Info 202 F12

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/business/california-referendum-pits-organic-brands-against-corporate-parents.html?pagewanted=all

A number of healthy/organic brands are under fire for
contributions their parent companies have made to oppose California’s Proposition
37, legislation that will be on the November 2012 ballot.  In 202-speak all food has various meta-data: calories,
nutritional content, and whether it is natural, organic, or genetically
engineered.  This article centers on who
is funding lobbying efforts that affect the requirement of placing GMO meta-data on all food in California.

Proposition 37’s required labeling changes (adding clarified
meta-data) would provide consumers transparency on whether his or her selected
food resources contain genetically engineered food.  This is similar to desires for trans-fat or sodium labeling for consumers.  It provides the consumers the ability to learn about the “quality” of their products.  About Prop 37:

- -All food items made with Genetically Modified Organisms (e.g. genetically modified corn) require a label indicating they contain GMO.

- Food items made with GMO are prohibited from
being labeled “Natural”.

- There is no discussion as to placement, size, or
color of required label.

There is no common schema for displaying or organizing GMOs
metadata.  There are interesting possibilities such as the number of raw resources
containing GMOs (this pizza has 23 ingredients and 17 contain GMOs.   Alternately, each GMO could be listened and
its intent e.g. corn: changed DNA seq <sequence id/name> to prevent use of
<insect> insecticide. 

Should prop 37 pass, I believe it will be a low-granularity binary labeling system due to the difficulty
in tracking food meta-data from farm to the processing and packaging
plants.  Many food processing/packaging plants are built to have operations take advantage of massive scale. 
This is done by leveraging / combining fruits and vegetables from
multiple sources.  Each food source may contain different
genetically modified foodstuffs which could make the aggregate product a
cocktail of different GMOs.  Imagine
pasta sauce made from 20-50 different farm’s tomatoes.  Because organizing food into individual
contains follows a serialized order – it is highly likely labeling would be a
binary option and increases the likelihood any item may contain GMOs.