To the Editor:

Your September editorial1 makes a brave attempt to make sense of the 'puzzle' concerning public reluctance about genetically modified (GM) crop cultivation and GM food. It also makes plain, however, that there still is quite a bit of confusion about the nature of the problem—a confusion that continuously obstructs the path toward a sustainable solution.

Calls for the public to appreciate the 'facts of the matter' refer to an evergreen concept that, I'm sure, makes for much back-patting in scientific communities. Another party-starter used to be the notion of those pesky 'irrational' consumers. It is a relief to see that the endless discussions about trust and confidence in social science have finally made it to the scientific nexus: no, people don't read scientific reports, they listen to somebody they trust. But yes, it is a huge problem in this debate, as well as others, that the media tend to look for conflict rather than scientific consensus in some misunderstood pursuit of 'journalistic objectivity'. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's book The Merchants of Doubt ought to have been a chilling wake-up call to journalism as such2.

But that doesn't change the fact that agrichemical companies must ask themselves, with more persistence, why they are not (always) perceived as credible by the public. As the editorial hints, it very likely has to do with perceived alliances between regulators and industry—and, increasingly, scientists; in other words, as science increasingly becomes intertwined with various agendas, it looses credibility— the facts are not what they used to be. No doubt the countless food scandals linked to industrial food production have also made an impression, not to mention the guarantees from experts that those scares are inconsequential. This track record has likely heightened public skepticism about GM foods, a response that appears quite understandable. The title of the Feature3 that accompanies the editorial—“How safe do transgenic crops need to be?”3—is, hence, at best misleading: for the public, safety in the scientific sense is but one aspect of the matter.

The question of why consumers are concerned about GM food is many-faceted—for 'consumers' or 'the public,' for example, are heterogeneous entities in terms of knowledge, attitude and engagement. But one may have to be a food scientist—thrilled by the opportunities—to find it mysterious why many consumers are fundamentally critical about any new food technology. To be sure, consumer benefits such as low price or added health benefit will persuade some people to buy GM food. Others will be convinced if the technology contributes to a solution for major societal problems such as global warming, as a UK study on synthetic biology has demonstrated4. But to really move the debate forward in a constructive way, we must ask: how can the entire agrifood system be incentivized so that its products merit the kind of public credibility it desires?