1.  The title was obnoxious and condescending.  Sorry, I was cranky.

2.  I was wrong about the financial issues surrounding GMOs:  as Sarah Huffman points out, Trader Joe’s does not carry GMO products and they have been in my experience price competitive on most products they carry.  I still think this is a market based solution: producers and retailers voluntarily identifying themselves as GMO-free is the way to go.

3.  On that note, while I do not support mandatory labeling of GMO products, if you are going to mandate labeling, make suppliers really source their ingredients. Don’t allow a weasel label such as “might have been made with GMO ingredients.” Make them identify which specific ingredients are GMO.  Do not use consumer litigation as an enforcement mechanism, and allow for a small tolerances for GMOs, the way that there are regulations for other adulterants in food.  This will protect producers who inadvertently have their crops contaminated by GMOs.

4. Finally, keeping with the “not all GMOs are the same,” I have to state that there are GMOs I am quite concerned about.  The Roundup resistant soybeans bother me not because they are genetically modified but because by their nature they allow for greater use of pesticides.  I am worried about the ecological effects of the pesticides — but I would be even if that had been obtained by hybridization than more technological methods.

(I actually have been meaning to write this post for a couple of weeks, but life intervened.)