Voice of America: GMO Opponents Take Protest On the Road

Posted: August 19th, 2013 | Filed under: Fishy Apple, Fishy Corn, Fishy Soy, Fishy Sugar Beet, Fishy Tomato, Press, Video | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

GMO Opponents Take Protest On the Road

By Steve Baragona, August 19, 2013

Riding around in a car topped with a giant half-vegetable, half-fish is bound to attract attention.

As Nikolas Schiller drives past the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., pedestrians gawk, kids point, and tourists snap pictures.

An oncoming driver pulls up in a stretch of slow traffic and asks, “What is it?”

Schiller explains it’s a Fishy Food Car and hands the man a card bearing a cartoon that asks, “Are we eating fishy food?”

It’s a visual pun. For opponents of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), there’s something fishy - suspicious - about putting genes from other species into food crops, and they want foods containing GMO ingredients to say so on the label.

Labeling laws

There are no fish genes in the GMOs on the market today, but nearly all of the corn, soybeans, cotton and sugar beets growing in the U.S. contain bacterial genes that help farmers control weeds and insects.

Schiller’s day job is with a D.C.-based public relations firm. But this summer his fishy apple car will join the fishy corn, soybean, sugar beet and tomato cars driving cross-country to Washington State, where a GMO labeling law is on the ballot this fall.

Momentum is behind them. Labeling laws were approved in Connecticut and Maine earlier this year.

Labeling everything containing a GMO ingredient would take a lot of ink. They’re in 80 percent of the foods on supermarket shelves, according to the Grocery Manufacturers Association, especially anything processed, in a bottle, box or bag.

Novel food

But are they bad for you? Schiller acknowledges that the only evidence of harm from GMOs is anecdotal, but he’s suspicious.

“This is a novel food. Our grandparents and previous generations didn’t eat this,” he said. “And now all of a sudden we’re seeing higher incidences of food and health issues. And so if [GMO makers] are saying, ‘Oh, everything’s safe,’ but nothing’s labeled, we really can’t trace the safety.”

Health authorities from the U.S. Institute of Medicine to the World Health Organization have said there’s nothing to fear from GMOs.

And the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says there is no substantive difference between GMO and conventional ingredients, so it can’t require labels.

On the other hand, products without GMOs may say so on the label, and these are now some of the hottest items in the supermarket. Last year, sales of certified-organic products grew 7.4 percent, twice the rate of the food sector as a whole. And foods with the “Non-GMO Verified” seal passed $1 billion in sales in 2011.

‘We should’ve been talking about this’

This has not gone unnoticed by the biotech industry.

This summer, the industry-sponsored Council for Biotechnology Information made an unusual, if understated, admission.

“We recognize we haven’t done the best job communicating about GMOs,” Executive Director Cathy Enright said in a press release.

She was more frank in person.

“We should’ve been talking about this for two decades,” she said, adding that in the last few years in particular, social media have taken opposition to GMOs to a new level. “We haven’t even been near social media.”

Transparency

But for opponents like Schiller, it’s not about a failure to communicate. For one thing, he wants to see the results of safety tests the companies submitted to the FDA.

“And they can say, ‘This is proprietary information. We’ve done our testing. We don’t have to disclose to the public,’” he said. “Anytime you have a veil over something, people are going to want transparency. People are going to want sunshine. And as long as you withhold that, people are gonna think, ‘This is kinda fishy.’”

Sunshine might be about to break through. For the first time, Enright said, the companies’ testing data will be available online at a new website: GMOAnswers.com.

“It’s gonna be technical,” she said. “But we’ve been asked, ‘Show us your data.’”

It’s part of a new pledge of openness and dialogue. Enright said the big seed companies will be opening their doors for people to come and see what they do. There will be dinners where supporters and opponents can sit down and talk. She said a panel of volunteers will be answering any questions the public might have.

“We believe that if people have the information at hand, that it won’t feel fishy; that they’ll be more comfortable with this technology,” she said.

But with a growing number of states considering GMO labeling laws, the industry has a lot of catching up to do.

Source: Voice of America

Washington Post: Mobile Protest Art Draws Gawkers in D.C.

Posted: June 12th, 2013 | Filed under: Fishy Apple, Fishy Soy, Press | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post

Something fishy in D.C.: Cartop protest art, minus the protest, becomes a spectacle

By Robert Samuels

What is that thing?

Parked near the U Street Metro station is a junky Ford Escort with a fiberglass whatchamacallit on top. The red structure is shaped like an apple, except for the fins jutting from its sides. It has googly eyes, a goofy smile and a face more Muppet than man.

For weeks, it has befuddled neighbors. No one knows who owns it. No one knows what it means. And yet, it’s been spotted throughout Northwest. It has been parked at the new Costco. It has made weekend revelers in Adams Morgan question their sobriety.

“I’ve been trying to figure it out for days,’’ said a man walking near the 1800 block of Vermont Avenue. Then he sighted a second structure, this one atop a Volvo. Same googly eyes, but shaped like a green bean — with fins.

A breakthrough came Tuesday morning when 32-year-old Rica Madrid was seen getting into the car with the finned green thing. Its name is “Soyna,” modeled after a soybean, Madrid said. She pointed to the apple atop the Escort: “That is Goldie.’’

Madrid and her co-workers at Mintwood Media Collective (“Communication Strategies for Social Change”) helped create the two structures to convey the message that food sprayed with toxic chemicals is, in a word, “fishy.” Hence, the fins.

The two vehicles will be part of a caravan of activists that will depart in August on a coast-to-coast trip to Seattle, making stops along the way to lobby for legislation to label genetically modified food.

Right now, the connection between the cartoonish cartop produce and the cause is a little confusing. Mock labels will be added to explain it all, Madrid admits.

Meanwhile, 300-pound structures can’t fit inside rowhouses, so Madrid and her colleagues mounted them on the cars early.

These are the toils of creating protest art. It’s hardly an unusual activity in Washington, a magnet for protesters of all sorts. But it’s jarring to see the art without the context, as Madrid and her colleagues use the cars for routine daily errands — going to work, picking people up from the airport and bulk-buying groceries.

Nikolas Schiller, 32, who drives Goldie the Apple, doesn’t mind the baffled stares. No one fully understands what’s going in their food anymore either, he says.

“That [confusion] is kind of what we’re going for,” he said.

The kids smile when they see Goldie the Apple, because Goldie the Apple is smiling at them. It’s not unusual for someone to come up to Schiller or Madrid during lunchtime, asking whether the cars are new food trucks.

As Madrid climbed into the Volvo to head to work from Shaw, a neighbor walking with her 3-year-old approached:

“What is this all about?” Sandrea Ballestero asked. “We never see you!”

“We are protesting GMOs,” she said, using the acronym for genetically modified organisms.

“Do you have a Web site?”

They do, but it’s not ready yet.

Madrid drove past the suit-and-tie set downtown, some of whom, caught up in their smartphones, paid the car no mind. A man in a blue oxford shirt and khakis pulled out his smartphone for a quick pic. A window-washer scaling the low floors of a building saw the large soybean in the reflection of the windows and cheered. A baby in a stroller near Farragut Square looked into those googly eyes and started to bawl.

Occasionally, someone will ask what she’s doing, and she’ll tell them about genetically modified food. Sometimes the person will start sharing what he or she knows about the history of hybridization or genetic engineering or selective breeding — pretty sophisticated stuff that reminds Madrid that driving the vehicle has a serious purpose.

“Some people are really knowledgeable about the subject,’’ Madrid said. “You just have to be ready for people to debate you. I mean, this is Washington.”

Source: The Washington Post