naturally saturated fats?”
J AOAC Int. 2009 v92(5):1250-7.
Consumption and health effects of trans fatty acids: a review.
Teegala SM1, Willett WC, Mozaffarian D.
a snippet from the abstract should point you towards the right conclusion: “Consistent evidence from prospective observational studies of habitual TFA consumption and retrospective observational studies using TFA biomarkers indicates that TFA consumption increases risk of clinical coronary heart disease (CHD). Based on the adverse effects of risk factors and consistent relationships with clinical endpoints, the evidence that TFA consumption increases CHD risk is convincing.”
@ 12 jeanettecorlett-black
It is almost impossible to be allergic to MSG because:
1) All MSG becomes sodium ion and glutamate / glutamic acid in food.
2) Humans synthesize glutamic acid everywhere throughout their body, therefore, if their immune system recognized it as allergen, they would be allergic to themselves and having so strong auto-immune disease throughout their life that they would not even be born. (Before you say anything about chirality, i.e. L- and D-glutamic acid, see 3) and 4) below.)
3) Glutamic acid also exists in the digested product of almost everything with protein. And there are significant (about 5% of all glutamic acids) D- isomers in almost every food. Therefore, if some people are allergic to D-glutamic acid, they must have been eating a very limited diet for their lives (for example, no poultry products at all) and MSG would be the least thing they should be worrying about.
4) D-glutamic acid is tasteless and there are known inexpensive methods to avoid producing it, or separate and convert it to L- under industrial production. Obviously corporations don’t want to waste much source materials as useless components in their final product. Actually MSG has less D-glutamic acid than a lot of “naturally flavored foods” (fermented or whatsoever) because of this very reason.
5) Although too much sodium is bad, no one should be allergic to sodium either. And salt is more likely to be the culprit.
The products that we buy today
Are often full of DNA—
Consumers must be made aware!
But then may buy them… if they dare!
But surely, though, we need not panic;
At least not when the stuff’s organic
Or natural, which must be good–
When people speak of processed food!
Consumers, though, won’t act as fools,
Unless their food has… molecules!
http://freethoughtblogs.com/cuttlefish/2015/01/17/whats-in-your-food/
Oy, raw milk. My mother claims to have a weak immune system. (If anything, she has an overactive one.) She also decided a while ago it would be a good idea to start getting raw milk. I could not convince her that if she really did have a weak immune system, drinking raw milk was about the last change she should make to her diet.
Also, we have way too much of what I call “smug food” in Seattle, where the marketing and labeling is completely designed around making you feel smug about what you’re eating rather than actually benefiting your health.
I hope this survey is skewed in some way that would allow a more generous interpretation, but on its face it appear we are a nation of short-bus riders. And that is very, very troubling.
lorn
As is your “short-bus” ablist bullshit. Fuck off with that.
I blame Twilight. By feeding primarily on DNA-free red blood cells, Edward and his sparkly friends have misled America’s youth into craving a hedonistic, nucleotide-free lifestyle.
honestly, my first thought is “They don’t mean deoxyribonucleic acid. There is some other food additive that shares an acronym I’m just not aware of.”
I actually checked wikipedia’s disambiguation page to be sure.
DNA, DDT… anything beginning with a D has got to be trouble.
DNA is Douglas Noel Adams initials.
What fools these mortals be!
The thing about DNA is that it’s a “science” word, just like chemical is. And since they’re “science” words, by extension they mean artificial or unnatural to people who have a poor understanding of what those terms mean. I suspect a lot of people don’t realise that the DNA being tested in a DNA test comes from the specific person or creature being tested, and isn’t some sort of chemical created by scientists. Not that this always applies with health and food concepts. Just look how people treat honey and sugar, with sugar being seen somehow as tainted compared to honey.
I like Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’s take on this topic.
Jonathan Potter wrote:
you know, i understand that it’s even used as an industrial solvent. do we really want something like that in our food?
Questions like the DNA question – ones that are “not even wrong” – are often tossed into polls as a way of determining the ignorance level of a given pool of pollees.
As for raw milk: I knew someone who grew up on a farm and as a teen drank milk straight from the teat – that is, until he got listeria. He was lucky, he was only sick for a month.
The problem is that cows’ pee and poop chutes and milk glands sit right next to each other, and unless you stick a cow in diapers that you change hourly or put a hose attachment on her butt, she’s going to be getting (literal) crap all over her udder – if not directly from her bowels, then indirectly from her tail.
1. The complaint I’ve herad from many people including myself is that high levels lead to, well fast pooping.
2. I’m opposed to added MSG (or DSG) is because it indicates a low quality product. It means that instead of using quality ingredients to give it flavour, they use cheap stuff and just add MSG.
How about a lable to the effect: “May contain nuclear particles”?
I would prefer my apples to not be labelled at all. Not enough nutrients and they stick to your tongue.
You know, folks, it’s all funny, but be aware that to a large degree you’Re making fun of people who did have the chance to get a decent education. You’re laughing at them for being poor and not knowing better.
@Giliell 43
How does that follow? Those ignorances are prevalent regardless of socioeconomic or educational level. People who were handed a great education and every other privilege have these same ignorances. Lack of inquisitiveness is epidemic.
Grewgills
You really need to show some evidence that people with a college degree are afraid of DNA in their food to the same degree people without a highschool degree.
Can anyone find information on exactly how this survey was done? The “technical information” (direct pdf link) says:
But what does that mean, exactly? Do they have a pool of members that they send the surveys to, ensuring a representative distribution? Or do they just allow whoever drops by to take the survey and then weight the answers afterwards?
I’ve poked around on the site a bit, but I can’t seem to find a better description.
I propose a much simpler labelling scheme:
A big sticker with three boxes on it saying Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. Put the label on the food, put a big tick mark in each appropriate box and you’re ready to put your product on the shelves. This offers significant advantages to both the consumers and producers, as well als legislators and monitoring agencies.
– It’s easy to check; no more browsing endless lists of chemicals for the one thing you’re looking for
– It’s easy to understand; who has time to keep track of all those evil chemicals?
– It’s easy to enforce and test; “Why is this sausage so crunchy? Is that olivine I’m tasting?”
If you don’t like to eat stuff that has been modified by humans at some point in history, or food that contains DNA, or whatever else makes you hide under your bed at night, you can just stick to the mineral group to ensure you’re save from all that. Maybe. Well, no. But it’s a start, yes?
Stupid things believed by educated people:
–vaccines are worse than the diseases they prevent
–unidentified “toxins” cause disease (my Mom, a PhD, believes this…sigh)
–global warming isn’t occurring / isn’t anthropogenic
–fracking is a good idea
–God exists
I could go on and on, but really, there is no causal link between being under-educated and tendency to believe in stupid things.
Some of the smartest, canniest people I know never went to college. Implying that only under-educated people would believe that food needs a warning label against DNA is actually an insult to them.
Antibiotics in the feed aren’t even mentioned.
@Giliell 45
It might not be at exactly the same level, but it is very prevalent. It’s over 80% of the population, so it certainly isn’t limited to the poor. Anecdotally, I have worked at high schools and universities and have seen that level of misunderstanding common in both (non-science) faculty and students. We do educationally fail our poor, but when 80% of people don’t get it there is considerably more to it than poverty.
Massively so. Touch it and sequence yourself, or your turkey sandwich.
Stupidity has nothing to do with this. This is ignorance – to blame on the school system.
Or indeed “isn’t occurring and is occurring but isn’t anthropogenic” at the same time.
I fear it strongly depends on what their college degree is in.
re Doug Hudson @48:
Sorry to derail on “toxins”. My elderly mother’s kidneys failed (i.e. functionality reduced to <20% of normal) recently, and we had to convince her to begin dialysis; as a temporary measure, to allow her kidneys to heal and return to their job of cleaning the toxins from her blood that is causing all her current “confusions”. She kept blaming the confusions on the dialysis itself. This did not work out well. It kept reminding me of a recent online article about the scam of beverages claiming to “detoxify”. By consuming this liquid will remove toxins from your body. The article pointed out that the liver and kidneys do that and these beverages do not enhance the function of the liver and kidneys at all (and actually increase the load on them). And the second point being, the toxins are not ingested separately but are the products of your own cells digesting the food you eat, and that’s why there are organs to remove the toxins.
– “Vaccines are toxins.” … wrong, wrong, wrong. [this will send me off the rails (of this derail), so I’ll stop here]
Where they got this degree also matters, obviously. A sciencey degree from Creationist Clown College™ probably won’t help, for example. And yes, economically-privileged people do waste lots of money on that kind of thing, at least here in the US. Or they go to a “real” college and waste their time there, thinking they’ve played it “smart” without doing much work at all, when someone hands them a piece of paper at the end which supposedly guarantees them a high-paying job. In Murrica, gettin’ teh jarbs is what it’s all about.
Of course, the stupid are generally culturally disadvantaged in some other ways as well, since stupidity often doesn’t just happen in people spontaneously and independently; it generally gets transmitted from one person to another like a cultural version of an STD. So ultimately there’s somebody else you could also blame, for causing them to think this or that particular piece of garbage. However, that’s not a reason to avoid criticizing or even ridiculing their ideas mercilessly. That’s just the sort of cultural pressure you can use to fight back against a fucked up piece of culture which ought to go away. Or you can play nice and try to coddle them out of it, if you feel like spending your time on that. Either one might work.
I think it’s technically Kreationist Klown Kollege™. I forgot that you also don’t need to learn spelling or pretty much anything about language. When you become a CEO, you can hire
nerdsExperts™ to do it for you.@phoenixwoman
That is why udders have to be carefully washed and dried before milking (I recall my grandmother using water & soap, but nowadays you can buy “professional” detergents). It is not that different than washing vegetables grown in the garden; after all, some animals might have peed or pooped or them.
I would like to suggest a ban on food containing carbon. I tell you its an addiction. Go to any restaurant and you will see people getting their fix on food containing carbon. I think it is like an opium den but with food.
My kids grew up drinking raw milk. The cows’ udders are washed/cleaned with a disinfectant before milking. The milking gear in the barn is kept scrupulously clean and sterile. Some people in the extended family have been drinking it for 70 years without incident. In my opinion it tastes better than the whole milk in the store. Pasteurization does affect the flavour, and the butterfat content is higher in raw milk which also has an effect. I wish we could buy some of the lovely raw milk cheeses that I’ve eaten in Europe. They can’t be sold here.
And the DNA question in that survey had to be the “ignorance test”. Sheesh.
Of course they did not learn about DNA at school. That could have led to them finding out about evolution and where babies come from.
Giliell (#43)
Nah, the way this food woo is sold to people, it’s like a religion. It lets otherwise educated people compartmentalize. Or it encourages them to think that because they’re relatively educated they’re making rational eating choices. Heck, think of Linus Pauling—he won a Nobel Prize in chemistry and still fell for vitamin magic.
Without legal/regulatory/labeling/ethical barriers, I suspect that brownies which contain marijuana would strongly outsell brownies which don’t.
Has anybody published analyses of snack/sweet food sales in Colorado and/or Washington lately?
@39, phoenixwoman
Actually, it just dawned on me: the presentation indicates that there was no “I don’t know” or “I have no opinion” (or other not-yes-or-no) choice offered to people taking the survey. That’s… actually kind of insidious, and goes a long way towards explaining the result. Were I taking the survey, I would actually interpret a question phrased that way as being a sign of ignorance on the part of the people asking the question, and assume it was actually intended to be about GMOs. And since I am opposed to GMOs (the arguments for them are uniformly either disingenuous or make assumptions which are already known to be false) I would be strongly tempted to answer “wrongly”.
When I saw that DNA question in the list I was thinking to myself “please god tell me that ‘DNA’ is short for some obscure random thing in the food world”. Nope, no such luck. Just ignorance.
If only they would have allowed one to fill in a blank space after the answer, for the reason behind the answer. “Should foods have a label, if it has DNA in it?”: No, then every food would need that label, unduly increasing the cost of all food.”
But that would be difficult to summarize so neatly. They just asked it to determine the population’s ignorance of food being living matter, all of which requires DNA.
Maybe they wanted to sort the total results by who answered [Yes], to that question, vs who answered [No].
I know I’m being a bit of a pedant on this point, but as regards the multiple quips about mandatory labeling of foods for “chemicals”…we already do that on some levels. The FDA basically requires this right now (though mostly in a general sense) on both ingredients labels and nutritional information labels for packaged foods.
I’m reasonably certain that they mean food with novel DNA spliced into it, like strawberries with cold-water fish protein spliced in to increase frost resistance. So that would require a label to read, I dunno, “Berry with fish DNA?” But I couldn’t find anything that clarified what they actually asked people.
@ChristinaRose
The problem with that interpretation is the next item on the list, “Mandatory labels on foods produced with genetic engineering”
@19 HolyPinkUnicorn
I have a feeling this might actually be what’s meant in this survey, although they provide no detail whatsoever in the report about the survey questions. People are concerned, for various good and terrible reasons, about taking genes from one animal species and introducing them into another animal species or, as vegans and vegetarians would find very troublesome, into plant foods. A lot of people don’t want a tomato that was grown with a protein taken from an animal. Is this reasonable or rational? Not really, but it’s the reality of people who take the food rules they set for themselves very seriously. People are very concerned with avoiding real or imagined or ‘ritual’ contamination: Some individuals don’t like the servings of food on their plate touching each other and some whole religious sects don’t like certain foods touching each other or eaten at the same time or even eaten at separate times but from the same set of dishes.
I, for one, am still waiting on the Banana Meat Tree so seductively described in a story by John Varley: A wildly popular plant that bears fruit with the flavour and texture of pig, owing to the cleverness of the genetic engineer who creates it using bits of her own DNA.
I think, for the most part, that bans on anything are dangerous. There are reasons to ban certain substances (lead in paint for instance), but I find those cases to be few and far between. I think labeling is the better idea. It allows people to make decisions for themselves with full informed consent. For instance, a ban on the sale of marijuana is just as stupid as a ban on the sale of foods with trans fats (milk has trans fats for crying out loud, as do donuts, butter, and most baked goods). If people want to know that their food contains DNA, then I don’t care. It won’t affect my buying decisions, but at least people might learn something about biology.
Seeing as how all plant matter and meat contain DNA, what is your point? It was a stupid question.
Can’t be sold in Europe or most of it either.
Worse: he invented it. He came up with the idea that taking ludicrous amounts of vitamin C – eating the white powder with a spoon – protects you against all and sundry.
…if, indeed, they are informed in the first place. This survey shows that 80.44 % of them (in Oklahoma or something?) are not.
Labeling doesn’t help you when you have no idea what the label says!
In what amounts?
2.7% of the total fatty acids. ” The main trans 18:1 isomer is vaccenic acid (VA), (18:1, 11t), but trans double bounds in position 4–16 is also observed in low concentrations in milk fat (5).”
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls,
Many people don’t know that. Putting labels on food that let them know that may, in fact, help to educate a few people out there.
David Marjanović,
I see labeling as an effort to help inform people. There will never be a fix for people who don’t care or who want to believe whatever already fits in with their preconceptions. However, there are a lot of people out there who will go “really?” when they read labels and learn from it. It can only help to have more information out there. The more transparent the food industry is, the better off people will be. If some people choose to remain in an opaque world, there isn’t much to do about it, but we can at least give information to the people who want it.
caseyrock
Isn’t that the idea behind the current labeling? I wish I could get behind this idea but people already don’t understand the plain labels we have, and I’m worried additional labeling would just fuel freak outs. Of course, I’m in the poor section so what goes in and out of fashion for the more privileged usually ends up fucking the poor over worse and we’re already stuck eating whatever crap we can. The last thing I’d need is more cheap food suddenly becoming hip or forboden, as if there isn’t enough judgement and condemnation of the poor and welfare recipients.
It happened again just a couple days ago where a nosy older lady stood right by the card machine as I was checking out and wouldn’t move. So she saw my EBT (food stamps) card and even my pin, I’m sure since she was close enough to use the damn thing herself. It was the first time I wasn’t cussed or yelled at for it though. She thanked me for being responsible, using ad matching and buying food for my daughter. Then she went on ranting about other welfare users buying scallops then the cashier and her husband got in on the act. It made me feel worse than assholes that cuss me out and insult me in front of my daughter.
People like that terrify me. Those fuckers have the power and I have no control over the market, stuck picking up their scraps and leavings. Education needs to come first otherwise we’ll just have more “GMO’s are creating mutant corn that’ll kill us!” bullshit, business will be forced to accommodate and no one will give a fuck how other people are screwed. And poor people are always screwed when this shit happens.
Well, the DNA label would be easy to implement, anyway. Just a little double helix icon stuck on almost everything. Well, everything, because DNA tends to contaminate stuff.
WARNING: The enclosed food products may contain trace amounts of matter, and may have been produced in a facility which uses energy.
I never understood organic salt. I mean it’s still sodium chloride right? Do they neglect to wash/clean/filter it for that extra sea bacterial taste? Leave a bit of sand and seaweed in it? No? Lack of pesticides? It’s just salt without iodine, so it’s less healthy salt for the general public.