"The industry's not stupid. The industry knows that if those foods are labeled "genetically engineered," the public will shy away and won't take them"
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“The industry’s not stupid” is a loaded opening move: Rifkin isn’t just describing corporate behavior, he’s pre-empting the usual defense that confusion and inertia explain why transparency fails. He frames the food business as fully rational and strategically self-interested, which shifts the debate from science to power. The subtext is that labeling fights are not about informing consumers but about controlling risk to sales. If “genetically engineered” is a neutral descriptor, why fear the words?
Rifkin’s line also smuggles in a hard truth about how public opinion actually works. People don’t make grocery decisions by reading white papers; they read signals. A label is a cultural cue, not a graduate seminar. By predicting that “the public will shy away,” he’s banking on the fact that biotech, fairly or not, triggers anxieties about tampering, corporate control, and being made a test subject without consent. The industry’s fear, in his telling, is less about safety data than about narrative: once a product is marked as “engineered,” it becomes a choice with moral and political stakes.
Context matters: this argument lands in decades of GMO disputes where regulators, companies, and activists wage proxy wars over language. “Genetically engineered” competes with softer branding like “bioengineered,” and the fight over wording is the fight over who gets to define normal. Rifkin’s intent is to reframe labeling as accountability: if the market is so confident, it shouldn’t need to hide behind ambiguity.
Rifkin’s line also smuggles in a hard truth about how public opinion actually works. People don’t make grocery decisions by reading white papers; they read signals. A label is a cultural cue, not a graduate seminar. By predicting that “the public will shy away,” he’s banking on the fact that biotech, fairly or not, triggers anxieties about tampering, corporate control, and being made a test subject without consent. The industry’s fear, in his telling, is less about safety data than about narrative: once a product is marked as “engineered,” it becomes a choice with moral and political stakes.
Context matters: this argument lands in decades of GMO disputes where regulators, companies, and activists wage proxy wars over language. “Genetically engineered” competes with softer branding like “bioengineered,” and the fight over wording is the fight over who gets to define normal. Rifkin’s intent is to reframe labeling as accountability: if the market is so confident, it shouldn’t need to hide behind ambiguity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Food |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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