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The implication here is that we should just assume that food companies such as Monsanto really do have our best interests at heart.

That is absolutely NOT what I wrote. Go read that post again. For you to characterize it as such is so ignorant of my record here in twelve years at FR as to be both negligent and blinded by irrational fear. Go read my FR page. Go read my patent application for free market environmental management. If anything, I have stood for more stringent product standards, but in a competitive free market of risk management and product verification, not the bogus straw-man you infer.

So since you don't know how Underwriters' Laboratories works, go look it up. Nobody producing a product with a UL tag gets to do what you suggest. UL is a private service that tests and verifies the safety of manufactured products. It is funded by insurance companies. The insurer has a customer's stake in whether the product they insure is worthy of coverage, but they lack the expertise to make that determination. Hence, when you buy a product, you are paying the subscription cost of that testing for the insurance behind the product. The supplier maintains the integrity of his proprietary process and intellectual property and the UL seal assures that it is safe to use.

More important than malevolent intent is whether or not companies know what they are doing. The risks appear when the available data are insufficient for a deterministic estimate of risk. When a company has committed millions (or even billions) to a new technology, there is then the hurdle of denial that it might have its problems. Yet even then, most companies do realize that selling a dangerous product is a problem for them. Asbestos at least has taught them that, but there are many more instances that are pertinent to this very topic.

There is one other important reason that UL exists: besides providing assurance that the product is safe, it protects proprietary data about how the product is made. The final customer has no means to evaluate whether the contact plating should be copper, silver, gold over electroless nickel, or rhodium. UL has the experience to make that assessment.

Given what I have posted, I suppose you might all be surprised that I am in fact an avid reader of labels. Yet I would NEVER try to use government to FORCE company to disclose its product contents or processes. In a free market, they have the option to tell me what I want to know and I retain the option not to buy the product. Until I do buy that product, the information belongs to them as private property. It is up to them to convince me that their product is something I want to buy. That’s where label information is legitimate.

Oh, but that alone CAN’T get them to tell you enough, right? Well, neither can the government. In fact, they don't even try.

How many of you saw “corn sweetener” on labels for years and thought nothing of it? Did that label protect you from “high fructose corn syrup”? When you see that on a label today, it is as often to inform you that it is NOT there! Once people had heard about how addictive HFC was and how conducive it is to any number of health disorders, market incentives were absolutely sufficient to get the producers to change their product formulations and their labels. It happened fast too (and I promise you: it is NOT easy to do because FDA and USDA qualification processes are so protracted). There was a similar response to trans fats, and I’ll bet you all have bought products for decades that had them on the labels and thought nothing of it.

A label cannot guarantee you that a product is safe. I have plenty of chemical background with which to comprehend much of what is on the labels I read. Yet there are plenty of products I buy that I have no idea what that truly means in the finished article despite the fact that the label has the ingredients on them. I know a lot about cars, but I don't know enough to buy one without the advice of third parties. If fact, that is just as true with most of what you eat. The ingredients lists tell you what was added, but not what the reaction products are after processing such as cooking, much less anything about the witch's brew of chemistry that is in natural goods.

I would hazard that none of you have ever developed a product for the mass consumables market. I have. I was responsible for concept design, formulation, machine prototype development, process design, installation, permitting, and regulatory compliance, construction management, even drafting the patent applications. The product was a disposable medical device that was also qualified for the food processing industry. So I do have some familiarity with the kind of qualifications process demanded by both the FDA and the USDA. Neither one is easy.

Inexpensive new products are highly capital intensive. They are also very hard to get onto grocery shelves. Producers with market power have a far easier time than a new entrant. Our tiny division had the resources of a Fortune 200 company quality and compliance group to facilitate that qualification. Obtaining approval for a label means nothing to them. To a start-up, it's a big deal.

There are two things mass producers of cheap products guard jealously as trade secrets, material content and process knowledge. To force that new entrant to disclose what is in his product has the high likelihood of keeping the noob out of the market entirely. In other words, it’s the big guys who want this kind of bureaucracy, not the small producers, because of economies of scale in production, marketing, and compliance.

Hence, a label of ingredients not only cannot tell you the product is safe, it does not tell you enough to know what the product even is. But here is where that last attribute of UL I mentioned comes in: There is someone who knows exactly what those labels imply: the producer's competitors.

Are we to believe that adding a label that says "Contains Genetically Modified Ingredients" or "This product is genetically modified" would be prohibitively expensive?

I want you to find the words "prohibitively expensive" in anything I wrote. Nor is it the issue I have raised about this proposition.

This proposition is looking to inform the consumer of a potential danger, not forcing further dangers on us.

Nonsense. This proposition informs of whether the ingredients of the product ever contained a GMO, not whether or not the product is dangerous or even if the GMO is chemically present in the final product! An example is ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) made from Bt corn (ascorbic acid is often used as a preservative). In bulk form, the ascorbic acid has been refined to the point that there is nothing of Bacillus thuringiensis left. Is that any more dangerous than some other ascorbic acid? No, it’s not even chemically different. Yet the two labels would have to be different under this law.

Oh, but what about a residue? This is where it gets silly. You eat 5,000 to 10,000 times by weight naturally occurring carcinogens and mutogens compared to artificial sources. In not one of those goods are those carcinogenic chemicals listed as ingredients. Some are chemicals that plants use to resist pests, shown to be effective for millennia without being overcome by pest adaptation. The concentration of these chemicals is strongly affected by how the food is handled, whether it was chilled soon enough, bruised, or stored too long. Effectively, bruised food that sits in your refrigerator is far more toxic than fresh picked food; in effect, it is dangerous. Does the government tell you that?

That information about the principal source of carcinogens taken internally by humans is NOT on your Prop 65 label. Worse, agribusiness wants to hold that imported food is equivalent to fresh local produce, hence, the work done at NIH to establish toxicity as a function of product history was spiked. So much for label protection.

Other naturally carcinogens are induced because of how you process your food. Typically, frying, roasting, and broiling cause meats to form cancer causing toxins. So does toasting grain. Nobody knows all the implications. Effectively, even your fresh produce is too complex for anyone to understand fully. Labels do not guarantee safe food and yes, prop 65 is a perfect example of how idiotic this proposal is re GMOs.

You see, it will be equally complex as to whether a particular proprietary plant is or is not a GMO. You don't see that now, but just wait. There are plenty of reasons to do modifications that will benefit human health that have NOTHING, ZERO, NADA to do with changing what you eat. Is it a bad thing to put something of collard greens into spinach to make it more frost tolerant? Recombinant technology sure as hell is easier than cross breeding for decades with uncertain results. Is it a bad thing to link them to less tasty variants that happen to be more drought tolerant? I promise you: Plants raised under less stress are likely to be MORE healthful, but you would give those varieties the Scarlet Letter despite the fact that the plant's genetics would still fall within the range of variability found within the species.

Do I trust labels? To a degree they help, but no. When it is insufficient, I consult third party sources of information, FOR WHICH I PAY (if only by my tolerance for advertising). You see, the analysis cannot be done for free. Yet it is in the realm of virtually public information where food labels most often derive meaning. Food companies weren’t the original informers of risk re HFC or trans fats, nor should we expect them to be. They were making what we agree to buy. But competitive market forces have made them the biggest informers as to whose products have them and whose do not.

You clearly believe a consumer should be “fully informed” about a product before he buys anything. The reality is that any product these days including "simple" fresh vegetables, is so complex that even if you know EVERYTHING about how the grower, processor, and distributor handle EVERY aspect of the delivery of that product, you will not know how safe it is or is not when you buy it, never mind after you get done storing and preparing it. That spinach is producing toxic "defensins" from the moment it is picked. You don’t know if the picker practices decent hygiene. You don’t know how long it had been in transit or whether the mineral content of the soil is depleted. You can ask for that information, you can even refuse to buy the product without it, but you do not have that right to FORCE that producer to supply it. Even if you could, I doubt you could ever have enough information to absolutely know whether that the product is totally safe. More ironic, once “genetically modified” becomes a means to reduce carcinogenic defensin content by inhibiting the process by which they are produced, with no other difference to the material, what will you say then? Is the product any different? Yes, it's better. Thus, the criteria by which a product is deemed "genetically modified" will similarly be subject to question AND the good will be conflated with the bad.

This prop 37 label doesn’t even attempt to tell you whether the modification is adverse or beneficial; it simply presumes that ANY genetic modification, including those for purposes of controlling growing habits, is more likely to be harmful than natural. Why in G_d’s name would any conservative trust a political system instead of an independent third party with their survival at stake if they fail their customers?

As to expense, you can bet your booty that small local producers will be disproportionately affected by the legislation, the very people upon whose existence you depend for the survival of your community should a true meltdown occur. Your fear of Monsanto will help do them in and Monsanto will still be there with their fingers wrapped around your throat because you helped kill their competitors. Nice going, “conservatives.” You have fallen for the siren song of progressivism and to no good end.

You're referring to massive companies buying regulations they want to make themselves more powerful and keep competitors down. I fail to see how that problem relates to this matter.

You "fail to see" a lot more than you realize.