How Many Cheers for Cheerios?
JAN. 7, 2014
Mark Bittman, NYT
Well, a major and venerable American brand has gone and announced that it contains no genetically modified organisms (G.M.O.'s). Cheerios is G.M.O.-free! And will soon be labeled “Not Made With Genetically Modified Ingredients.”
Do we care? Should we? Is this a cynical marketing ploy or a huge deal or both? (It certainly isn’t neither.)
Without question this could be the start of something big. That it has value to Cheerios and to anti-G.M.O. activists is also undoubtedly true; the question is whether it matters to the rest of us. It does; but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
First, let’s get this straight. Taking the G.M.O.'s out of Cheerios is only a little bit harder than taking them out of oatmeal: there are no G.M.O. oats, and Cheerios are, essentially, oats. (Well, hyper-processed oats.) They also contain small amounts of cornstarch and sugar, so its parent company, General Mills, has done little more than source non-G.M.O. cornstarch and cane rather than beet sugar to use in production. (There are G.M.O. beets, and almost all corn and soybeans grown in the United States use G.M.O. seeds, whose products find their way into most processed foods.) This is what they’ve done for years in most of Europe, where products with G.M.O.'s are almost universally labeled as such.
(More here.)
Mark Bittman, NYT
Well, a major and venerable American brand has gone and announced that it contains no genetically modified organisms (G.M.O.'s). Cheerios is G.M.O.-free! And will soon be labeled “Not Made With Genetically Modified Ingredients.”
Do we care? Should we? Is this a cynical marketing ploy or a huge deal or both? (It certainly isn’t neither.)
Without question this could be the start of something big. That it has value to Cheerios and to anti-G.M.O. activists is also undoubtedly true; the question is whether it matters to the rest of us. It does; but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
First, let’s get this straight. Taking the G.M.O.'s out of Cheerios is only a little bit harder than taking them out of oatmeal: there are no G.M.O. oats, and Cheerios are, essentially, oats. (Well, hyper-processed oats.) They also contain small amounts of cornstarch and sugar, so its parent company, General Mills, has done little more than source non-G.M.O. cornstarch and cane rather than beet sugar to use in production. (There are G.M.O. beets, and almost all corn and soybeans grown in the United States use G.M.O. seeds, whose products find their way into most processed foods.) This is what they’ve done for years in most of Europe, where products with G.M.O.'s are almost universally labeled as such.
(More here.)
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