Paul LeMay, Vancouver

Some day, perhaps in the not too distant future, Christians everywhere could be faced with the prospect of having to use genetically-engineered wheat in their communion bread. Though that day hasn’t come quite yet, it has certainly come for ingredients that have already entered our “daily bread” in the many processed foods that sit on our supermarket shelves.
    It’s arrived for 88 percent of the corn, 90 percent of the canola, 94 percent of the soy and 95 percent of the sugar beets grown in the United States, rendering over 70 percent of the processed foods sold in North America genetically modified. Yet none of those GMO facts appear on the label. Why is that? And should we be concerned?

Some day, perhaps in the not too distant future, Christians everywhere could be faced with the prospect of having to use genetically-engineered wheat in their communion bread. Though that day hasn’t come quite yet, it has certainly come for ingredients that have already entered our “daily bread” in the many processed foods that sit on our supermarket shelves.
    It’s arrived for 88 percent of the corn, 90 percent of the canola, 94 percent of the soy and 95 percent of the sugar beets grown in the United States, rendering over 70 percent of the processed foods sold in North America genetically modified. Yet none of those GMO facts appear on the label. Why is that? And should we be concerned?
    Many are concerned of course because the list of genetically-engineered (GE) foods waiting in the wings is growing, and growing fast. One such is GE alfalfa. Alfalfa, one of the primary feeds used with dairy cattle, owing to its high protein content, is now eliciting strong vocal resistance from many dairy farmers who fear milk derived from cows eating GE alfalfa will, when mixed with their own non-GE affected milk, spark a consumer backlash owing largely to potential health risks.
    Question is: Are there any potential health risks associated with genetically-engineered foods? Some say no, some say yes and many simply don’t know who to believe. As such, it’s a matter worthy of deep reflection both from a health science and faith point of view.
    Indeed, the fact that citizens in California and Washington State dove head-first into the topic with their respective citizen-driven referenda initiatives suggests millions of people have already moved beyond just reflecting on the risks genetically-engineered foods raise. They concluded there was already enough worrisome science there for the rest of society to more fully consider the question.
    Even for me, a science writer who specializes in the behavioral and cognitive sciences, it took me several weeks poking my nose into various news websites and science journals in my own spare time to get a handle on the lay of the GMO land.
    Sure there are some of the credible studies that have raised worrisome red flags around risks to human and animal health. But that’s not all. Then come the news reports of deep-pocketed lobbying efforts by biotech giants telling politicians (behind-closed doors of course) that they’ll pull their research bucks out of universities in their districts if they dare bring in laws requiring the labeling of GMO ingredients in foods.
    Then one reads stories of university scientists who, ever hungry for research funding and tenure track, shy away from doing the “wrong” kinds of experiments or asking the “wrong” sorts of questions when it comes to GMOs. 
    And there’s a news media that habitually fails to dig deep into this topic for lack of resources and time…  or do they too fear causing corporate advertising harms to their news business for doing so?
    Yet when we come to matters of spiritual faith, another of these strands tends to pull in the opposite direction. And I can see why. As a person of faith myself, I believe all Christians have a vital role to play in guiding society when it comes to matters that significantly impact human life, particularly when it comes to science and technology.
    In fact, it’s something many church leaders have recognized for years, among them the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church, and even the World Council of Churches. All support a person’s right to know what they are putting in their bodies, and as such, support the principle of labeling GMO ingredients in foods.
    If GMO foods do pose risks to health, and there’s enough reasonable evidence to suggest they can, then Christians can only fall on one side of the larger social debate, the side of transparency, caring and love.
    So then what are Christians to do when they are faced with corporations who, through their concerted actions and spending, have demonstrated repeated and deliberate attempts to ensure others remain ignorant of the presence of genetically-engineered ingredients in so many of our foods?  Nine out of 10 Americans, regardless of their political affiliation, feel they have a right to know what they put in their bodies.
    Of course industry advocates know this too, and it helps explain why the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), a lobby group for the food industry, deliberately tried to hide the names of companies that collectively donated $7 million to Washington State's ‘No GMO label’ campaign  heavy-weight companies like Pepsi, Coke, Nestlé and General Mills among them.
    And the fact that it ultimately took the threat of a lawsuit by Washington State’s Attorney General to crowbar that ghostly information out of the GMA on October 18th to remain compliant with the state’s law on campaign donation disclosure, tells us about the extent to which these companies were prepared to go.
    Companies, such as Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer, openly donated over $8 million to the Washington State ‘No GMO label’ campaign. And it’s not hard to see why. GMOs represent a multi-billion dollar industry and labeling foods containing any of their source ingredients might do more than alert now uninformed consumers to what’s in their food.
    It could cause a form of marketplace stigma as occurred decades ago with the cancer-causing artificial sweetener called saccharin. Hence their willingness to support a television and radio advertising to defeat the GMO labeling effort as they did last year in California.
    Yet for Christians, the gravity of this issue extends well beyond a bit of moolah-boola shell game mischief or corporate giants openly contributing large sums of cash to construct messages aimed at muddying the merits of the GMO labeling issue. Many Christians worry that genetically engineering our food does, from the outset, represent a dangerous tampering with God’s creation. Nor is this worry completely devoid of scientific merit.
    Independent studies like those conducted by Séralini et al (Food and Chemical Toxicology 2012) and Ewen & Pusztai (Lancet 1999) in Europe which respectively looked at herbicide resistant “Roundup Ready” GMO corn and insecticide producing GMO potatoes fed to rats, found that this product was associated with higher incidence rates of several diseases.
    In the 2012 study, the researchers found evidence of liver and kidney dysfunction, disrupted hormone function, cancerous tumor formation and earlier death in test animals. In the 1999 study, researchers didn’t just find proliferative (pre-cancerous) cell growth in the stomach and large intestines of their test animals, they also found (though did not formally report) depressed immune function, smaller brains, livers and testicles, as well as enlarged pancreases and intestines.
    If these findings aren’t sobering enough, a Canadian study by Aris and Leblanc (2011) found Roundup Ready herbicide metabolites in the bloodstreams of 93 percent of pregnant women and 80 percent of the fetal cord blood they examined. And it’s no wonder. GMO cornstarch or GMO high fructose corn syrup, as found in soft drinks, are near ubiquitous ingredients in so many of our processed foods that it’s difficult to count them all.
    Nor has the fact that Roundup Ready corn is one of the most widely present and consumed GMO ingredients in North American processed foods gone unnoticed by policy makers in Europe. There, such products are labeled, and life, from all accounts, is still rumored to go on with nary a hiccough.
    Nor did such labeling cause a rise in food prices, as big Biotech firms so keenly proclaimed it would in their TV and radio advertising blitz during California’s Proposition 37 campaign. (It’s worth remembering here that Biotech narrowly won that contest  51 percent to 49 percent  in part by outspending their pro-GMO labeling opposition by a ratio of five to one.)
    GMO food labeling is becoming a matter with much larger implications, implications rarely spelled out in mainstream news media. The outcomes of these two referenda could well set both the direction and pace of genetic engineering for decades to come.
 In fact, when the ‘No-to-labels’ side prevails in such contests, biotech firms are more inclined to interpret these results as a social, if not political license to move full steam ahead with genetically-engineering other crops, and even animals on an industrial scale. Science fiction you say? Think again.
    Genetically-engineered salmon is already in the development pipeline, and it sets the stage for what might one day follow  genetically engineered chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep and cows. And if that whole scenario doesn’t feel like an imposition on the magnificence of God’s creation, the next item surely will.
    Today’s contamination of the natural ecosystem with genetically-engineered crops isn’t just a nuisance for fussy farmers who only want to grow and sell organic crops. Some scientists worry about something much more sinister. It’s called lateral gene transfer.
    This is where the naturally occurring traits in a given plant or even an animal species become genetically altered thanks to an invasion of their biology by artificially induced traits of another genetically-engineered plant or animal. In the case of plants, these are traits like an ability to make an insecticide, or an ability to better tolerate the presence of a chemical herbicide, such as glyphosate. (Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the widely used herbicide called Roundup.) Or even spawn an entirely unanticipated organism for which we have no defenses.
    Imagine the consequences if flowers start killing bees. And what happens when a genetically engineered animal escapes its enclosure and begins to interbreed with its wild counterparts, passing along highly undesirable health compromising traits in the process?