This week on Parts Pervilion, we're asking some pretty mind bending questions about GMOs. For example, what is a GMO? The answer, which is that no one really knows, may surprise you. Hello and welcome once again to Parts Pervilion, Bloomberg DNA's bi weekly environmental policy podcast. I'm David Schultz. It can be really difficult to talk about GMOs, and one of the reasons is that there's so little agreement
about even the definitions of the most basic terms. It's like two people playing chess who can't agree on what a pawn is or how a queen can move. There's not even agreement that we should be calling these foods GMOs at all. Some people call them genetically engineered, other people bioengineered. These all referred to the same thing, but what exactly is that thing? GMO usually refers to some type of organism, like a plant or an animal that's had its genetic code modified in some way by humans.
So at this point you might be asking, why are we getting so deep into the semantic weeds here. It's because Congress just passed a GMO labeling law, which may not actually even be a GMO labeling law, and food companies that need to comply with it are trying to figure all this stuff out. Starting soon, food manufacturers will have to let shoppers know somehow if their food contains GMOs. Keith Matthews is one of the people helping these companies out.
He's an attorney at the firm Sidley Austin who specializes in food and environmental law. Before moving to the firm, he headed up the EPA's division in charge of pesticide and GMO crops. When we went to go speak with Keith at Sidley's downtown Washington headquarters, he had just wrapped
up a webinar sorting out the details of this new law. So, as someone who writes about this topic a lot, but also as someone who buys food and grocery stores a lot, I asked him the question that probably a lot of people are wondering, what are these GMO labels going to look like? That's actually a very interesting question. Any answer to that is no, one knows. The main factor that drove lawmakers to pass this bill now is that the state of Vermont had just enacted its own GMO labeling law.
Congress was worried that without a single national standard food makers would have had to deal with a patchwork of fifty different laws across the country. So, now that the federal law has been passed and signed by the president, why don't we know what these GMO labels will look like? Matthew says, that's because, well, the labeling law it's actually not a labeling law at all. What we have now,
it's not a labeling law. The bill that pass was enacted and signed by the president is a bioengineered food disclosure law, and disclosure not labeling. Disclosure not labeling does not preclude labeling, but it does not necessarily require labeling.
The statute basically says that the disclosure can be by text symbol or electronic or digital disclosure, and so the latter is what's commonly known as a QR code, And those are the labels that are on the packages where you can sort of put your cell phone up against them and or scan it with yourself and then get more information that way. That's right, that's right. So how that is going to play out and what those will look like a it will determine. It will depend upon
what USDA promulgates. Is a regulation requiring the disclosure and then b what the food manufacturers decide. Now, some food manufacturers have already committed to labeling. This was I think in part motivated by the Vermont law, which has now been preempted. But some food companies likely may very well decide, you know, we've already gone so far down this road, we're committed to this. This is what we're going to do, and so they will have labels. Other food companies may
in fact say we're happy with QR codes. There's a possibility, probably a very good possibility, that some food companies will do a combination of the various alternatives, depending upon the different products. There is a provision in the law that addresses very small packages, you know, where you have very small packages where a label may not fit. There's provisions or usdas to come up with provisions to kind of
address that circumstance. But I wouldn't be surprised if you have a number of food companies that have a number of alternatives depending upon the size of the product. One of the most significant aspects of the bill was that it actually includes the definition of what a GMO is. Matthew says that definition is actually pretty narrow. There are a lot of things that many people would consider to be a GMO that would fall outside of this definition.
For example, a lot of the organisms created using new genetic engineering techniques called gene editing, those aren't GMOs according to this law. Neither are meat products made from animals who were fed GMOs. Matthew says he thinks Congress went with a narrow definition on purpose to be honest with you,
and this is merely speculation on my part. I was not involved in the negotiations or in the drafting of the statue, but I think that there was an intent to make this particular requirements narrow as possible, you know, and still get it through, still get it passed, because I do think that, you know, there's a lot of people who feel as if this is really a meaningless requirement because you are disclosing to people information that is
not really relevant to anything. When you're talking about mandatory food labeling, our food disclosure that should be about aspects of the food that are relevant to health and safety, and whether or not something contains genetically engineered components really doesn't tell you anything at all about the possible health consequences or safety or risks of the food. But while Congress tried to get specific with its definition of what a GMO is, Matthew said, they left a lot of
other details really vague. For example, the law doesn't state what the labeling threshold should be. Should a food be labeled if five percent of its ingredients are GMOs or only one percent or less. Those kinds of decisions will be up to the Department of Agriculture, aside from certain requirements that USDA must have. For an example, you know
there's no disclosure requirement for food sold in restaurants. I mean, there's a few specific explicit requirements, but otherwise it's just a broad ground authority to USDA to go off and come up with a disclosure standard. And Matthew says, given how rapidly the field of genetic engineering is evolving, USDA really needs to be strategic and forward looking when it develops these standards in your federal agency and you promulgate regulations.
The regulations have the force of law. But because they have the force of law, in order to revise them, or to change them, or to update them, you have to go through a regulatory rulemaking process that can take years, and there have been examples of where an agency decided that they wanted to update its regulations because science had moved forward, and by the time they had finished the regulations, science had continued to move forward and the regulations were
out of date and obsolete at the time that they were promulgated. Sidley Austin environmental attorney Keith Matthews. For more reported on food and agriculture, visit our website at BNA dot com. You can find the latest news on these and other issues at Bloomberg bna's Daily Environment Report, a source for comprehensive coverage of the day's top environmental news. Start a free trial of Daily Environment Report by visiting BNA dot com slash Daily Podcasts. That's BNA dot com
slash Daily hyphen podcast. Parts Rebellion was produced by myself with help from Jessica Coombs and Rachel Daegel. Special thanks to Bloomberg BNA agricultural reporter Casey Wooten. The theme music for Parts Rebellion is a message by Jasar. It was used under a Creative Commons attribution share like license. More information can be found at Better with Music dot com.