For me I just want choice (at the super-market). Choice to not choose GMO, until there is more than enough evidence and discussion around the topic. Maybe you feel there is enough evidence, but I want more. I do not want said firm to 'force' me into eating their product just yet. This is my due diligence on the one life I live.
Why not go full scale and demand choice of not using the fruits of scary science at all? Demand every store to carry the products made of wild plants and hunted down wild animals only, with no products of selection (aka "genetically modified") at all? Why would mega-corporations force you to eat modern wheat, whose yields and chemical composition was completely modified by the corporate puppetmasters and whose production requires to use herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilizers and a variety of modern chemicals and technologies that very well might be accepted? Why not do the due diligence and eat the healthy diet that allowed our cavemen ancestors to live long and healthy lives? And if you can not feed 7 billion people with caveman technologies - too bad for them, you only have one life and you can't spend it worrying about such things.
The subject is conservatism. A conservative is not someone who rejects all of a thing, but someone who is skeptical and suspicious of new things.
As a result of many past issues with novel food products, people have become increasingly conservative about food. That doesn't mean that they reject all industrial or scientific agriculture, but they're likely to be suspicious of things that haven't been around for more than one or two generations. They're quick to reject novel changes in the food supply and very slow to accept them.
Along with having been burned in the past, I can think of another reason why this might be rational. The cost function is weighted heavily on the conservative side. It feels like something that could be modeled well with game theory.
The cost of food conservatism is likely a small increase in the amount of money paid for food. This is a very small cost for most first-worlders, where food is so available that obesity is a health crisis. The benefit is that the risks, if any, are well-known and are known to be tiny.
The cost of food liberalism, by contrast, is an unknown chance of getting cancer, heart disease, diabetes, allergic reactions and inflammatory disorders, etc. The unknown chance is probably very small, but many of those health effects have astronomically high costs that possibly include death or permanent disability. But the benefits are small to nonexistent, especially for your typical first-worlder who as I mentioned is drowning in food.
The same calculus underlies decisions to take out insurance policies on unlikely events such as floods or tornadoes. Statistically you'll probably be better off not buying insurance -- otherwise how would it be that the insurance company could make money? But you'd rather trade the risk of losing everything you own and having no recourse for a small amount of money that you're not going to miss.
>>> The unknown chance is probably very small, but many of those health effects have astronomically high costs that possibly include death or permanent disability.
This is a very basic math error. If you multiply two unknown quantities, you can not assume anything about the result, even if one of them is very big. So basically what you're saying is "we have no idea if it's dangerous or not, and there's absolutely no evidence on any danger present, but if it were, you could DIE!!! so PANIC!!!" This would be an extremely irrational and stupid behavior.
>>> But the benefits are small to nonexistent, especially for your typical first-worlder who as I mentioned is drowning in food.
The problem is that it is very fragile. If the anti-science idiots ever prevail, the whole food abundance we have now could very well collapse pretty quickly - without science, malthusian scenarios are very real, and the people who predicted massive hunger by 2000s could very well be right if science did not intervene. If the idiots ever succeed in their war on science, first world would be in no way insulated from the disastrous effects of their victory. The whole abundance is the direct effect of what you call "food liberalism" and it is the only thing maintaining it.
>>> The same calculus underlies decisions to take out insurance policies
Not at all. Insurance companies have very accurate actuarial and statistical data, which they use in very accurate and specific ways to issue insurance. They never base their decisions on "multiply two unknown numbers, make assumptions on the result, panic". Your decision on buying the insurance may very well be irrational, but the insurance market itself is very rational.
>>> Statistically you'll probably be better off not buying insurance
It is not true, since you can not be better "statistically" - the fact that it didn't happen to 100000 people would not improve your situation if it happens to you. The whole function of insurance is to make statistics work for you, without it statistics would be just a useless trivia - just as the fact that if Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average income of the bar visitors jumps - is useless for anybody in the bar, because they get no money from it. Insurance is the way to get you some money from statistics.
Do you have an idea where the seeds the farmer used came from? There the water came from? What is the chemical composition of the soil and which exactly chemicals in which quantities were put in it? Probably not. And it is never required to publish it. However, you require to publish data about using specific technology. Thus you single out this technology and stigmatize it, implying product using this technology is abnormal and substandard, and must be avoided. If the full knowledge was indeed important to you, you would solicit all the information above, but you do not. You want only information about specific technologies used, arbitrarily defined, for irrational reasons. It is fine, but the additional expense and regulatory hurdles you would impose on the producers because of this irrationality is not.
For me I just want choice (at the super-market). Choice to not choose GMO, until there is more than enough evidence and discussion around the topic. Maybe you feel there is enough evidence, but I want more. I do not want said firm to 'force' me into eating their product just yet. This is my due diligence on the one life I live.