GMO Apples, REI Papayas
When I lived in Germany in the early 90s, the European consumer rightly felt besieged by Mad Cow Disease (bovine encephalitis – BSE). And it was impossible to sell U.S. beef in Europe because of the lingering controversy about farmers adding hormones to beef cattle. I always suspected that hormones and BSE somehow became connected in the mind of the European consumer.
Later on, when we were living in Vienna, a similar thing happened when agribusiness companies (notably Monsanto) developed Genetically Modified Organisms to “improve” their products (usually corn). Many GMOs did improve things by reducing the quantity of insecticide needed for crops. But again, in Europe more than elsewhere, these benefits were lost sight of in the consumer rush to avoid “Frankenfoods”. Curiously, GMO crops that were used to produce new pharmaceuticals in pill form did not meet such opposition. I used to quip to my Austrian friends that this meant it was OK to put GMO products in your mouth, you just had to swallow them without chewing.
Untreated Apple Scab
Now comes a study of the semantics of food labeling done by a team at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign that has appeared in the Journal of Food Distribution Research. Don’t be impressed; I read about in the Green, Inc. blog of the New York Times. The study used two groups of 200 people each. The groups were told that locally-produced apples in Illinois are subject to apple scab disease (they are) and that farmers are responding by growing apples with an added gene that stops apple scab from taking hold. This added gene, they were told, reduces the need for anti-fungal sprays in local fields, and increases the availability of local apples for the consumer. The groups were then offered tastes of a dozen different apples, variously labeled. Among the labels faced by the first group was one apple clearly marked as a GMO apple; this being the United States, where we are used to GMO foods, this had little impact on which apples the group thought tasted best. The second group got the same apple, but labeled as “Reduced Environmental Impact” apples. This group overwhelmingly preferred the new REI (former GMO) apples, reflecting today’s environmental sensitivities. What a difference semantics makes in marketing!
Hawaiian Papayas
Another example crops up in Hawaii. Hawaii farmers grow magnificent papayas, but must meet the phytosanitary requirements of their major markets: Japan and California. Papayas have their pests and the conventional ways to treat them are to spray noxious chemicals on the fruit or to wash them in hot water. Consumers don’t like the first, and the hot water hastens ripening and makes your papaya go all mushy. The really neat cure for this is to “irradiate” the papayas. Radioactive particles dash through the papaya, killing the critters we don’t want, and dash out again – leaving no residual radiation. What it does leave is an impossible marketing problem. No matter how often you tell the consumer that there is no radiation in the treated papayas, visions of nuclear weapons and Chernobyl come to mind – and the papayas are unsaleable – even if the irradiated papayas are a better, safer product. I wonder if “Reduced Environmental Impact” will resurrect this once thriving industry. Or if the heads of state at the Copenhagen Summit will eat REI apples.
