{"id":113,"date":"2013-10-31T13:19:58","date_gmt":"2013-10-31T20:19:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/?p=113"},"modified":"2014-04-10T23:35:38","modified_gmt":"2014-04-11T06:35:38","slug":"so-i-read-initiative-522","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/31\/so-i-read-initiative-522\/","title":{"rendered":"So I Read Initiative 522"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As a follow-up to my <a href=\"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/28\/why-im-voting-no-on-initiative-522\/\">previous post on the subject<\/a>, I decided to read the full text of Init 522. My findings were a little surprising.<\/p>\n<p>The full text is a little over 2 pages (as printed in the State of Washington Voters&#8217; Pamphlet distributed to all registered voters), but it spends the entire first page talking about how bad genetically engineered foods are. I don&#8217;t usually read ballot measures, but are all ballot measures so full of fluff?<\/p>\n<p>Section 3.3 is actually pretty interesting. It lists out all the exceptions to labeling. Notable ones include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Food made from non-genetically engineered animals don&#8217;t need to be labeled, even if the animal is fed genetically engineered foods or injected with genetically engineered drugs. This means corn-fed cows or cows injected with rBST don&#8217;t need to be labeled, which is kind of a big deal.<\/li>\n<li>If the farmer didn&#8217;t &#8220;knowingly or intentionally&#8221; grow genetically engineered foods, he doesn&#8217;t have to label them. Now here&#8217;s hoping that our farmers know what they&#8217;re growing, but in the absurd scenario where the farmer doesn&#8217;t know, they can say it&#8217;s non-genetically engineered instead of the more logical &#8220;might be genetically engineered&#8221;. Sure, this clause might be there to provide plausible deniability to farmers when their crops get contaminated. But that doesn&#8217;t really inspire confidence in the label.<\/li>\n<li>Food containing less than 0.9% genetically engineered ingredients don&#8217;t need to be labeled. Anyone who&#8217;s ever cooked or baked knows (as well as most people who have eaten) that small additives can make a huge difference. Again, this might be a &#8220;plausible deniability&#8221; clause, but again defaulting to &#8220;not genetically engineered&#8221; doesn&#8217;t inspire confidence.<\/li>\n<li>Foods labeled &#8220;organic&#8221; don&#8217;t need to be labeled. This is the other big one. It means that the &#8220;organic&#8221; argument is actually correct. If you buy mostly organic foods and don&#8217;t accept the claim that organic foods are all non-genetically engineered, then Init 522 will literally do nothing to help you avoid genetically engineered foods.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So while Init 522 helps you identify foods that are genetically engineered, it does very little to help you identify the foods that are not. I agree that giving consumers information about what they&#8217;re eating is a good thing, but Init 522 clearly isn&#8217;t the answer.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;But isn&#8217;t it better than nothing?&#8221; Well, there&#8217;s the estimated fiscal cost of $3.3 million over the next 6 years (source: Voters&#8217; Pamphlet), not to mention social cost I mentioned in my <a href=\"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/28\/why-im-voting-no-on-initiative-522\/\">previous post<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>And yes, the phrase &#8220;clearly and conspicuously on the front of the package&#8221; does actually appear in the full text.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a follow-up to my previous post on the subject, I decided to read the full text of Init 522. My findings were a little surprising. The full text is a little over 2 pages (as printed in the State of Washington Voters&#8217; Pamphlet distributed to all registered voters), but it spends the entire first [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","tag-genetically-engineered-foods"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}