This 'DNA Labeling' Statistic-Meme and the Cost of Misinformation

For those who think "'merica" is potent social commentary, the ​recently released statistic-meme that 80 percent of Americans think foods containing DNA should have warning labels is fertile territory. Sure, whatever: People don't get stuff, lol.

It's not really that exciting. The question was one among several others all asking for opinions on this or that government policy, hypothetical or otherwise. Other questions included whether or not meat should be labeled with its country of origin or if restaurant menus should list caloric information. If I were to be contrarian about the whole thing I'd say that if you slip some non-sequitur into a list of plausible or at least popular concerns, you will wind up with a different set of responses than if the question had been posed in isolation or within the context of other nonsensical items/noise.

Which isn't to say that Americans in reality have a whole lot of sense about biology and food safety, or that the statistic is trivial, but another section in the same poll is as alarming. It tracked respondents' "awareness of food issues," things like E. coli and salmonella and hormone/antibiotic usage. Beating out everything was, drumroll, GMOs.

People had the most awareness of a non-issue, an extremely varied, somewhat arbitrary category held aloft by an aggressive and highly-dishonest scare campaign.

GMO labels might as be DNA labels as far as actual meaning. That is, what consumers actually learn from either label. Saying this product has at some point had its genome altered has about as much meaning IRL as saying that this product contains DNA, and a "contains" label is just a way of wiping away the more important, higher-resolution information about a thing (the information that might actually matter) in favor of a generic flag, a flag that just offers the lie that these things are alike (say a herbicide-resistant crop and an apple that turns brown less quickly) even though they're not even a little bit the same, from laboratory to field to mouth.

But there's another part to this, illustrated in the survey. The GMO scare campaign, which seeks to just "provide information," has the effect of stealing attention away from a whole bunch of other, actually valid food safety concerns, like antibiotic and hormone overuse or contamination threats. More than Americans' lack of knowledge about stuff, which we could have just assumed, the survey highlights the effects of monopolizing consumers' already-limited capacity (a limit of time and energy, not intelligence or concern) for tracking these kinds of issues, something with real effects.