It's kind of hard. I deal in the facts. I guess it's much easier for people to fear something they don't know. When you're dealing with superstitions, myths, and, in some cases, people would say, religion, you're dealing with faith and fear. Science has to be grounded in facts, so when a scientist speaks of whether something is safe, they speak in terms of “generally regarded” or “our evidence shows”. People coming from the other side of the argument will be more forceful with the words they use.
As my colleague Daniel here suggested, in a survey done by a very reputable firm, over 70% of people thought the meat they were eating in Canada was genetically modified, more so in poultry than in beef and pork. Over 60% of them thought the strawberries they were eating were genetically modified. These products do not exist in Canada.
As far as I know, they don't exist anywhere, but once these myths are perpetrated, published by non-scientific journals, and repeated in the newspapers or on news media—much like some celebrities would like us to believe things like “vaccination cause autism”—that credibility they carry is damaging to the actual scientific facts. These are the types of things we fight on a daily basis. We need to engage these people in their own environment, and that's in the Twitterverse and in social media.
Two weeks ago, there was a great example in Berkeley, California. A very well-known scientist, Pam Ronald, a colleague whom I know quite well, was speaking in a very open dialogue and an engaged environment, with 700-plus students watching, about genetic modification and the need for it to be incorporated into the food system. These are the types of things we need to do and that I think governments should be supporting it, particularly the Canadian government.