Two points:

1. I can think there are things wrong with food safety and advocate for new things being done safely at the same time. To some degree, you have to make changes where there's the political will to improve, even if it's not perfect.

2. The rate of mutation and deployment of new cultivars is really the concerning aspect, not the mechanism. I think we should have to label and clone cultivars (while checking for drift) these days, which still isn't perfect but better.

I want to make wider changes, but there's no reason not to start with limited changes at the start, particularly if we can do it for the method that's likely to be the long-term winner.

GMOs have the economic advantage of precision and control, while they also have the political will around them to effect regulation. So you can effect long-term broad legislation by targetting GMOs at this early stage.

So let me ask you this, if I were broadly concerned by food as widely practiced, unregulated pharmacy, why wouldn't I target regulation on a politically hot portion of the market as the wedge for wider reform?

I would think you'd be concerned to get the food industry on your side. This seems likely to be more difficult than necessary if you propose to shift consumers away from some of their products and hand them inconsistent labeling standards across their product ranges.

Besides, free markets don't operate well if buyers have information on only half the products.

Holy smokes, that mutation breeding was news to me!

That's how typical plant selective breeding works. Plant a bunch of the plant, induce all the mutations you can with all the mutagens (radiation, chemicals, etc.) you can, and look for useful traits. Then use recombinant breeding techniques to try to breed just those traits back in.

This has been standard practice since at least the 40s. There's very little "natural" about it.