Abstract

As Biotech Are Stuffed Down Their Throats, Consumers Rebel

In 1990 the first genetically modified (GM) additive approved for use in British food, a GM baker's yeast, was swallowed without qualms, so was the GM tomato paste sold by Sainsbury's supermarket in 1996, at a lower price than its conventional equivalent. The trouble started that same year when the American Soybean Association, Monsanto and the U.S. trade associations told British food retailers that they could not-would not-segregate American GM soybeans from the conventional kind, undermining the golden rule of consumer-friendly capitalism: Let them have choice. Around the same time, media and public awareness of the issue reached critical mass, and the supermarkets started getting worried letters from their customers asking them not to use GM ingredients.