GM Foods - What's In The Shops?

At the time of writing, no GM crops are commercially grown in the UK. And since Bayer CropScience decided to stop pursuing its goal of commercializing its Chardon LL modified maize, it looks unlikely that there will be any British GM cultivation in the immediate future except for the occasional government-approved trial (such as the one currently underway for a blight-resistant modified potato). Genetically modified crops are still imported from abroad, however, both as ingredients and as animal feed.

After a tightening of EU law in April 2004, all food derived from a GM organism must be labeled as such. This includes any product that contains individual ingredients with a GM content of 0.9% or higher. So if a biscuit was 1% soya oil, and the soya oil was 1.5% GM in origin, a label would be required. If the soya oil, for "accidental or technically una­voidable" reasons, was 0.5% GM, no label would be needed. In practice, however, this is all academic, since the major UK supermarkets, and many of the major food processors, have imposed their own stricter standards, and don't sell anything that would come close to requiring a label. The Co-op, for example, announced a number of years ago that it would stop selling any food that contained ingredients consisting of more than 0.1% GM-derived produce.

The major exception to the EU's strict GM labeling rules relates to animal products. Despite the fact that most biotech crops are grown as animal feed, there's no requirement to label meat, fish, eggs or dairy products from farm animals fed GM crops. There isn't any evidence to suggest that modified DNA can be passed from animal feed into meat or milk, but anti-GM campaigners such as Greenpeace point out that this hole in the labelling laws makes it impossible for consumers to boycott biotech foods completely. Marks & Spencer is the only major supermarket to have banned GM animal feed for its fresh meat and milk (the policy doesn't extend to frozen and pre-prepared products).

Another loophole is that labels are not required on food produced with the aid of, but not actually containing, GM-derived substances. For example, the chymosin enzyme - "rennet" - used to separate the curds and whey in cheese production is usually produced with modified yeast or bacteria. The main exception is traditional cheese made with rennet from calves' stomachs.

These loopholes aside, most people in the UK aren't currently buying or consuming GM foods in any serious quantities. If you'd rather be consuming none at all, including products from animals fed on GM crops, buy organic, since the organic rules ban all use of GM technologies. Even this may not completely remove all traces of modification from your diet, since accidental contamination of organic food by GM crops has been widely spotted. According to a study published by Mark Partridge and Denis J. Murphy in the British Food Journal, out of 25 "organic/health foods containing soya beans ... ten tested positively for the presence of GM material"; eight of these were labeled organic.