Review

Beyond the baskets

GM FREE: a shopper’s guide to genetically modified food
Sue Dibb and Tim Lobstein
Virgin, 1999, £4.99

The plain title of this handbook exactly describes its contents and purpose. True to the authors’ origins in the Food Commission, this is a comprehensive and consumer-friendly explanation of the issues raised by the genetic modification of food.

The book is divided into three sections: the largest is the filling in the sandwich, and lists a huge range of food – from abalone to Yorkshire pudding – annotated to indicate those with GM ingredients. This is the real ‘shopper’s guide’ of the title: an informative companion for the concerned consumer. It is supported by a brief final section which provides a list of contact details for food manufacturers, UK biotechnology companies, and campaigning groups. But there is still a sense that the shopper of the title remains a single, independent being; the book addresses an isolated reader, although the authoritative information it offers could usefully support environmental activists or other pressure groups.

The first part provides useful summaries of the relevant science and current regulation of labelling, outlines the interests of the key biotech companies involved, and explains the main environmental concerns – herbicide and pesticide resistance, diminished bio-diversity and the threat of cross-pollination. But it glosses over the larger political concerns regarding transnational corporations’ stranglehold over farmers, and what Vandana Shiva calls ‘bio-piracy’. And this, I think, is the real weakness of the book.

To represent the debate about genetic modification of food as an issue for the concerned shopper in the over-developed world is to neglect the huge significance of the impact of this global imperialism for those who depend on farming and the land for their livelihood. I don’t think it need be outside the scope of a ‘shopper’s guide’ to make those connections; indeed, they are vital to an understanding of the social and economic contexts in which the genetic modification of our food is happening.

In their introduction the authors state that ‘at the very least, consumers want better labelling of GM foods, better regulation of GM processes and, above all, more information so that they can make up their own minds’ – a surprisingly naïve position from such experts in the field. This is not just about avoiding products which may harm individual health.

The genetic modification of our food impacts on growers and consumers globally, as well as the environments we inhabit, and the effect of one shopper ‘making up (her) own mind’ about GM products is utterly negligible, unless it is as part of a concerted and organised campaign to resist and outlaw these developments by the transnational biotech corporations. That said, it is possible to subvert the quiet purpose of this book as an impartial provider of consumer information, for far more radical ends.