Team:UCSC/Elected Official
Elected Official
Now that we developed an intuition for the legal considerations of the ‘What is Natural?’ question, we decided to explore how our elected officials—those responsible with enacting these changes—viewed this question. Elected officials often serve as the crossroad between legal considerations and public opinion; and in doing so highly influence how, when, and what laws are legislated.
For this we drove down to Watsonville to speak with Lowell Hurst, the former mayor of Watsonville County and lifelong political advocate. Lowell, the only mayor in Watsonville history to have been elected twice, was generous enough to show us around the town center and teach us the history of the county. Additionally, he agreed to sit down with us for an interview regarding GMOs and the definition of ‘Natural.’ Given the importance of agriculture to the Watsonville heritage and economy, we wanted to understand both the history of this public debate, as well as what the ramifications of a FDA labeled definition of ‘Natural’ would be for the farming community.
To begin the interview, Mr. Hurst described to us how the definition of ‘natural’ is truly “in the eye of the beholder”, and how difficult it can be from a public policy standpoint to integrate all of the different definitions and their implications. Lowell further explained that the origin of ‘Natural’ and the controversy of its definition began around two decades ago, stemming from the growing food scares over consumer safety. Watching Watsonville transition from a focus on canned foods, to the convenience of frozen foods, to the allure of fresh, ‘natural’, leafy greens, Lowell feels strongly that these definitions are often merely semantics resulting from changing markets. Interestingly, in response to our question Lowell stated that there were certainly cases in which farmers desired the benefits that genetic modifications could provide, but were deterred due to consumer preference. When asked whether GMOs could be considered 'Natural', Lowell mentioned that we have been engaging in genetic manipulation of crops since we first began crop breeding; a sentiment that our team connected with and carried with us to future events.
