Politics & Power Quote by Jeremy Rifkin

Rifkin’s line works like a warning label aimed not at a product but at a political culture that treats new technology as “progress” until someone gets hurt. The phrase “the American public is not aware” isn’t neutral description; it’s an accusation. Someone, implicitly, has made sure the public isn’t aware: regulators moving slowly, companies moving fast, and a media environment that translates technical uncertainty into a shrug.

The contrast he builds - “regular food” versus whatever new category he’s pointing at (in Rifkin’s era, that’s typically genetically engineered or industrially novel foods) - is strategically simple. Traditional food may still be dangerous, but it’s legible. People can name their allergies, learn family histories, read ingredients with some confidence. Novel food systems, by comparison, outsource knowledge to institutions: lab testing, corporate disclosure, federal oversight. His subtext is that those institutions are either compromised or structurally behind the curve.

He also sneaks in a moral claim by focusing on allergies and toxicity rather than abstract ecological risk. “Allergenic” is intimate and immediate; it’s about children, school lunches, ER visits. That rhetorical choice compresses the distance between policy debates and bodily stakes, turning “consumer choice” into a question of consent. If you don’t know what could happen, you can’t meaningfully choose.

Context matters: Rifkin rose as a prominent critic of biotech’s rollout, especially in the US, where regulatory frameworks often treat new food technologies as equivalent until proven harmful. His sentence leverages that asymmetry: industry gets the benefit of the doubt; the public gets the experiment.