Abstract
In most areas of our lives, legal protections are in place to ensure that we have autonomous control over what happens in and to our bodies. However, there are fewer protections in place for autonomous choice when it comes to the food we purchase and consume. In fact, the current trend in US legislation is pushing us away from autonomous food choice. In this paper, I discuss two examples of this trend: corporate resistance to GM labeling laws and farm protection laws (often called “ag-gag” laws). These examples are quite different from a legislative point of view. In one case, laws that would promote autonomous choice are actively resisted, whereas in the other case, laws that undermine autonomy are enacted. The common core of the two examples is the effect: in both cases, we are unable to determine whether the food we purchase and consume is consistent with our values. In both cases, then, autonomous choice about the food we purchase and put into our bodies is undermined.
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Notes
The law often does not grant us autonomous control over our bodies when what we autonomously want is to receive something. For example, we are not entitled to receive a medical procedure that will do us no good or will do us harm—even if we autonomously choose to undergo that procedure. Likewise, we are not legally entitled to ingest prohibited drugs, even if we autonomously choose to do so. The autonomy right is thus best construed as a negative right against bodily intrusions.
However, it is not uncommon for pregnant women to be denied this right when they do not consent to a C-section. See Purdy (1980).
More stringent conditions are required for informed consent in medical ethics. See Vaughn (2012).
See Lomelino (2015), p. 96.
Here, again, I follow Lomelino (2015), p. 98.
For example, we probably do not need to know or have access to information about the time of day the wheat in our bread was planted or the sex of the person who picked our apple.
The more appropriate term might be “genetically engineered” or “GE” foods. The FDA considers “genetically modified” and “GM” to be overly broad, in that any alteration to the genome (including selective breeding) is a form of genetic modification. However, given that most of the legislation and referenda on this issue refers to “GM foods” (or “GMOs”), I use that terminology.
Margin of error: ±1.8 %.
Irradiation is an exception to this policy. A food item that has been irradiated must be labeled as such, even though the FDA deems irradiation a safe process that does not negatively impact the healthfulness of the food.
Taken verbatim from Ballotpedia (2012).
For a full list of donors, see KCET Los Angeles (2012).
See http://gov.oregonlive.com/election/2014/finance/measure-92/ for a full list of donors. $576 in donations were marked "miscellaneous cash contributions under $100." Some of this money might have come from private individuals.
For a full list of contributors to the "no" campaign, see: http://tracer.sos.colorado.gov/PublicSite/SearchPages/CommitteeDetail.aspx?OrgID=26735. For the "yes" campaign, see: http://tracer.sos.colorado.gov/PublicSite/SearchPages/CommitteeDetail.aspx?OrgID=25377.
First Amendment claims were also used by the meat industry to argue that Country-of-Origin labels (COOL) are unconstitutional, in that they compel speech. The suit failed, but COOL labels were recently challenged by Canada and Mexico at the WTO. In response, Congress repealed the US COOL requirements for beef and pork. See USDA (2015) and House Committee on Agriculture (2015).
U.S. District Court Judge Christina Reiss, quoted in Gramm (2015).
However, Judge Reiss noted that the State would have a difficult time defending the ban on GM foods having the word ‘natural’ on their labels. See Gramm (2015).
See USDA (2013) for discussion.
See http://www.nongmoproject.org/find-non-gmo/search-participating-products/ for a list of products certified by the Non-GMO Project.
Not all non-GM foods are so labeled. Given the ubiquitous nature of GM ingredients, one might argue that a concerned citizen could make a reasonable guess about the GM status of most unlabeled food items. However, more is called for. We ought to be able to know with certainty.
Henry Miller, quoted in Klintman (2002).
See Thompson (1997), pp. 36–37 for a discussion of religious objections to GM foods.
The religious, social, and cultural concerns apply to all GM foods. The environmental concerns, on the other hand, are mostly a result of the way GM technology has been developed by large biotech firms. For example, it is only some GM crops that encourage increased herbicide use (those that have been engineered to be resistant to glyphosate). However, the environmental concerns are relevant to the vast majority of GM crops grown in the US.
The Daily Show, Comedy Central, broadcast April 22, 2015.
However, it is worth noting that of the 15 websites that show up on the first page of my search (executed on 1/16/16), only one is scientifically questionable. The very first result in my search was a website with good information: http://www.thelugarcenter.org/ourwork-35.html. However, Google's algorithms are likely to return different results for others, so it is difficult to determine the proportion of good information to bad information that initially shows up for the average consumer searching the internet for "GM foods".
Thorpe and Robinson do not actually defend this position, but, instead, pose the question of whether labels would actually allow consumers to make informed choices in this climate.
The analogy is not perfect, of course, for two reasons. First of all, it isn't clear that there are comparable reasonable objections to vaccinations. But this disanalogy doesn't affect the primary point, since the presence of reasonable concerns in the case of GM foods strengthens (comparatively) the case for disclosure. A second disanalogy is that vaccinations are in the realm of medicine, where the requirements for informed consent are more stringent than those I am using here. I nonetheless think that the primary point holds. The existence of irrational fears does not undermine the case for disclosure.
As I discussed above, if it is organic or labeled "GMO free," we can know that it does not contain GM ingredients. But we cannot know that a food item that is GM or has GM ingredients is GM.
Idaho’s law was recently overturned; see below for discussion.
Farm protection laws have been introduced and failed in several other states (several times in some of them): Arizona (2014), Arkansas (2013), California (2013), Colorado (2015), Florida (2012), Illinois (2012), Indiana (2012, 2013, 2014), Kentucky (2012), Minnesota (2011, 2012), Nebraska (2012, 2013), New Hampshire (2013, 2014), New Mexico (2013, 2015), New York (2011, 2012), Pennsylvania (2013), Tennessee (2013, 2014), and Vermont (2013) (ASPCA 2015). Wyoming passed a law in 2015 that some (e.g., the ASPCA) have characterized as a farm protection law. Wyoming's law criminalizes trespassing to collect data on resource use (Wyoming Senate File No. SF0012). It is broad enough to criminalize whistleblower actions and explicitly includes agriculture in its definition of "resource data." However, it is importantly different from the other laws discussed here, in that it is the trespassing itself that is outlawed, not the recording of images and sounds. I thus do not include Wyoming's law in the discussion.
In Utah. The charges were dropped after blogger Will Potter’s story about it went viral. See GreenIsTheNewRed.com.
Note, too, that civil cases have a lower standard of proof than do criminal cases. I thank Alex Hughes for this point.
Although it might raise other First Amendment issues: Tennessee’s governor vetoed an early reporting law because Tennessee’s attorney general suggested it could be an “unconstitutional burden on news gathering.” See J. Zalesin (2013).
See, for example, the quote from Dale Moore, executive director of public policy for the American Farm Bureau Federation, in Oppel (2013).
The Missouri animal cruelty statute exempts “normal or accepted practices of animal husbandry” for farmed animals. See Missouri Cruelty to Animal Statutes.
See, for example, the videos of farmed animals on the website of the Humane Society of the United States: http://video.humanesociety.org/index.php?id=PLFF7DE1D5DD17F6CE.
I thank an anonymous referee for this point and the first example. I thank W. John Koolage for the second example and helpful discussion of the issue. J. Michael Scoville also deserves thanks for discussion of this issue.
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I am greatly indebted to an anonymous referee, whose comments and suggestions vastly improved this paper.
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Dieterle, J.M. Autonomy, Values, and Food Choice. J Agric Environ Ethics 29, 349–367 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-016-9610-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-016-9610-2