OK. This is pretty unsettling, but a recent survey put together by the Oklahoma State University Department of Agricultural Economics found that 80.44 percent of respondents were all for a government policy mandating labels on foods containing DNA.
Not genetically modified foods (GMOs) or things we should practically be concerned about monitoring, but DNA. Genetic material that is in everything that’s living or pretty much every food. What does this say about our society?
The results indicate that most Americans do not understand the difference between DNA and a genetically modified food. The former is genetic material essential to life as we know it. The latter is an edible organism, the genetic material of which has been altered for some purpose. One is a building block, the other is the result of a process that alters those building blocks to some end. Given that a label warning of a food’s DNA content would be, for all intents and purposes, as meaningless as a label warning of, say, its water content, the survey results reflect an unsettling degree of scientific ignorance in the American population.
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went into what these kind of survey results mean as far as representing the public:
It would be a mistake to assume that widespread political and scientific ignorance are the result of “the stupidity of the American voter,” as Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber put it. Political ignorance is not primarily the result of stupidity. For most people, it is a rational reaction to the enormous size and complexity of government and the reality that the chance that their vote will have an impact on electoral outcomes is extremely low. The same is true of much scientific ignorance. For many people, there is little benefit to understanding much about genetics or DNA. Most Americans can even go about their daily business perfectly well without knowing that the Earth revolves around the sun. Even the smartest people are inevitably ignorant of the vast majority of information out there. We all have to focus our time and energy on learning that information which is most likely to be instrumentally useful, or at least provide entertainment value. For large numbers of people, much basic political and scientific information doesn’t make the cut.
So maybe our foods will end up having DNA labels. Yeah, this is just kind of sad.
[Photo from Flickr user Siobhan]
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Nicole earned her master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 2012 and has since worked as a freelance writer in both the music and healthcare industries. She recently completed work as a ghostwriter for a book about leadership in the medical field.
