There Are No ‘GMO’ Tomatoes: Backlash Erupts After Hunt’s Marketing Blunder

“No matter how far afield you look, you won’t find a single genetically modified tomato among our vines,” Hunt’s, the iconic company that makes preserved tomato products like ketchup, tomato paste and barbecue sauce, announced on December 26th. A video accompanying the announcement depicts a field of tomatoes and a message: “No GMOs in sight.” The backlash was swift, with hundreds of comments from consumers, farmers and scientists criticizing the company for fear mongering and pandering to “the superstitions of misinformed extremists.” “It's terribly unfortunate you're lying to consumers, Hunt's. GMO tomatoes are not available to the market and yet you're implying they are,” one critic wrote. Even though the term has little meaning, “GMO” has come to denote modern molecular genetic engineering methods used to achieve specific, targeted traits, from insect and disease resistant crops to apples that don’t turn brown. And science. But companies need to look at the bigger picture, and realize that anti-GMO marketing contributes to consumer rejection of genetic engineering. It means that farmers in Uganda, where bananas are a staple food, can’t use GMO banana plants resistant to disease threatening to wipe out the crop because of ideological regulations. Sometimes the best tool is “GMO" and sometimes it’s not, but it has never been used unsafely. As the AAAS report puts it, “consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.” Others pointed out that Hunt’s shouldn’t be rejecting “GMOs” even if there aren’t any GMO tomatoes on the market, explaining that genetic engineering is beneficial, and may prove necessary for sustainable tomato farming in the future. “When a food company shuns science to pander to activists I avoid their products,” wrote scientist and prolific communicator Kevin Folta.