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Avoiding GM Foods? Monsanto Says You're Overly Fussy
blackbeak writes "The BBC today characterized those who avoid GM foods as overly fussy, the very same day that the Wall Street Journal announced that picky eating may be recognized in the 2013 DSM as a psychiatric disorder. The DSM item refers to something completely different, though I'm sure many will confuse the two. Of course, this was not done without subterfuge; the BBC's author, Professor Jonathan Jones, in no way indicates his close ties to Monsanto. Point by point Jones regurgitates the same pro-GM arguments debunked numerous times all over the net for years, while serving up some stale half facts too."
I would personally prefer to stay away from Monsanto based products not because I don't trust their science, but because I dislike their business practices and media tomfoolery. GM crops are a double-edged sword by all neutral study, having definite benefits of their own but creating potentially disastrous consequences (super-bugs and super-weeds, which are nearly immune to conventional herb- or insecticides), but the Intellectual Property abuse that comes of their use is hurting more farmers than those issues for now.
Genetically modified foods are just foods. There's nothing "natural" about selectively bred crops. Unless you're going into the woodlands and picking wild berries for breakfast you're eating unnatural food. Welcome to the modern world.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Why on earth do you need a carb-free bread? Unless you are allergic, just manage your eating habits in a normal way.
The point of the above sentence being: medicine is not always the best answer. Third world countries are starving because we 1. destroy their local farmers' economy by dumping free food on them (note that when the chinese are dumping textile on european / USA markets, we start adding trade taxes for a reason), and 2. destroy what food-production they still have by making it financial beneficial for individual farmers to grow cheap maize for our cattle, rather than food for their countrymen. (3. Because their governments are far from brilliant, but we're not making it easy for those governments either).
I can see that one solution is to make the few farmers these countries have be more efficient in producing grain with GM crops, but there's also the solution of 'lets stop to abuse the fcuk out of third world countries', which seems to be the higher moral ground.
I think its a worrying trend when a company attempts to have people who don't like their product as suffering from a psychiatric disorder. The corporate masters of Western society are using the same techniques as the Soviet Government. What's next, compulsory treatment of people who avoid certain foods? I know that all they probably have in mind mow is having their detractors classed as mentally unstable, but if that becomes generally accepted what will the next step be?
A) Mendel did not do engineering, he did experimentations on crossbreeding
B) He also did not then patent the genome of wheat or peas so that all german farmers would have to buy their seeds from his monastery, their fertilizer from his monastery, and their insecticides from his monastery, while suing people who would accidentally get his seeds through natural pollinization.
Die, shill
what about superweeds that are now glyphosate resistant and mirid bug plagues in Northern China because they haven't been using pesticides on their bollworm killing GM-Cotton from Monsanto. Nothing is as simple as Monsanto wants you to believe. We are only now seeing the effects of decades of use of this stuff.
I'm afraid that "debunked numerous times all over the net" isn't a persuasive argument. Any nutcase can claim to "debunk" anything, and many do. You can find many self-proclaimed "debunkers" of climate change, evolution, the Holocaust, Obama's nationality ... anything. Having a bunch of bloggers attacking a topic doesn't have a damn thing to do with how scientifically accurate an idea is. Why didn't this guy actually cite some SCIENTIFIC refutations instead of a scaremongering blog?
Personally I think that Monsanto has some pretty evil business practices, but as for health effects to consumers, I have no problem. I don't believe Monsanto could cover up evidence of that if they tried. There are already a lot of unpleasant things in food -- pesticides, rat droppings, steroids, antibiotics, radioactives, etc, etc. As much in "organic" foods as anything else. Not to say these are fine, but that there are no perfectly pure and healthy foods if you examine them in microscopic detail. You have to measure and set a limit; but zero is just impossible. The real world is imperfect.
It reminds me of how the Romans brought in lead piping for their water. They thought it was great - water pumped to your home, the ultimate sign that you'd made it. An entire ruling class slowly poisoning themselves. We don't know what affect GM crops may have. They might prove relatively harmless to us directly (who knows?) but turn out to have a devastating effect on the environment. Remember that a lot of the high yields some like to report, are not because the crop has been engineered to be super-abundant (selective breeding has already done wonders there), but because they are engineered to resist pesticides that kill pretty much everything else. What does that do for run-off into rivers? What does that do to biodiversity and the general eco-system? What happens if these traits get loose into the wild or to the farm workers and local people exposed to the increased use of pesticides. Not to mention that if some of the GM traits do get loose in the wild, it's pretty much irreversible. So they've engineered plants that secrete a poison normally found in caterpillars to make the plant poisonous to pests. Sounds like one Hell of a survival trait to me. So a little way down the line and insect populations take a tumble because of this, and the birds that depend on them. Maybe everything will be fine, but the point is that we don't know and we can't reverse this if it does go wrong.
But leaving aside the biological issues, the economic ones that we do know for sure are frightful. These crops are patented. The developing world is Monsanto's poster child for GM crops and they'll do anything they can to get everyone using these crops. But first one's always free. If a staple food is monopolised, you're going to trust who that the licence fees stay low? Monsanto? Should there even be licence fees for growing food? And enforcement? Well, the seed they sell you is sterile. Terminator crops will not reproduce so you can't save seed from last year for this year's planting. You have to buy again and again. Sure you can try and go back to planting non-Monsanto crops. If you still have seed stocks that are viable. And if you can guarantee that their inspectors wont find any traces of Monsanto crops on your land. Good luck with that.
Monsanto tout things like their "Golden Rice" (such a dream name, that one) as helping the poor third world. It's been engineered to have high levels of Vitamin D. But why do some people in the Third World have vitamin D deficiencies? Because their historical balanced diet based on their usual range of crops, has been replaced with bulk rice farming because that's what the international market demands they grow.
But what's the genetically modified strawman that gets trotted out by Monsanto every year? "You said GM might be bad for people and our scientist has failed to find evidence that it causes disease X, so shut up, because there's nothing to worry about."
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
At least in Europe, this is really Monsanto's problem. The fact is that "the people" have spoken and the vast majority have decided that they'd rather pay more than eat GM food. The majority of people don't want it, so the shops won't sell it, so the farmers won't grow it. There isn't a step in that chain that wouldn't jump at GM if they thought it would increase their profits and they could get away with it.
There isn't a restaurant in the UK that doesn't have a sign "We do not knowingly use GM ingredients". Quite frankly, if they could be sure to not use them accidentally then there would instead be a sign "We do not use GM ingredients".
It's somewhat refreshing that, for once, "the people" have chosen a path that I want to follow. My concern about GM foods isn't that they couldn't be safer, or even better, than non-GM foods but that the drive to GM is being driven by the search for profit.
BP was drilling in the Gulf in the quest for profit. It made the choices it made because it felt at the time that they had the best return on investment. It doesn't really matter whether they were criminally negligent, too laissez-faire, or just unlucky, the results are the same. There's no reason to suppose that a similar scale of accident couldn't happen with GM crops.
Corporations have too much power and too little interest in "doing the right thing". They have as little regard for their host, the human race, as the malaria parasite has for its host.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
They also have a nasty habit of breeding strains that can not reproduce on their own.
DRM isn't that good of an idea for digital entertainment. But DRM on the human food supply? That is jumping off a cliff into cartoonish insane evil mega-corporation territory.
...too many people are far too full of their own self-importance these days to "never have the time" for anything - this is one thing you start to realise when you get to middle-age like me.
As soon as you hand over too much personal responsibility to big, evil corporations like Monsanto, they will exploit you for financial gain - that is the purpose of a corporation.
The solution is to take your head out of your backside and make time to grow a few things yourself - in plastic tubs, on a small patch of soil, whatever. No, you don't need to be self-sufficient, grow a few things so that you can feed yourself to a degree, then with the money you save use it to buy better produced home-grown foodstuffs.
Companies like Monsanto exist because there are certain problems that are created when you try to grow foodstuffs in places where it wouldn't normally grow or when it's only economical to grow it there in the first place if there is a certain minimum yield per acre, hectare, etc. We ourselves create those problems because we expect food at a certain price and refuse to eat based on seasonal produce.
Monsanto is a demon created by our own consumer demand - go back 40 years and foodstuffs were transported less, more of it was homegrown and took up a higher proportion of incomes because local producers had to pay reasonable pay to their workers.
I'm not one of these green "loonies" either, I'm more scared about the power we willingly give to huge corporations over what we may or may not be doing to the planet.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
1) Decades? German physicist Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen announced his discovery of X-rays in 1896. Less then a year later Elihu Thomson found that X-rays harm living tissue. 4 years after the discovery of X-rays, it was widely accepted that exposure needed to be limited.
2) I'm not convinced that it ever makes sense to be afraid of "unknown unknowns" without having a threat model. Don't we have to be afraid of everything in that case?
For example, it wouldn't make sense to say this: "It might take decades to fully understand the implications of reading slashdot every day. Until we have a reasonable comprehension of the dangers and risks, we should use other methods for getting our tech news."
It would work better to say something like "Reading slashdot every day is detrimental to productivity, because the time spent reading and posting would otherwise go to useful work." At least then we'd have a minimal model that we can analyze, discuss, test and refine. That way we can also avoid the same problems when we do switch to an alternative. You can't do that if you just cite "unknown risks".