The Labels On Your Food Lie

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Issues & Insights

Everyone’s used the term “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,” usually in attempting conversational wit. But few know any of the Seal’s history.

In the late 1930s, after nearly three decades of Good Housekeeping magazine’s testing household products for its readers, Washington aggressively sought to replace such private scrutinizing with public tests and approvals. The Federal Trade Commission accused the Hearst-owned publication of deceptiveness, ultimately forcing Good Housekeeping to soften the wording of its product endorsements.

It was a case of government seeking to increase people’s dependence on it. But all these years later there’s another Seal of Approval unquestionably being used with deceptive and politicized motives, in the war on culinary technology.

The “Non-GMO verified” label has, to some intimidated food manufacturers, become a near-necessity because they’re convinced that without it customers will shun their products, in fear of consuming genetically modified organisms with carcinogenic dangers like those of radiation or toxic chemicals. There are now many tens of thousands of products sporting the Non-GMO Project’s seal of approval.

Yet the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Medical Association, the European Commission, the National Academy of Sciences, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization and other competent bodies vouch that genetically-modified foods pose no health hazard.

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