by Dawn Smith-Pfeifer
You know what I hate? Going to the store and trying to find packaged foods that DON’T contain that darn non-GMO butterfly symbol. I’m seeing more and more of it and quite frankly, I don’t want to buy foods that carry the symbol, but sometimes, I have no other choice.
And that makes me cranky.
Like last week. I thought I had found a grab-and-go pouch of freeze-dried fruit (because I really like freeze-dried fruit) that didn’t contain the non-GMO label. I was looking for the butterfly, but didn’t see it, so I purchased the pouch. Actually, I purchased several pouches.
Then, as I was enjoying what I thought was a brand that didn’t buckle to fear-mongering, I looked below the nutrition information on the back. And there it was in relatively small print: Non-GMO.
I don’t want to support the hysteria that is non-GMO marketing. And there is plenty of that. I mean, I can’t type in “How to avoid non-GMO products” in Google or Bing without getting first-page results that are ALL (except one) about how to AVOID GMO products.
How frustrating is that?
It took me until the THIRD page of results to see another pro-GMO article.
I thought search engine algorithms were supposed to reflect back to the searcher news and articles that resemble the searcher’s particular thought process, based on all the tracking search engines do. I am decidedly, non-apologetically pro-GMO. So WHY can’t I get a page full of how-to-avoid non-GMO products in my search engine?
I did come across something, however, that caught my eye and gives me hope. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has filed a petition with the Food and Drug Administration against the non-GMO Project’s “butterfly” campaign.
ITIF claims the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act prohibits labels that are “false or misleading.” Yet, they say “Consumers who see the Non-GMO Project butterfly logo are unavoidably misled on multiple levels. First, they are wrongly led to believe items carrying the label are safer to consume than those that do not. This alone is sufficient to compel FDA to take action.”