Reason Magazine's Hit and run column has an interesting article about the Greenpeace targeting of Anheuser-Busch:
Greenpeace activists make their livings by scaring the public and so it is never really news when Greenpeacers launch another bogus alarm. This time they are going after beer drinkers.
The article goes quotes an article in the Boston Globe where Greenpeace claims that Budweiser is tainted with an experimental, genetically engineered rice strain, and points out that this rice is in fact approved by the US government.
This is fair and well, more interesting are the comments to the article, which go along two lines:
* Why does a libertarian magazine suddenly go for what regulators have ruled is safe to eat?
* What is rice - GMO or non-GMO - doing in this beer in the first place? A proper beer is not brewed with rice.
To muddle things up totally, a spokesman for the lager lads is quoted in the Globe story that the perfectly legal rice is destroyed during the brewing process:
Doug Muhleman, Anheuser-Busch's vice president of brewing, acknowledged in a prepared statement that US-grown long-grained rice "may have micro levels" of a genetically engineered protein called Liberty Link, but added that the protein is "substantially removed or destroyed" during the brewing of beer sold domestically.
How is that for creating consumer confidence? Zap, it is destoyed! Would you use such a term for how you handle an ingredient in a staple food?
And it opens up a new can of worms when it comes to the beer being exported, doesn't it? Greenpeace Germany are probably celebrating already.
Who said beer journalism is without significance?