ARTICLE: Flu and fish-mato
The following is an excerpt of a blog post at Medium.com by blogger and scientist Mary Mangan, Ph.D., about the misconception that there are fish genes inserted into tomatoes.
Besides celebrities, another group that has big megaphones are companies with marketing budgets. Just recently Stonyfield created a campaign with atrocious misinformation spewed by cute children. Natalie Newell — creator of a documentary that gathered Science Moms to help get quality information to parents — was the first to draw attention to this terrible nonsense.
It was also covered by numerous science communicators — a SciMom, a number of scientists, farmers, a food safety group, food press, and a doctor, among others. [ed. note: so did GMO Answers] (But we don’t exactly have marketing budgets — just our little blogs and niche media.) Not only was Stonyfield peddling bad information, they were silencing critics by deleting their comments and calling them names. Truly a bizarre marking strategy.
But as wrong and stupid as that was, what really bothers me about Stonyfield’s nonsense is the downstream consequences of their false claims. The fish-mato particularly triggered me. I was recalling a story by Joe Schwarcz about a guy who came to one of his events: “There are No Fish Genes in Tomatoes”
“If genetically modified foods were properly labeled, I could still eat tomatoes,” was the angry remark. I was puzzled by this, but the gentleman went on to clarify. “I have a fish allergy,” he said, “and I have no way of knowing which tomatoes have been modified with fish genes, so I just don’t eat any tomato products.”
What happened here? A guy was misled by the claims of the anti-GMO folks and has been avoiding a healthy food for years — based on a lie. This is one case, but we hear this all the time from the food-fearful that are carrying a lot of food myths around.
The other thing that happens as a result of the lies is that it creates unfounded resistance to GMOs. I have a peanut allergy, and for decades I’ve dreamed of the chance to eat a Reese’s peanut butter cup, or the local favorite food — the Fluffernutter. I have been following the work on eliminating the peanut allergy proteins for years, hoping to be able to test this out. This recent piece made me very happy: This Food Scientist Wants to Save Lives With a Hypoallergenic Peanut. But people who are lying about GMOs are making products with health benefits difficult to commercialize.
To read the entire blog post, please visit Medium.
