From: Alfio Puglisi (puglisi@arcetri.astro.it)
Date: Tue Jun 24 2003 - 10:10:26 MDT
On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, John K Clark wrote:
> > The "forcing" of labels
>
>Why the quotation marks? You're saying if I sell a can of peas with a
>label you don't like you will put me in jail, that sounds like forcing to
>me.
You are right. I'm advocating for more information for the consumer, using
government force. Maybe in a libertarian world it would be handled
differently. Now, in Europe and US, it seems to me the only way.
> >is to prevent a bigger, messier sequence of events: companies
>selling
>foods without labels,
>
>It's really not that complicated, if you don't like food without labels
>then don't buy food without labels.
You seem to stumble on a contradiction here: on one hand, you think
that people protesting GM are protesting the wrong thing (because they are
not informed, stupid, etc). On the other hand, you trust their judgment in
buying the right things... What i think is that, without proper
information, people often make the WRONG choice. And what's worse, they
often have no way to know that they did.
> >people (as it was suggested) setting up labs for analyzing food and
> >publishing reports
>
>What's wrong with that?
Nothing, but it just feels wasteful to go to such great lengths just to
see if that red fluid in a bottle is orange juice or colored water.
> > companies suing those labs for misleading information,
>
>What's wrong with that? Fraud should be punished and I don't see why
>mandatory labeling laws will lead to less fraud or fewer lawsuits.
That was worded wrongly. What I meant to say is "companies suing those
labs not to make public that information", and it seems to me a very
possible outcome.
And to answer your statement, I think that mandatory labeling would
actually lead to less fraud and lawsuits. It's one thing to sell something
without revealing its composition. It's another thing to deliberately lie
on the food label. One would think twice before doing that.
>And would one of those "other ways" be the astrological sign of the person
>who grew the food along with the GM information? After all, millions of
>people are interested in astrology, far more than in modern genetics, you
>don't see many molecular biology columns in the tabloids but every one of
>them will tell you what will happen when the house of Mars is in Uranus.
Hey, I work in an astronomical observatory. You don't need to lesson me on
astrology :-))
>Protesting something that has never hurt anyone is time and effort spent
>that could have been used to save many thousands, it's a classic case of
>misplaced priorities.
And who are you to tell people what they should protest? If the free
market of ideas brings billions of $ to football players and nothing to
cryonics research, well, that's just free market at work. Judging from
what I read in your post, you should approve those choices.
> > Some years ago, Europe was shocked by the "mad cow" disease.
>
>And mad cow disease had nothing to due with GM foods.
I'm talking about proper food labelling in general, not just GM. The mad
cow incident resulted in better food labelling, and better information for
the consumer. Let's see if the GM war brings along something similar.
Ciao,
Alfio
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