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Cheerios To Go GMO-Free
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "ABC News reports that General Mills has ended the use of genetically modified ingredients in Cheerios, its flagship breakfast food. General Mills has been manufacturing its original-flavor Cheerios without GMOs for the past several weeks in response to consumer demand. Original Cheerios will now be labeled as 'Not Made With Genetically Modified Ingredients,' although that it is not an official certification. 'We were able to do this with original Cheerios because the main ingredients are oats,' says Mike Siemienas, noting that there are no genetically modified oats. The company is primarily switching the cornstarch and sugar to make the original Cheerios free of GMOs. Green America has been targeting Cheerios for the past year to raise the profile of the anti-GMO movement. 'This is a big deal,' says Green America's Todd Larsen. 'Cheerios is an iconic brand and one of the leading breakfast cereals in the U.S. We don't know of any other example of such a major brand of packaged food, eaten by so many Americans, going from being GMO to non-GMO.' For its part, General Mills says, It's not about safety,' and will continue to use GMOs in other food products."
Genetically modified food feeds over a billion people who would not otherwise be able to eat given the arable land available. The "organic" craze is for marketing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5amLAMRQk5I
> For its part, General Mills says, It's not about safety,' and will continue to use GMOs in other food products.
Correct. It's not about safety. It's about giving customers what they want, which is the result of scientifically illiterate scare tactics by talking heads making a career of it.
It's all one stupid cluster fuck anyway. Science keeps developing ways to make food even cheaper, and government keeps deliberately forcing the price up to help farmers.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It is the patents like what Monsanto is doing that are the problem. There is no health issues.
But then they'll make the wrong decision!!1!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Sometimes I wish I had intestines for brains, so I wouldn't be annoyed by the stupidity of the rest of the world.
It would also be cool to have an ass hole on my forehead.
The TPP will make it illegal to label your food GMO free and no, it won't matter what your nation's legislature had to say on the topic or would like to say later. The TPP will supercede the laws of you nation's legislature:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/09/obama-trans-pacific-partnership_n_4414891.html
http://www.nationofchange.org/trans-pacific-partnership-and-monsanto-1372074730
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/stop_tpp_tafta_monsanto_protection_act_on_steroids/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-r-shaffer/tobacco-symbol-of-corrupt_b_4439416.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/041965_tpp_gmo_labeling_monsanto.html#
So, General Mills is switching the cornstarch and sugar, so that they don't come from GMO'd crops. Great.
There is noi DNA, nor protein, nor anything that might be GMOed in either cornstarch or sugar. So much for the big change; it's an absolute unevent.
Corn starch comes from corn. There is GM corn available (most notably Monsanto's RoundUp resistant stuff). Does Cheerios use corn syrup for its sweeteners?
The consumer is always right, no matter what those who think they are our Lords and Masters say.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A. For it's part, it's not about safety - so, what is it about? A publicity stunt?
It's about giving the consumer what they want. If using non-genetically-modified corn for their cornstarch and corn syrup doesn't cost (much) more and improves the company's image, then go for it.
They might. I went into a large grocery store in a near by city a few weeks ago and saw gluten free bread (expected), but also yeast free bread — and it was not flat bread. I am expecting them to come up with a bread free bread soon.
Most consumers don't have a scientific background. What they do have is a memory of how many 'harmless' things turned out to be anything but. For example, the trans fats in margarine. For another, cigarettes. So when consumers see a bunch of agribusinesses fighting tooth and nail to not label GMO foods, it naturally makes them wonder what they're trying to hide.
They may be wrong, but they're not idiots. They've just been lied to far too many times.
Start a Kickstarter fund, with the Top Backer prize being a free trip back to 1601 to rescue the time traveler
add to this lots of drugs prescribed to kids over the decades that were supposed to be safe, but turned out to be the opposite
the latest being all the ADHD drugs
All corn is GM corn. The stuff we call "corn" did not evolve naturally, but by extreme pressure by human farmers. The stuff we eat cannot grow without human intervention and is anything but natural. Just because we didn't modify its genetics through a test tube doesn't make it non-modified genetically.
My problem with GMOs is the patents and the patent abuse. SOrry will not support GMO until the companies such as Monsanto stop abusing patents. Also i have a problem with the superweeds that are now cropping up as a result of drenching crops with roundup. Also when patented seed contaminates non GMO crops the non-GMO farmer has to pay Monsanto for a license or get sued out of business. Its the practices of the companies that turn me against it and until they stop i will avoid and tell everyone to avoid these patent encumbered crops. NO one company should be allowed to own all corn or all soybean because their patented crap has displaced natural crops.
Bravo General Mills and thank you for making my favorite breakfast cereal without GMOs. The market place works. Consumer demand is a far better way to set things than regulations. All we're asking for as consumers is to know what's there so we can make decisions. It worked. Bravo to the free market and capitalism.
for almost all of human history, we all lived on the edge of starvation...one bad crop or inablilty to hunt due to injury or migration, and we were starved...to death.
read malthus.
now, we have so much food we attack those who supply it for us....the irony is unreal.
i don't know if GMO food is "dangerous" or not....i don't think anyone here really does....but i do know one thing.
only a population with WAY more food then it could possibly dream of needing could ever have this debate.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Since this is mostly blowback from the assholes at Monsanto, I fully support removing the GMO ingredients. However, when it comes to Cinnamon Toast Crunch, GM really needs to stop using that whole wheat shit or at least take the word "Crunch" out of the title.
How big do you have to be before you get to have shills?
I mean Whole Foods profit rose 20% in Q2 of 2013, and Hain Celestial, the owner of Earth's Best Organic, boasted a 21% increase in net sales in Q1 of 2013. I have no idea what Michael Pollan made in 2013, but I doubt it would be a tenth as much if he wasn't a big name in the (insert preferred adjective)-foods circle, selling books to concerned eaters, and getting appearance fees from talking on shows and at events.
Does Monsanto have some patent on having shills, or are we willfully overlooking the fact that there's plenty of people who would rake in the cash by overblowing concern with respect to "natural" and "organic" foods?
Cue the organic food fanatics for the same countdown.
Both sides of the argument are full of hyperbole and bullshit. As per usual, the truth lies between.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
So when consumers see a bunch of agribusinesses fighting tooth and nail to not label GMO foods, it naturally makes them wonder what they're trying to hide.
And when labelling something with a phrase that people are being misled into believing means "poison inside", any sane business will fight against having to bear that label. There is nothing to hide, it's protection from rampant hysteria. It's happened before. Irradiated foods were going to make people glow in the dark and fearmongers wanted them all labelled so people could be scared away from them, too.
They may be wrong, but they're not idiots.
citation required.
They've just been lied to far too many times.
That's certainly true.
So, GMO is scary, but the fact that Cheerios barely resemble the produce they are derived from, no problem. All that processing couldn't possibly "change" the food in a bad way. The consumer is an idiot.
What other people think of me is none of my business
Take your pick. Low harvest yields or risk herbageddon.
If you want thew ability to distinguish GMO from non-GMO in your grocery store then you better act fast because Obama is about to try to ram through the Trans Pacific Partnership which will permit the WTO to ban GMO labeling the way it bans meat country-of -origin labeling and dolphin-safe labels:
Letter excerpt from
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (CT-3), Ranking Member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, to United States Trade Representative, Ambassador Ron Kirk,
full letter:
http://delauro.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=406:-delauro-food-safety-critical-issue-in-upcoming-trade-talks&catid=7:2011-press-releases&Itemid=23
First, past FTAs incorporate the WTO's sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) and technical barriers to trade rules, which are deeply problematic. These rules set ceilings on signatory countries' domestic food safety standards. As a result, WTO panels have ruled against the U.S. meat country-of-origin labeling requirements and voluntary dolphin-safe tuna labels in challenges brought by other WTO countries. We must learn from the record of WTO implementation and modify the food safety-related rules of U.S. trade pacts to best protect the public health, starting with a TPP FTA.
Contact your Congressperson right NOW! :
http://www.exposethetpp.org/
Tribbles Unite! take Oats and Wheat!
Seriously. The whole science of agriculture has rather drastically modified various food plants over the last 5000 years. All of the stuff you eat, even if it hasn't been gene-spliced in a lab, is SIGNIFICANTLY different from the same plants your ancestors were eating before the development of agriculture and civilization.
FTFY.
Monsanto is terrible, and the world would be a much better place if every single Monsanto office burned to the ground (preferably while, by some miracle, every everyone else was on vacation, but all the CEOs were in the office). That doesn't change the fact that there is not *inherently* wrong with GMO foodstuffs. There's no direct relation between those two. That'd be like saying "Toyota tried to cover up some issue with one of their cars so they wouldn't get sued! Therefore, ban all cars forever!" There can certainly be issues with some GMO products, and disregarding that, Monsanto deserves to die in a fire for all kinds of other things they've done. But there's nothing *inherently* worse about GMO products than products modified through regular, boring, done-that-way-for-thousands-of-years artificial selection.
Every time this subject comes up, someone comes to raise the objection you're raising.
Those people are trolls.
So are you.
Breeding is not the same as GMO, and no amount of claiming that it is will make it so. It simply isn't. You can get results with GM that you cannot get by breeding, which proves the difference. And before GMO, nobody was splicing animal genes into plants, period. It may have happened in nature, but nobody then went on to plant a whole field of that organism.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Have you looked at a box of Rice Chex or Corn Chex lately?
This is actually playing catch-up on the marketing....
...and my 1st thought was: do you have to use 'I Can't Believe it's not Butter' on it? Yummy
Selective breeding is not genetic modification.
I am so god damned tired of fucktards like you screaming about the sky falling.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
so in spite of corn yield going from 60 bushels per acre to 150 or so (from 1960 to 2010), a yield increase of somewhere around 150% (2 and a half times in the last fifty year), you are saying that this had nothing to do with the GMO seed sold by Monsato. In your dreams. Farmers make money by growing more corn. If the Monsato seed did not work, farmers would not be buying it and using it.
This does not mean that GMOs do not have problems, but since your main statement was that GMO do not boost production is false, it kinda calls in doubt your other statement about pest plants picking up the mutation from the corn plants.
refer to the http://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTrends.html for some charts showing the yield gain.
But there's nothing *inherently* worse about GMO products than products modified through regular, boring, done-that-way-for-thousands-of-years artificial selection.
In a strictly moral or practical sense, I agree. My issue is that regular, boring seed selection has a millenia-long safety record; GM does not. We have not had enough time to ascertain any long-term effects, if there are any. We are rushing headlong into a new technology that a not insignificant amount of research shows might not be wise to rush into.
Basically, I urge caution, research, safety. And that's where most of us "anti-GMO nutjobs" actually stand.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
But people are raising cattle with snake genes in them. All domestic cattle, in fact. So yes, people have been doing it for thousands of years.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/01/how-a-quarter-of-the-cow-genome-came-from-snakes/
What makes a gene from a plant and a gene from an animal different? Not much, both are able to process it. In fact, a huge number of genes are conserved in both species, or both end up dead.
According to General Millsâ(TM) vice president of global communications, this is just a marketing stunt - Cheerios are made from oats, and there is no GMO oats.
All they're doing is changing the source of sugar that they use in making cheerios to non-GMO. Which means the sucrose, glucose, and fructose (which are specific chemicals) will come from non-GMO sources, even though the sucrose, glucose and fructose will be exactly the same as they've always been, As he says, they're doing it because: âoeItâ(TM)s simple. We did it because we think consumers may embrace it.â
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
How does the enormous US "corn subsidies" factor into this?
Farmers grow corn (far more then needed) to maximize the amount of subsidies they receive
So gene splicing is the same as natural selection (or unnatural selection)?
Learn to love Alaska
We've found a number of "impossible" things to be possible, such as gene leakage cross-species (spliced genes ending up in unrelated but nearby plants, with unknown, untested results). How do you assure us of 100% safety for eternity when genes mutate and organisms evolve? Those types of unknowns are why slower is better. We aren't smart enough to know all the unintended consequences.
Learn to love Alaska
All dogs are GM dogs? General Motors makes dogs?
Great - how about going gluten free?
Same question to the manufacturers of every one of the other 99% of foods which are both widely-available and reasonably priced.
Requiem for the American Dream
Hello,
Please moderate up the parent post. The link is to a story which discusses how genes have moved between species via vectors such as ticks and viruses.
--PM
Quite contrarily, GMO seeds have been repeatedly used for market domination through legislative bullying, most infamously ending in the suicide of farmers in india due to non-affordable seed prices after Monsanto cleared the market from other companies by undercutting and legal bullying before rising the cost.
I have been following farmer suicides in India for a long time. The reasons are complex. They include crop failure at an inopportune time, non-seasonal and extended droughts, and inability to pay debts from unscrupulous moneylenders and so on. Monsanto or its pricey or unaffordable seeds directly causing a farmer to suicide - you might be able to find one or two examples, but that's not the norm.
Monsanto is famous (or infamous) in India for their GMO Bt Cotton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bt_cotton. But Bt Cotton is only cultivated in the state of Maharashtra...suicides happen in many other states too. And given the options for cotton seeds, BT Cotton may not be that bad an idea.
I agree Monsanto is borderline evil and creepy. There are valid reasons to argue genetically modified crops are a bad idea (or a good idea), but you should not add Indian farmer suicides to make a point. That's FUD.
Tat Tvam Asi
They may be wrong, but they're not idiots.
Same could be said of the top dogs in the anti-GMO movement, to some degree. You could write a book on the things most people don't know about plants and agriculture. But only one issue gets singled out, genetic engineering. That makes it look undesirable. It is a weasley thing to do, to single out one thing and, in the name of 'consumer freedom' give absolutely no background information or necessary context, but that's the frustrating situation.
You think that's impressive, it's been shown in the lab that a retrovirus can potentially move material across kingdoms. But in practice, most such organisms won't survive to pass on their genes, and even if they do, it again won't be to an entire field.
I'm not saying all GMOs are evil or anything. The situation is however more complex than some people would like to make it out to be. Whether it's tampering with strawberries reducing rainfall or glyphosphate resistance promoting overuse, there are secondary effects which themselves are good reasons not to support GMOs as they are used in the market today.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Stating a fact does not make that fact meaningful. No one cooked with microwaves until recently; that doesn't mean that microwave cooked food and oven cooked food are substantially different.
Yes, by pointing out that link I didn't mean to support one side or the other, I thought it was interesting in its own right.
I think GMOs probably ought to be the product of government nonprofit research which becomes public domain, that would remove some of the more significant objections and reduce the pressure to market something that is actually risky.
--PeterM
They come out of the woodwork any time the letters "G" "M" and "O" appear together in a story.
Maybe there's actually people in plant biology here who get ticked at all the misinformation people are spreading about the field? Maybe for some people here this stuff is more than some story to yammer about on the internet.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a shill.
You have to keep sense of scale in mind here. Consider that in the year 1000 there was an estimated 310M humans on the whole planet. The USA alone exceeds that today. It only hit 3B in the '60s, and is up to 7B today.
As such, in order to gain credit for 1B people, GMO only needs to be about a 14% productivity boost over all the other methods you mention in order to be able to be credited with 'saving' 1B from starvation. If you consider that starvation need not be fatal, the necessary boost to simply keep people from 'experiencing starvation'*, due to uneven productivity and such is much less.
*Say, a period of 30 days or more without sufficient nutrution = 'experiencing starvation'.
I don't read AC A human right
...is if they'd remove that free jagged metal O in every box!
But I'll be choosing something else now. Fuck the bioconservatives.
'We were able to do this with original Cheerios because the main ingredients are oats,"
Taken from a UK packet 800g, today:
- Cereal Grains = 77.5%
- Oats = 38.0%
- Wheat = 18.6%
- Barley = 12.8%
- Rice = 5.5%
- Maize = 2.6%
And yes, the above is over 100%. Work that one out.
If they cant even get the ingredients list right on a packet, theres no hope. For all we know, we could be eating dog shit.
various nations are using the GMO issue to justify blocking US agricultural exports.
That's mostly what it is about... trade wars... diplomatic power games... and the drums of war. This sort of thing tends to lead to it.
In any case, abandoning GMO is not the solution. The technology is too powerful to abandon.
Rather, we need to play the power game back at them. This is now officially a pissing contest. If the feds want to be anything but a useless waste of money they might want to actually win one of these fights. They've done little lately but embarrass themselves.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
There are many problems with your reasoning.
First, fertility rates are plummeting. Much of the world (including the USA) is already below replacement rate, leading to problems such as population aging and cultural weakening. Some countries still have large fertility rates, but even there it is falling fast. As a result, world population is projected by the UN to peak at 9B or maybe 10B, then start falling.
Second, much of the world is obese, and 1/3 of the food is not even eaten - it is thrown away at any of the several stages of production. Food production per capita is growing. Starvation is not caused by lack of food, it is caused by civil wars, terrorism, or corrupt, authoritarian and incompetent governments.
Third, inflation-adjusted price of many commodities have been stable for a century.
Fourth, there is no clear correlation between population density and income per capita.
Fifth: while we compete for primary resources (but see the third point above), when the population grows we share the benefits of more scientists, engineers, musicians, writers, philosophers, etc.
See
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
No one cooked with microwaves until recently; that doesn't mean that microwave cooked food and oven cooked food are substantially different.
You're engaging in prevarication by using as an example a situation which is not remotely congruent. That's a cheap tactic for cheap people. We know that microwave ovens lack the energy to twiddle DNA, which is ironically precisely what we're doing when we create GM organisms, which makes your example especially stupid. For stupid people.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Prove that microwave heated food isn't dangerous. Microwaves are totally different than simple heated air that people have been using for centuries, which heats food more slowly. Totally different results too; your pizza will be all mushy and not crisp when it is made in a microwave. You couldn't do that with an oven. And you have no idea what alterations you are making to the food. It isn't like anyone has ever studied it, and if they have, Big Microwave has silenced them.
But you are right, the point I made was rather stupid. Saying that all differences are meaningful is often an oversimplification of an issue.
Prove that microwave heated food isn't dangerous.
We have no reason to suspect that microwave-heated food is dangerous. There are reasons to suspect GM plants. QED, your argument is crap.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Looks like they're a fine shot, too. Each one has a hole right through the center.
Glad I'm not the only one to spot that. This is like advertising "NON-GMO" salt.
It reminds me of all of those candies out there with big "FAT FREE!" labels on them...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Just like they fought against listing transfats.
Probably GMO free lard.
GMOs are how we will destroy our world. They are uncontrollable and when GMO foods start cross pollinating with our regular food strains we are all gonna be fucked. It is so messed up that they can make the foods we eat into pesticides, yes that's correct the GMO potatoes you got cheaply from the grocery store are registered biologically as a pesticide not a food. Further more genetic diversity and sustainable land use is the only way we will survive into the future. GMOs lead to monoculture crops which leads to massive agricultural and financial disaster when that crop fails or is attacked by disease or pest.
Selecting for random mutations is one aspect of genetically modifying organisms, just that you mutate the genes using a naturally occurring process, without needing a modern biotech lab. That's how almonds came to be edible, that's how wheat doesn't need to pollinate with other strains, etc.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Yes, just like the "deadly poison" boogeyman "transfats" that people have been taught to fear and avoid at all costs. And that some manufacturers trumpet proudly from the front of every package, even for things that wouldn't have trans fats anyway. I'm surprised that the dried seaweed didn't also have "0 trans fats" printed in large letters on the front of the package to go with it's "vegan" and "gluten free" buzzwords. (And yes, it had the "may have been processed on equipment that previously processed nuts" statement to protect themselves legally from the peanut allergy people.)
Your ignorance is showing. The evidence against transfats is rather damning. To the point that the FDA has taken the unusual step of revoking GRAS status.
Of course, by the time it did that, most trans-fats were already replaced due to market forces and required labeling.
Meanwhile, none of the howling about how irreplaceable transfats are and/or how expensive the replacements would be has panned out.
Should we start campaigning for Cheerios boycott?
Troll 2.0 Fear my asocial networking!
Your ignorance is showing. The evidence against transfats is rather damning.
It is simply amazing that all those people who died a horrible, instant death from eating food that had transfats in them didn't make any of the news programs. There is a significant difference between long term potential harm (at some point in the distant future, you may suffer some harm from eating this, or you may not -- it is a crapshoot, and all the other environmental factors in your life probably play a larger part in deciding who wins and loses) and "deadly poison".
Perhaps in your ignorance you didn't realize that EVERYTHING you eat can cause you harm in the long term, if you eat too much of it. You will almost certainly wind up dead if all you eat is 83 pounds a day of that "gluten free, vegan" (and also 0% trans fats) dried seaweed I've used as an example of ridiculous packaging notices.
Should everything get a label because for some people at some point a decade down the road some scientist may point a finger at it as a distant cause of your heart attack?
Meanwhile, none of the howling about how irreplaceable transfats are
You must be replying to someone else, since you're the first person I've seen howling about trans fats in this thread.
So you figure anything that doesn't kill you instantly must be just fine?
The industry did the howling about transfats when they fought listing them on the label.
So to recap your position, slow poisons are just fine in food as long as the fatality rate is under 100% and consumers have no right to know what they're eating.
And yes, information on each and every aspect of any good should be open to the consumer. The buyer has every right to know what they're buying.
You can blow up Monsanto for all anyone cares,
if only that were true.
There are more people dying of hunger than there are anti-GMO morons such as yourself.
Zero of them are dying from hunger because of a lack of GMOs, just like the Green Revolution didn't save any net lives; it saved some people, and the practices have starved others.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"