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Friday afternoon, Anastasia and I were taking part in special conference call via Skype, which soon enough, you’ll get to listen in on. We were being interviewed for Science Cabaret on Air, produced by Jenny Nelson. We talked about misconceptions about genetic engineering, contradictions and conspiracy theories, and misleading non-peer-reviewed research. We also talked about what may be driving some of the anti-GE sentiments out there, and how that very underlying issue may soon  As I’ve mentioned before, I’m an Australian. But us Ozzies get to meet a lot of Americans. American author of Seeds of Deception and public speaker Jeffrey Smith’s of Fairfield Iowa, first came to the attention of Australians when he was rolled out by the anti-GM activists to try and prevent Australian farmers being given the freedom of choice on crop technology in late 2007. Fortunately this effort by the anti-technology lobby groups was unsuccessful. At most meetings organized by these activists that I have attended since that time — and there have been quite a few — stacks of his more recent book Genetic Roulette book were available for purchase, and I snapped up one early on. A brief perusal of the articles revealed the book was highly biased. Nowhere in the book was there a mention of any of the major good outcomes from GM technology—such as decreased risk of cancer from mycotoxins in moldy corm (see this link for Chassy and Tribe’s efforts on this important topic at Academics Review). On the topics that I was most familiar such as antibiotic resistance in bacteria, Genetic Roulette was deeply misleading and factually wrong. I decided late 2007 to investigate its claims thoroughly, little knowing how huge the task would be because as it turned out every one of the 65 claims in it — better called myths– was distorted, misleading, plain wrong, or based on misrepresentation or misreading of the sources it quoted.
Continue reading… (Hat tip to Elton Robinson at South East Farm Press) The Consumers Union wanted to know what consumers felt about genetically engineered crops cross-pollinating with organic crops. So in early February, they conducted a poll. They called a thousand random people over the phone and asked them just two questions:
Sounds like a pretty simple exercise. However, I question the use of the term “contaminated.” This is a loaded term, and assumes one of the things that they want people to believe – that organic agriculture should not include genetic engineering. This introduces a bias into the poll. For instance, if you asked these two similar and benign questions, you would get two different results:
Of course, hybrids are allowed in organic agriculture, but I’ll bet my backyard garden harvest for this entire year that if you ask these two questions the word ‘contaminated’ will have a measurable effect and cause people to answer that they are more concerned than they would be otherwise. Ok, that issue aside, it is good that the Consumers Union did a poll such as this, because there hasn’t been very much research investigating what people really think about genetic engineering and organic agriculture, and there’s been some talk about it in numerous channels. So how concerned are consumers about this “contamination?”
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GE Survey: More believe safe than not, most undecided
In 2010, Thompson Reuters released a survey* (PDF) of public attitudes toward genetically engineered food in the US. They had several significant findings, some of which should be fairly obvious, but some are real eye-openers. The questions were straight-forward and the raw data was posted online, but there was a distinct lack of visual representations of these results. I thought we could all use a good look at some simple graphs that demonstrate facts that many studies have shown consistently over time – that there are more people who believe that GE crops are safe than not, while most people are still undecided. It also showed that most people say they would eat GE plant-based foods that are currently on the market.
Question number one asked people to self-report their understanding of GE food. While self-reporting has its own problems (Like people who say they completely understand GE foods yet don’t really know anything about them), it does provide some information about how aware different groups are about GE. The survey reports that 65% of people are aware that some foods in the store are genetically engineered, and high-income and highly-educated people are up in the 80s. As for the understanding of the concepts, check out these results:
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