Ideological rift brews in anti-GMO movement as Americans embrace Impossible Burger

Mary Mangan

For years, anti-biotech activists were primarily focused on labeling foods made with genetically modified ingredients as a way to stigmatize “GMOs” and ultimately get them removed from the market place. Their rhetoric was forceful and combative, which made clear that it was a strategy to punish companies who used genetically modified ingredients. According to Andrew Kimbrell, head of the anti-GMO litigation group Center for Food Safety:

We are going to force them to label this food… If we have it labeled, then we can organize people not to buy it.

The Organic Consumers Association, which provided seed money to establish the anti-biotech advocacy group US Right to Know (USRTK), likewise admitted the labeling push was a way to grab market share:

The burning question for us all then becomes how – and how quickly – can we move healthy, organic products from a 4.2% market niche, to the dominant force in American food and farming? The first step is to demand truthful labels on so-called “natural” products and GMO labels on all foods containing genetically engineered ingredients.

But the GMO labeling debate began to subside when Congress passed the USDA-administered National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Law in 2016, which established federal label standards for foods made with genetic engineering. So I wondered where the previously employed label activists would turn for their next gig. For those interested in remaining in the food space, a curious bifurcation arose. Some of them headed to the newly energized and explicitly non-GMO “regenerative agriculture” movement, that claims it can solve all of agriculture’s problems by using grazing animals for carbon storage and biodiversity benefits. Another group, though, wanted to tackle agriculture’s problems by removing animals entirely—the “plant-based foods” movement. The latter group has not yet taken a public stand against crop biotechnology and sees food labeling as a roadblock to promoting eco-friendly vegan diets. These redrawn battle lines expose a growing ideological rift in a once-cohesive anti-GMO movement and appear to signal a shift in the food safety debate. High-profile environmental groups and influential activists previously aligned in a campaign against biotechnology and corporate dominance of the food system are now fighting with each other over food labels, GMOs and the future of sustainable farming...MORE