Moms want labels for Mother's Day
Eric Schlosser and Gary Hirshberg
Sitting around the breakfast table with her family one morning, Robyn O'Brien faced a terror she had never before experienced: Her youngest daughter's face began to swell shut -- and she had no idea why. They were only eating waffles, scrambled eggs, and tubes of blue yogurt...so what was happening to her baby girl?
It turns out that Robyn's daughter had a violent allergic reaction to something she ate -- and it awakened Robyn to the reality that we often don't know how the food we feed our families is produced. That's why we have labels -- so we can know and respond to these situations.
Now Robyn and thousands of other moms are speaking out this month with a simple Mother's Day request: the FDA should require labels for GMOs. Help ratchet up the pressure on the FDA by getting us to 1.2 million supporters by Mother's Day.
What we all want is simple: information. Because information helps us keep our kids healthy. That's why so many of us pay attention to labels, and why Robyn shared her story in this video made by the director of Food, Inc.
Yet the FDA won't give us the information we need to let millions of parents make informed choices at the grocery store, because current policy doesn't require that genetically engineered foods be labeled.
We have no time to lose. The FDA is on the brink of approving genetically engineered salmon, which would be the first genetically engineered animal on supermarket shelves in the United States. The salmon is engineered to produce growth hormones year-round that cause the fish to grow at twice its natural rate. The government already requires labels to tell us if fish is wild-caught or farm-raised -- don't we also have a right to know if our salmon is genetically engineered? But without labels, moms like Robyn will never know.
If more of us speak out this month, we'll show the FDA that moms and other Americans want to know how their food is produced. Please, watch this video, and then share it with at least one mom today.
Thank you.
- Eric and Gary