WARNING: This food was derived from plants whose genomes were MUTATED from the single-cell ancestor of all living things
That would probably get the fundamentalist "Chrisitans"/young Earth creationists, to stop purchasing it. I mean after all the Earth has only been here for about 6000 years and all of the plants and animals were created exactly as they are and always have been. That evolution nonsense is just a lie to persecute them for their strongly held anti-intellectual beliefs.
I'm for food labeling too, as long as it's not takent to ridiculous extremes, such as having to write "WARNING: Contains Peanuts" on a bag of peanuts, or putting dietary information (calories, protein, etc.) on a bottle of pure water.
You mean the labeling that already takes place
have you ever deliberately chosen one product over another because it was fattier
All the time, I always choose 85/15, when it comes to ground beef, because the extra fat, provides extra flavor and I've never had a 'lean' burger that tasted anywhere near approaching good. If you've never chosen steaks, it's always best to choose a steak that has nice streaks of fat running through it, rather than one that is overly lean. All those beautiful white lines of marbling running through that steak are what help make it so god damned juicy and tasty. Unless of course you're one of those people that likes a well done (usually over done) steak with some ketchup.
Not a small proportion of us
So the difference between Slashdot and politics is that,
people who "obsess" with "gluten-free-ism" do that because they have a very real (Medical) problem
It may of been more that way when it hit the forefront, people suffering from Ciliac's and the like that need to avoid gluten. Now it's just become trendy, like being a vegetarian or vegan, many people striving to be gluten-free, just because there's someone famous saying how gluten is bad for you or how their on a gluten free diet. The increasing number of sheeple is what should really worry those of us that are capable of independent thought, rather than simple regurgitation.
I think more detailed labeling about the amount of sugar artificially added to foods would be of more immediate value.
Especially the corn syrups. I swear that stuff is evil. When I took a trip to Australia and New Zealand a couple of years ago I was gone for a month, the only thing that changed about my daily amount of activity or diet, was that I didn't have any HFCS, from the time I left LAX, till I got back to the states. I came back 12 pounds lighter than when I left.
How do you feel about crops where the seeds are naturally sterile, [wikipedia.org] and there's no known wild form of the plant?
There's a huge difference between something like saffron being sterile and a company like Monsanto, wanting to create seeds for staple crops like corn sterile. Their idea of wanting to produce a sterile seed is that they can then lock farmers into their product, even more so than they do already.
"Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberrys!" -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail