The California GMO Right to Know Campaign—One More Million!

In a recent sur­vey, he found one. “Voters express almost unan­i­mous sup­port for manda­tory label­ing of genet­i­cally engi­neered foods,” Mellman wrote.

Several other polls have shown sim­i­lar results: 89-93% sup­port for label­ing.  But will the over­whelm­ing sup­port trans­late to votes this fall for Proposition 37?

The measure—which would sim­ply require labels to include infor­ma­tion about whether food has been genet­i­cally engi­neered, which means its DNA has been manip­u­lated by genes from other plants, ani­mals, viruses, or bacteria—is likely to be the biggest David vs. Goliath bat­tle on the California bal­lot this fall.

“Proposition 37 promises to set up a big-money bat­tle pit­ting nat­ural food busi­nesses and activists against multi­na­tional com­pa­nies includ­ing PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and Kellogg,” reported Marc Lifsher in the Los Angeles Times.

“Backers and oppo­nents have already raised nearly $4 mil­lion com­bined for cam­paigns to sway vot­ers, an amount that’s likely to swell into the tens of mil­lions of dol­lars as the November elec­tion approaches.”

On the oppos­ing side are some of the largest anti-union, pro-pesticide agri­chem­i­cal inter­ests in the world, as Zack Kaldveer wrote in California Progress Report.

These include Monsanto, the chem­i­cal com­pa­nies and the largest food manufacturers—the same food com­pa­nies that already label genet­i­cally engi­neered food in 49 other coun­tries includ­ing all of Europe, Japan, China, India and Russia.

Americans deserve to know what’s in the food we eat, too. But can the pub­lic inter­est, and the over­whelm­ing major­ity sup­port, stand up to the country’s rich­est corporations?

While it’s a safe bet that pro­po­nents of Proposition 37 will be out­spent in the ad war, the Yes on 37 Right to Know cam­paign has a war chest of a dif­fer­ent kind: peo­ple power.

In one of the most inspir­ing polit­i­cal sto­ries of the year, thou­sands of vol­un­teers mobi­lized across California to help the label­ing mea­sure col­lect almost a mil­lion sig­na­tures in just 10 weeks, nearly twice the num­ber needed to qual­ify for the bal­lot. Many of them were moth­ers and grand­moth­ers who are not typ­i­cally out on the streets peti­tion­ing for polit­i­cal issues—but they want to know what’s in their food.

Few, if any, other elec­tion cam­paigns in the state have mobi­lized so many vot­ers so quickly with such a huge net­work of vol­un­teers. Now, the Yes on 37 Campaign is pledg­ing to make his­tory again with an ambi­tious goal of orga­niz­ing One Million More Californians for the Right to Know.

The One Million More drive, launched this week, involves thou­sands of vol­un­teers going door to door and reach­ing out at gro­cery stores and farm­ers mar­kets around the state. The cam­paign is also launch­ing an online orga­niz­ing offen­sive, with vot­ers show­ing their sup­port at www.CARightToKnow.org and in social net­works and online communities.

More than 300 blog­gers have signed on to pro­mote the cam­paign and more than 800 orga­ni­za­tions have endorsed Yes on 37, includ­ing farm, busi­ness, con­sumer and envi­ron­men­tal groups, pub­lic health advo­cates and labor unions.

As these groups attempt to make his­tory by orga­niz­ing a mil­lion more sup­port­ers, the Yes on 37 Right to Know Campaign has already made his­tory by stand­ing up to some of America’s most pow­er­ful cor­po­ra­tions that want to keep us in the dark about what’s in our food.

Which side of his­tory will you be on?

You can sign up to join One Million More who agree that we have the right to know what we eat and feed our families.

Stacy Malkan is media direc­tor for the Yes on 37 California Right to Know Campaign to label genet­i­cally engi­neered foods. If passed by vot­ers in November, California would be the first state in the U.S. to require label­ing for a wide range of genet­i­cally engi­neered foods.