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GM and Other Food Production Techniques
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When a consumer asks "Is this food genetically modified?" and a business responds "we want laws that specifically ensure we never have to tell you," that seems, y'know, a bit suspicious.
I'm not specifically stating that GM foods are unsafe, but given the level of food and drug-based fuck-ups over the last decade, consumer fear and a general refusal to accept "trust us, its safe" doesn't seem particularly irrational. I don't see any problem with allowing consumers the option to avoid GM foods if they want to for safety, ethical, or delusional reasons, and if consumer paranoia and distrust is so significant that such an option kills GM foods in their entirety, maybe an industry with that kind of reputation should focus more or "not poisoning shit" and less on "making corn shoot lasers at pests PEWPEW."
Also, as I mentioned earlier, putting a GM warning label on foods is just going to give unneeded legitimacy to paranoid claims. It wouldn't alleviate it, it would just inflame the problem.
(the way food is irradiated, the absolute worst thing that could happen is that you'd damage some of the nutritional values. These groups are generally afraid of radioactive food, which can't happen that way)
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I've seen this assertion a couple of times in here, and it doesn't get any less silly with repetition. Genetic modifications of food crops so far haven't been about increasing yield to prevent disaster, they've been about expanding profit margin through reducing attendant costs from chemical application. Which is pretty neat, because spraying less would be nice, but GM is a very long way from being the saviour of the poor, particularly since GM crops are grown almost exclusively by and for developed countries at this point. Poor people can't even afford the fucking seeds. Which is another problem with GM...
You're not really thinking outside the box here. Firstly, GM mods like bt aren't going to last in terms of pest advantage, because of bred resistance in the target pest population. Secondly, african farmers (and farmers across the developing world) are in the shit primarily because their skills are low - they don't have any knowledge of non-chemical means of pest control, they don't have any knowledge about soil conservation techniques, and frequently they don't even know about crop rotation methods. They're not stupid, the problem is that their social and cultural fabric has been shredded by a hundred plus years of colonialism and civil warfare, so the holders of traditional knowledge have been hacked out of the culture with machetes, the social and economic situation is too tenuous to allow them to learn from outsiders or afford fertiliser and pesticides, and they're frequently too busy running away from angry militia to farm effectively anyway. GM seeds are expensive, and while they require less pest control, they do require more fertiliser ($) and as I recall, more water. GM has potential, but right now, its not a panacea. It will not save the developing world.
Golden rice is fucking useless if you don't already have a balanced diet, because otherwise it goes right through you. You need a certain amount of fats and oils in your diet before you can absorb the extra goodness. Its a cute demonstration of what GM could do, but its not going to save the lives of anyone who's actually back to living on nothing but rice. A rasher of bacon and a vitamin pill would do a lot more.
Salinity-resistant crops would be pretty freakin' awesome, yes. Especially if sea level rise gets to the point where saline intrusion into coastal groundwater becomes a major issue.
But still, mostly awesome for us, because we can afford the seeds.
HFCS metabolism in humans may be contested, but the substance itself is far more of a problem because of the way its produced. Read some Michael Pollan.
Upon re-reading, the only refutation that article does is say that lactase can break down the lactose disaccharide when the galactose part of the disaccharide is slightly different. I will concede that point. However, the article points out that if there is any change whatsoever to the glucose part of the disaccharide, lactase cannot break it down, thus supporting my point, as glucose is apparently the crucial part of the substrate. Also, the article specifically mentions enzyme specificity as "lactase does not behave as a typical β-galactosidase," suggesting that enzyme specificity is the norm, and not the exception. And it is specific in regards to the glucose part of lactose.
I didn't think you were actually arguing that genetic modification is the problem here, but your phrasing (and a lot of other people's) consistently conflates genetic modification itself with the way that corporations currently use genetic modification, and I thought it could use some clarification.
This, probably.
I'm not so sure it's paranoia. My wife is a molecular biologist working on animal diseases. She won't eat genetically modified food and neither will I. We aren't tech hating luddites with no understanding. I run a computer games business and she has a phd in molecular biology. We love tech, but we don't have blind faith in it.
I trust corporations driven by profit to experiment making new mp3 players, I don't trust them with the food chain. Given how little scientists really know about the causes of some diseases and the way genes work, the whole GM thing smells suspiciously like a programmer changing a few random hex values and keeping his fingers crossed.
One day, there may be enough technical knowledge of genes to fiddle with the food chain. We aren't there yet, regardless of what monsantos shareholders would like us to think.
maybe.
But I remember the UK nuclear energy industry saying nuclear generated electricity would b so cheap, nobody would need meters any more. Turned out to be the exact opposite. I don't trust the GM food companies to be impartial about the benefits of their products.
That, and we still can't get any fishermen to stop fishing unsustainable. Hell, we have European fishermen going down down and depleting African fish stocks.
Is there any objection to just saying that Monsanto can't make GM crops and letting everybody else go on their way?
Really? Care to expand on those excellent safeguards, because as far as I'm aware the only things mandating that GM food is safe are the FDA (ha-ha) and any research or food production companies' self-enforced safety mechanics.
With the FDA being particularly worthless in the last few years, we're back to square one, which is "Trust us, its safe, now eat it."
It doesn't strike me as particularly paranoid to suspect that a liar may be lying. After being told everything from cigarettes to DDT was harmless, some people have come to suspect that the scientists deciding what is safe for human consumption may not have the consumer's best interests in mind. Quite a few posters in this thread have already raised valid issues with GM foods, and while those concerns don't make the entire GM food industry unsafe, they do need to be addressed and you can be damn sure that once GM food is forced down consumers' throats without their permission any significant portions of money or time being spent on GM safety research is going to go down to somewhere around "zero."
Essentially, you have a wide range of production and research companies, many with spotty track records regarding consumer safety, saying "We shouldn't be forced to tell you what you're putting in your body" and, at the same time, saying "genetically modified foods are perfectly safe, trust us." Those two claims are not compatible.
This is just from a consumer right's angle. If you're talking about the ethical and environmental impacts (or, more accurately, potential impacts, because we have fuck-all idea what this is going to do decades down the line), you're getting into an entirely new bag of issues, and plenty of consumers may want to avoid GM foods for non-health reasons, and I'm not convinced in the slightest that they shouldn't be allowed to.
So, how about the Nerica bio-engineered strain of rice that's increased rice yields by 2-3 times (and the farmers can replant the seeds of)?
Or the push to develop a drought-resistant strain of corn that will drastically increase yield in areas hit by drought? Royalty-free and all that.
There's also "golden rice" that contains beta-carotene which could combat childhood blindness from vitamin A deficiency in third world countries.
There's also the work on a GM banana species that can resist a fungal infection which currently destroys yields in Uganda.
The FDA has to approve any new GM varieties. That can include running tests and examining the tests made by the companies. And I still ask, is there any instance of an approved GM food causing health problems? And even if the FDA were "worthless" like you assert, the solution would be to fix the FDA, not bring the decision for food safety on to people who have the least information to make that determination.
Wait, when did anyone ever approve cigarettes as healthy? I don't think ever. The first time the government stepped in was to mandate warning labels, restrict advertising and impose taxes.
Also your assertion that somehow GM foods will become untested after they're accepted is just hysteria. FDA approval is still a big deal for new drugs, despite the fact that drugs have been accepted for a long time.
Also the government has a responsibility to make sure food is safe, not to cater to the paranoia of everyone who can think of a doomsday scenario of some condition that might in their minds lead to unsafe food. If Retard McJoeBob thinks that growing crops in North-South rows is the Devil's way to grow corn and wants his food labeled "North-South grown", the government has no business mandating that label. Just like they have no business "teaching the controversy" of intelligent design or explaining both sides of the "moon hoax debate."
Giving consumers more information is never a bad idea. Maybe I'm worried about my health. Maybe I'm worried about the environment. Maybe I dont trust the regulating agencies. Maybe I dont want to support companies like Monsanto. Maybe I just dont like the idea of genetic engineering in the first place. Maybe I'm just a quack. Regardless, the decision of what I buy and put into my body are fundamentally my own decisions, and under no circumstances should my information on what I buy be limited by anyone.
Democracy is all about people making their own decisions, regardless of how stupid these decisions may be.
I've already discussed this, government mandated gives a legitimacy to the movement that is not warranted.
Also I don't want all of my food packaging to say "Transported by diesel trucks, grown near power lines, chemically fertilized, handled by the Irish, wasn't spoken softly to while growing, etc" just because some yahoos have unsupported theories about food safety.
Oh yeah and democracy is about letting people vote for their political leaders. It has nothing to do with package labeling. Governments only have an obligation to provide information on packaging when it is relevant.
There are a lot of people who are irrationally scared of genetic modification because they worship anything they consider "Natural" or "Organic," or because they think we shouldn't be playing God.
Luckily, I don't think there's a large contingent of those people in D&D.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yeah, it only took a few decades for them to get around to making sure people knew the full truth about the product they'd been buying.
Please. GM foods are specifically tested and vetted as safe. Cigarettes never were. That was my point. Stop making stupid comparisons.
I personally don't believe there's a significant health risk by eating the food. It's been around for a while now, nothing really significant has popped up. And while regulations are shabby, GM is under close scrutiny due to the public outcry, and yet nothing really bad is found. There can always be more research, and maybe something is wrong with it. But the outcry sometimes never stops, and sometimes turns into irrational superstition (see: nuclear energy, powerlines, microwaves, cellphones).
What is potentially bad is growing huge, huge fields of all the genetically same plant. That just has to end in tears sometime. If there's a disease that hits it, they're all dead. If something is wrong with their genetic makeup, it's wrong with all of them. Consider what happens if say 20% of the worlds grain dies for whatever reason.
But overall, the bad outweighs the good. We need to drasticly up the revenue from farming outside the west. It's the only way to feed the population, apart from our current hobby of cutting down the south american rainforest to do so. These aren't small margins either, a european farmer has about 10x the yield/m3 as an african one. GM is potentially the most useful solution.
I can totally see how asking for a label stating "This food has been genetically modified" is EXACTLY like requesting that intelligent design be taught in schools.
Please strawman your arguments more, I'd love to encounter these "unreasonable paranoid delusionists" you keep referring to, as they seem to be the focal point for you ignoring the requests of everyone else that a new and relatively untested form of food modification be allowed some tiny form of consumer scrutiny.
Yeah, unverified experts claiming that putting something in your body is safe is completely unlike unverified experts claiming that putting something in your body is safe.
What you want on your packaging is irrelevant. Democracies are about free and open societies where people can do what they want. Some want to know what they eat. And as I mentioned, there are other reasons beyond safety that people want this sort of labeling.
Labelling food as Kosher will only serve to encourage Judaistic conspiracy theories!
Not exactly but there are parallels. It's masses of uninformed people pushing through an unnecessary policy change. Though I can see your objections at the analogy.
FDA approval != some nurse saying a cigarette is good for you. Any jackass can get some random nurse to say something completely stupid. Come back to me when you've gotten FDA approval for something blatantly unsafe and then we'll talk. I'm actually finding it hard to believe that you're trying to compare the two after getting all huffy about my ID analogy.
That actually gives me an idea. You can check the ingredients for pork or whatever to satisfy your religious constraints. I actually wouldn't be opposed to having GM strains show up in the ingredients as shorthand for specific strains. Like what electricitylikesme said. The information would be there for people who are hellbent on getting it, but it's not overly dramatic like a warning label shoved on the front of the package. Would that make everyone happy?
Sounds awesome, but if you read the article, it seems be traditionally bred rather than a GM crop. Still, super work building on the Green Revolution, espeically since its an African innovation. Good on them, and I'll be keeping that link for slapping down those people who charge into Africa threads and declare everyone on the continent useless savages. I hate those people.
That's more like it, but still not here, and the article talks a lot about Australia using it. Frankly, that bothers me. We're a) not starving b) competing with SE Asia in the rice sales market and c) incredibly wasteful of what little water we have already. I'm not sure I like the idea of pushing cropping further into marginal lands than we already do, for a whole host of reasons. Still, good insurance in times of disaster, like the article ends up saying. Certainly much more useful than the first-gen mods, to my mind.
As I've already explained, that's a load of horseshit in practice. See the page previous.
Bananas are an interesting case, yes - being clones, they're very vulnerable to pests. Engineering some robustness back into the species is one of the few applications I have no problem with at all.
However, my points about the real causes of food shortages and poor yields in developing countries remain. Economic and social stability, as well as education, do far more to increase yields than magic beans ever could.
Not technically GM, but not traditional breeding. They had to use a bio-engineering technique to get the species to exist. It seems to fit into the "but yer messin' with our food and you don't know what will happen" category.
You're probably right, but banning GM crops cannot be a good thing for the world food supply.
You know, just once it would be nice to debate a position I actually hold, as opposed to finding out halfway through a thread that the people quoting me are actually arguing with someone in their head.
If you don't want people quoting you and arguing against it, perhaps you should be more careful about what you write.