Food Allergies

PROPOSITION 37: THE RIGHT TO KNOW

By Anchal Ahuja

Growing up, most kids rely on their parents to provide them with nutritious and balanced meals. This was certainly the case for me- I never had to think twice about what I was eating, because I was assured that my parents would only bring safe, healthy food into our home. The thought never crossed my mind that I could be eating something potentially dangerous, or maybe have ingredients I wouldn’t expect. However, I am now well into my first semester of college at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which has brought numerous changes for me, including my eating habits. I have been handed over the responsibility to make my own healthy eating choices, which can be quite a struggle for college students like me with limited options.

Fortunately, my school offers a large variety of cuisines to choose from every day, and I have grown accustomed to the plethora of food I can select from for every meal. I began to wonder how so much food could be provided to our large student body consisting of over 30,000 students every single day, let alone the entire country. Mass produced food is unavoidable in today’s world, but has never seemed to be a real threat to our communities. The question is, is that because mass produced food really is safe, or because we don’t know enough about the food we consume on a daily basis?

This is a much more pressing question for residents of California, who have been given the opportunity to potentially change the direction of America’s food industry for good. Proposition 37 is an initiative on the California 2012 election ballot that would require all genetically modified  food that is produced to be labeled, and would also ban labeling processed food as ‘natural’. This proposal may just be another “food movement” attempt to those in the state, but if the law passes, the results could be extremely beneficial and quickly spread through the entire country, permanently changing the food industry we know today. California is roughly 12% of our nation’s population, and its dominating influence over America’s agriculture business can easily challenge the current system.

Most mass produced food is genetically modified- it wouldn’t be available in abundance if it wasn’t. Almost everything we consume on a daily basis has been altered in some way, and cannot be called completely natural. Soy, sugar, and corn itself are present in most foods, and 88% or higher of each of those items available in our country are genetically modified.  Advancements in technology and science from the early 1900’s have enabled our agricultural industry to flourish, by injecting different types of hormones into our crops to help them grow triple in size, and resist pests and drought. Even more recently, scientists found a way to inject organism DNA into certain crops in order to give the fruit or vegetable the gene of survival in harsh weather conditions. The most famous example remains the fish and strawberry story, where scientists would inject the DNA of a fish who was well adjusted to cold-climate waters into a strawberry plant, thus making the strawberries resistant to harsh frost in the wintertime. This raises several questions regarding unexplained food allergies, health risks, and the untold side of the food industry. What are we really eating, and how come our society is still kept in the dark about what is in our food?

Though mass production and GMO’s have made food production cheaper, faster, and more efficient, it poses a problem for many college students just like me who seek healthier food options. CU Boulder freshman Seerie Clark also finds that her personal dietary needs are not being met through the large scale food industry. “Health value is much more important to me than taste value, so I always look for foods with a lot of nutrient variety. Unfortunately, my options are limited,” she says. Clark claims that if almost everything she is consuming has been genetically modified, it is impossible to differentiate the healthy choices from the not so healthy choices.

Proposition 37 would eliminate the time we students spend trying to figure out what to eat every day. With so many choices offered, but none of them guaranteed to be GMO free, we are forced to take risks every time we sit down for a meal. The food we eat may of course have nutritional value, but could be injected with various hormones and DNA we are not aware of, which raises the concerns of food allergies, as well. Say a person who is severely allergic to fish sits down with a bowl of fresh strawberries, and is suddenly struck with a terrible allergic reaction that could potentially be fatal. Their doctor would claim that they have developed an allergy to strawberries, when in reality, it is the lack of awareness that had almost cost them their life.

The CU Boulder Coordinator for Sustainable Dining, Lauren Heising, conducted a survey of 80 random students on campus, and found out that 57 of those people deemed freshness and nutritional value to be the most important factor when choosing what to eat at the dining halls, proving that a large majority of the student body, and possibly students and families all across the nation, truly do care about the health value of their food. “We are trying to increase our local, organic, and sustainable food products here at CU, such as potatoes, apples, pears, and cabbage,” Heising says, “but you can’t make a loaf of bread with one hundred percent Colorado wheat.” She pointed out that there is no concrete definition of ‘local’ in the food industry, and that there are unclear boundaries when it comes to the agriculture business in different states. For example, if chickens are born and bred in a local Colorado farm, but they are sent to a farm in California to be processed and distributed, does that still make the chicken a local product? Although these blurry lines aren’t clear, the answer to get them is, and Mrs. Heising certainly agrees. “I hope that Proposition 37 gets approved. It would be great to have [GMO’S] labeled for the benefit of our society.”

There is a lot of support for this proposition to pass, but there is always someone who opposes, too. Large food distributing businesses are contributing a lot of money to rally up more voters to say ‘no’ to this initiative, while local and organic farming communities in California continue to back the proposition with support from organic based companies and California health groups. The supporters’ slogan, “The Right To Know”, explains it all; Americans have the right to know what they are consuming on a daily basis, and requiring labeling of genetically modified food will only help our society start the food movement towards healthier lifestyles.

I would like to thank Lauren Heising and Seerie Clark for letting me interview them and credit them in this article. All the information I have stated comes from the websites I have linked in the article. Thank you to Gipsee.com for letting me publish my opinions.