A new Washington initiative may require labels on genetically engineered foods.
Initiative 522, which was submitted to the Washington Secretary of State Jan. 3, would require companies to label all food produced entirely or partly through genetic engineering beginning July 1, 2015. Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, are plants or animals that have been created using DNA of other organisms. In the United States, this technique is mostly used to create herbicide-resistant crops, according to the initiative.
Formal plant breeding has been going on in agriculture for the last 100 years, said John Tuxill, a professor at Fairhaven College, but primarily through breeding within species or between closely related species.
"It is all dependent upon moving genes through reproduction," he said. "With genetic engineering, you can take genes from completely unrelated organisms and transfer them [to a new organism]."
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