Are There GMOs in my Bread? Monsanto, Prop 37, and Your Kid's Sandwich

Recently a friend asked on Facebook for recommendations for finding GMO-free bread. My first thought was to ask the bakeries at my farmers market – today I did, and I was not disappointed. The woman at the first stand didn’t know if their wheat was GM, but said she would find out and be ready to tell me next week (and she sold me a loaf of tangy local sourdough). The knowledgeable baker from the Thousand Oaks Great Harvest Bread Co. sold me some tasty dinner rolls, and pointed my GMO search in the right direction: www.gmo-compass.org.

Wheat, it turns out, is not currently cultivated in any genetically modified forms. That’s good news! However, GM wheat has been tried, and will almost certainly be tried again. Monsanto began pursuing a genetically modified wheat in 2002 but dropped their efforts in 2004, in part because wheat is a big export product and the markets in Europe in Asia are “more skeptical” of GMOs, according to the site. Scientists are currently researching ways to use genetic modification to make wheat more resistant to fungal infections that affect the crop world wide.

What's in your bread?

So are there GMOs in my bread? Not in the wheat, but as my neighborhood baker pointed out, he couldn’t vouch for the corn or soy in some of his multi-grain breads. Even if the farms where they source their grain use non-GMO cultivars, pollen from modified plants can easily contaminate the crop, making it extremely difficult to guarantee a GMO-free product. Trying to keep GM and non-GM strains separate has resulted in frustration and law suits, including one before the Supreme Court last week. Indiana farmer Vernon Bowman unwittingly planted grain contaminated with a patent-protected GM variety of soybeans, and Monsanto sued him for using their technology without paying for it – essentially for stealing GM technology that was more or less foisted upon him.

Like a true tragedy, this story ends in the awful way we knew it would. In a write up on the Huffington Post, Eric Holt Gimenez, executive director of Food First/Institute for Food & Development Policy, says “It is painful to read the transcripts." He goes on: “The problem before the U.S. Supreme Court in Bowman v. Monsanto was not the cost-cutting strategies of a 75-year-old farmer. The problem was the law itself.”

Coincidentally (or not), when I got home from the market today I found an e-mail from a local group trying to raise awareness and promote policy change regarding the use and labeling of GMOs in our food. (Find them on Facebook as Label GMOs Ventura County.) They started as a group promoting California’s Proposition 37, requiring the labeling of GMO ingredients in food, which narrowly lost.

The fact that the margin was so narrow, less than 1% statewide, is remarkable considering the gap in funding between the pro and con sides. What’s not so remarkable: the top three funders for No on 37 were Monsanto, DuPont, and Pepsico. 

Now the Ventura group is trying to turn things around and rejoin the battle. No California legislators will agree to author a bill requiring GMO labeling, so activists are once again working on a ballet initiative, with hopes of getting it in front of voters in 2014. If you are interested in information or helping out with this group, you can contact them at labelgmoventura@gmail.org, check their Facebook page, or attend a strategy meeting on Sunday, March 10, 3 p.m. at the Clubhouse at Mira Vista Complex, 2760 E. Ponderosa Dr. in Camarillo.