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NEW ORLEANS—Charlie Arnot, a Kansas City public relations adviser to agribusiness, and Sam Kass, the former senior nutrition adviser in the Obama White House, would seem to come from the opposite ends of the food and agriculture world. But there is one thing on which they agree: Any attempts in Congress to stop the labeling of foods with genetically modified ingredients will not end the battle over labeling, because consumers are demanding more transparency about everything related to what they put in their mouths. Arnot’s work is to help agribusiness firms navigate the increasingly difficult territory of consumer demands, and he has developed a reputation for being able to bring difficult messages to agribusiness executives. Arnot has established the nonprofit Center for Food Integrity, which conducts an annual online survey of 2,000 consumers and what they expect from food companies in order to trust their products. At a Center for Food Integrity Food Summit here on Nov. 17, he told the food executives that his 2015 survey showed that consumers expect food companies—not farmers or grocers—to be more transparent about the impact of food on health and the environment, food safety, human and labor rights, the treatment of animals raised for food, and business ethics in food production. “Transparency is no longer optional,” Arnot said. Consumers believe that “big is bad” because they think that big, national food companies and big farms are more likely to put their own interests ahead of the public interest, but “we have statistical data to show that increasing transparency in farming, food production, and processing will increase consumer trust,” he said. “GMO has become an icon for what consumers don’t like about big food,” Arnot said. What consumers want is a “framework” in which all their concerns are discussed so that they can make purchasing decisions. “Transparency is coming. The story will get told. The question is who is going to tell it,” added Kass, who spent six years in the White House cooking for the Obama family and, as executive director of first lady Michelle Obama’s "Let’s Move!" campaign against childhood obesity, pushed food companies to make their products healthier. “There is nothing more intimate than people eating food,” added Kass, who is now a senior food analyst for NBC News and a fellow at the MIT Media Lab, where he is establishing his own independent voice on food policy. Neither Arnot nor Kass focused on genetic modification in their presentations, but the subject came up and the conference took place just one day before the Food and Drug Administration’s surprise announcements that the food from a genetically modified animal—salmon—is safe and that neither foods from crops nor salmon need to be labeled. The FDA announcements have energized the food companies and farm groups that are trying to convince the Senate to follow the House in passing a bill that would ban state labeling initiatives and establish a federal labeling program that critics say is so weak it would rarely be used. Organic farm groups and other advocates for labeling denounced the FDA rule-making, but it may be the decision to approve genetically modified salmon and not to require labeling of it that causes the most trouble for the anti-labeling movement. Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, whose constituents include the Pacific wild-salmon industry, has said she will do everything in her power to make sure that, at the very least, genetically modified salmon is labeled. As a first step, she has put a hold on Obama’s nomination of Robert Califf to be FDA commissioner. FDA’s approval of genetically modified salmon—since technically putting genes from other fish into a salmon is considered a drug application—shows that “the regulatory regime is not set up to handle these complicated conversations with the consumer,” Kass said, adding that the food industry should urge Congress to “revamp the regulatory approach” because FDA can’t change the law on its own. "I don’t have any concern that the salmon is unsafe to eat, but the regulatory regime is so dated that it is not applicable to where the technology is and it undermines public confidence,” Kass noted. “Food should not be approved as an animal drug.” One alternative to government-mandated labeling may be the “Smart Label” that Hershey is introducing to allow consumers to scan a QR code to instantly get detailed product information, from ingredient and nutrition facts to allergens. The mobile tool will reveal whether Hershey products contain genetically modified ingredients, but, in an example of increasing demands, Denneal Jamison-McClung, a professor at the University of California, Davis, told the conference that the label should include details on how the genetic modification was made. Consumer demand for information on genetically modified organisms is only the beginning of what consumers want to know, Arnot said, noting that some consumers now ask candy companies about the labor conditions on cane sugar plantations. For the big established food companies, transparency is “a never-ending journey,” Arnot said. Noting that Sweetgreen, the salad company, has pledged to tell people “where we are getting everything,” Kass said, “the ethos of the new generation of food companies is that they’re being founded on transparency and technology that will enable us to have real transparency.”
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