How a decade of GMO controversy changed the dialogue about food

Protesters marched through the streets of district Ginza during a World March Against Monsanto in Tokyo on May 21, 2016. Marches and rallies against Monsanto, a biotecnologie company and genetically modified organisms (GMO) food and seeds were held in dozens of countries in a global campaign highlighting the dangers of GMO Food. (Photo by Alessandro Di Ciommo/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“My husband worked at the FDA and he talked about GMOs,” explains Chef Carla Hall, one of the speakers at the December 3, 2019 Food Forever Solutions Summit held at the Gallup building in Washington, D.C. At this daylong discussion about the most pressing issues facing the global food system, Hall was asked why professional chefs tend to prefer organics over GMOs. The former Top Chef contestant recalled her husband’s words: “Carla, it’s not what you think. Don’t be afraid of the food,” she said, before promptly moving on to something else. As the decade of GMO controversy now draws to a close, Hall’s answer feels appropriately anticlimactic. The public, inundated with information, much of it false, is now more than ready to move on.

All stories about GMOs have to begin with an explanation of what these foods are. That’s because, whatever the opposition to these foods, most people still have no clue what it means. The initialism stands for “genetically modified organisms,” but that’s not a particularly clear or helpful category.

Is it food tinkered with by humans? Is it plants engineered to include foreign DNA? Or is the important feature, as the non-GMO Project has argued, manipulation by scientists in a lab? What about gene edited food? What about other breeding techniques like mutagenesis or marker assisted selection? The answer very much depends on just who answers the question.

Initially, GMO referred to plants and animals modified by a breeding technique called transgenesis, a technique in which a living organism is modified with the addition of DNA from another species. GMOs aren’t actually foods or ingredients, but traits designed to change those products for the better—at least, that’s the intention. But the public came to distrust these foods, despite no evidence that they posed a health risk.

There is no single type of GMO. Plants can be modified to resist pests, for example, like the Bt crops modified to include Bacillus thuringiensis, a natural toxin to insects, or disease resistance, as seen in the Rainbow papaya engineered to resist the deadly ringspot virus. Other examples include nutrition boosts as seen in Golden Rice, a breed of rice designed to help prevent vitamin A deficiency. Golden rice, a GMO plagued by controversy and numerous other challenges in the field, was only recently approved for commercialization in the Philippines.

The Roundup Ready trait, a trait bred into soy, corn and cotton plants to allow farmers to spray the glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup for weed prevention without killing the crop itself, quickly became one of the most ubiquitous traits and also the most controversial. Lawsuits alleging negative health impacts from the herbicide could end up costing Bayer, the global conglomerate that purchased Monsanto in 2018, $86.7 million (a reduction from the initial $2 billion jury award).

While the GMO controversy didn’t begin in the last ten years—the anti-GMO movement dates back to the 1970s and the initialism “GMO” was likely coined sometime in the 1980s—the past decade is when the controversy really hit its peak in the United States. Several of the most prominent anti-GM groups, including Just Label It, U.S. Right to Know and the March Against Monsanto, were all founded over the course of the last ten years. At the same time, there were efforts from scientists and science advocacy groups to counteract those efforts and educate the public about GMOs.

It was California’s Proposition 37, a proposal to require labels on GMO-containing foods, that first propelled the debate to widespread national attention in 2012. Though the proposition ultimately failed, the debate surrounding the labeling effort galvanized the anti-GMO movement. GMO opponents pushed for similar legislative labeling efforts in Hawaii, Vermont and Connecticut, but these efforts were all ultimately overruled by the federal labeling law passed in 2016.

Public Law 114-216, the federal regulation empowering the USDA to enact a labeling system for what the law calls bioengineered food, defined as “food that has been genetically engineered in a way that could not be obtained through conventional breeding or found in nature,” was passed by Congress in 2016. While the GMO controversy didn’t end that year, it certainly began its steady departure from the public’s radar.

John Purcell, a plant scientist who worked for decades at Monsanto before the company was bought by Bayer, remembers when the Bt trait was first introduced. “I’m an insect guy,” he explains, which is why Purcell found himself trying to persuade farmers to use seeds in lieu of a separate application of the Bt toxin insecticide.

“In the beginning, I can tell you it was a hard sell,” Purcell recalls. Farmers had a particular way of fighting pests that already worked well for them, he says, so it was a challenge to get them to try something new. Eventually, however, the new seeds won out, an agricultural shift that ultimately resulted in decreased insecticide applications.

Purcell says he’s learned plenty of lessons over this past decade of GMO controversy. Despite the time, money and effort the industry has spent opposing GMO labeling laws, Purcell notes the regulation didn’t doom genetically modified crops as many feared. In fact, the federal labeling law ended up quieting much of the debate, something he and other observers have now come to realize. “Sometimes what you’re fearing to happen, actually, by not doing it, you end up with the same result,” he says. Today, farmers still plant plenty of GMOs, and people still eat them.

The more important shift for Purcell might actually be learning to engage with the other side. The scientist who works on Bayer’s non-GMO fruits and vegetable seed products says he now regularly attends events with chefs and food writers, the kinds of people who tend to have concerns about GMOs that Purcell can now address in person. “It’s just a much more approachable platform to have that conversation,” he explains.

Chef Erik Oberholtzer, the owner of fast casual chain Tender Greens, is one of those chefs, a guy who’s actually changed his mind about GMOs. When he first learned of the controversy as a chef in California during Proposition 37, Oberholtzer set out to avoid all GMO foods entirely. But he soon realized that just wasn’t possible. “They’re in everything,” he says, from sugar to cooking oil to animal feed.

While Oberholtzer says he still has concerns about the herbicide RoundUp, he’s changed his mind about genetically engineered crops themselves, technology he now sees as critical to growing food in the midst of severe climate impacts like drought and flooding. “We’re just moving things faster,” Oberholtzer says, of the GMO breeding methods, adding, “I’m okay with that.”

After the summit, Oberholtzer joined a number of local chefs to prepare dishes featuring ingredients that could be useful for boosting the food supply in this uncertain future, biodiverse ingredients like greenhouse grown amaranth, Blondkopfchen cherry tomatoes and sustainably farmed oysters. The focus wasn’t on GMOs, but on biodiversity.

Marie Haga, Executive Director of Crop Trust, an organization that maintains a seed bank dedicated to preserving biodiverse plants for the future (and the group that also sponsors these dinners), says her organization is more concerned with preservation than taking a position on GMO technology. “It’s fundamentally important to safeguard the diversity of crops,” she stresses, because the usefulness of the trait matters more than how that trait was developed.

Her point echoes an argument often made by plant scientists: judge the GMO by its trait itself, not the fact that it was engineered by scientists, as most modern crops are these days. Have you tried the Cosmic Crisp yet?

After a decade of controversy, genetically engineered foods, including transgenic crops, are alive and well in the food system. New gene edited crops like non-browning potatoes are constantly hitting the market, and techniques that are technically non-GMO like marker assisted selection, which Purcell uses at Bayer, are commonly used to improve and tweak familiar fruits and vegetables, and some not-so-familiar ones like cotton candy grapes.

High-yielding GMO crops are an important solution for feeding the world, according to researchers at the World Resources Institute, but researchers also say these crops aren’t enough to satisfy the complex needs of the future food system. We also need to do things like lower greenhouse gas emissions (something that can be helped by swapping out some beef for plant-based Impossible burgers) and reduce pollution caused by manure run-off.

Many in the trenches of the GMO debate have grown weary of hearing the same arguments over and over again, frustrated at what they see as the other side’s refusal to grapple with the evidence. Others, like Oberholtzer, have changed their mind along the way. But for most of the public, their attention has simply moved on to other things now, like the Impossible burger, the popular plant-based burgers made with genetically engineered soy.

“It’s awfully sad that we have a completely black and white discussion about GM,” says Crop Trust’s Haga. We should try to come together and discuss what GM can contribute and what it can’t, she urges. Oberholtzer agrees. He’d like to see a future where scientists and chefs work together to solve these systemic problems. “You guys have got the resources and the skills—the smartest plant scientists in the world,” he says. But chefs bring something different to the table. “We’ve got some crazy ideas but we have the tenacity and the wherewithal to fight,” he argues.

The GMO controversy turned out to be more than just fear of GMOs—driven by concerns about corporate control of the food supply, dwindling biodiversity in our food system and a desire for more connectedness, a yearning to know the person who grows your food. Those problems are still there, which is why Oberholtzer hopes for more collaboration in the future, asking, “how can we just work together?”