Slashdot Mirror
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."
> 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.
So you're saying that the increase in productivity of GMO grains over "traditional" grains, given the same arable land area is enough to feed an additional billion people? In a word: bullshit.
Nope, this is a lobbying message subsidized by Monsanto and co, it is actually very possible to feed everyone with the food we create and the land we have. More importantly, it hides the fact that GMOs are not at all used to feed the aforementioned starving peoples. 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.
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#
We throw away over half the food we produce, and we let the commodities market manipulate the prices. We don't need GMOs. You're just spreading propaganda.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Nope, this is a lobbying message subsidized by Monsanto and co, it is actually very possible to feed everyone with the food we create and the land we have. More importantly, it hides the fact that GMOs are not at all used to feed the aforementioned starving peoples. 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.
In other news today, 1/3 of the world is now Obese.
We don't need no stinkin' GMO food, it's all about making seed banks all bound to Intellectual Property and making money for Monsanto, et al. Call a horse a horse.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Even before GMO foods were invented we allowed a lot of produce to rot in this country for various reasons. The problem isn't that we don't have enough land or good enough seed stock. Feeding people (or not) usually has to do more with local politics and who controls the land.
It's like how the entire Irish potato famine was very avoidable.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm seriously sick of this ignorant crap. There is absolutely no known possible mechanism for GM foods to cause cancer because they're GM. If you're going to speculate, at least look into real possible risks like those associated with glyphosate salts used in agriculture. If you're going to attack GM, focus on the real issues like intellectual property associated with staple crops.
Also, look up mutation breeding, which is how most of our non-GM foods came into existence.
How much of our planet's fossil fuel resources should we continue to mine for large-scale agriculture, before we have the conversation about why there are so many starving third-worlders, and what we might do to control overpopulation?
I see this assertion time after time -- that we must feed 8, 10, 15 billions of people -- without asking the question, "Does the planet need that many people?"
GMO is a non-solution to a problem that we could much more easily prevent.
The only winner in GMO is the patent holder who collects the royalties.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
We know this. GMO-free is a marketing term for affluent pananoid yuppies. It is not something that will ever feed mass numbers of needy people.
No, it's about being open and honest about what goes into your food. We in California had such a staggering amount of BS inserted into a campaign season, regarding GMO product labeling, that consumers were completely baffled what the impact was going to be and voted with the most convincing and well backed ads. Therefore we do not have a state statute requiring the labeling of food as containing all or part GMO components.
That was pretty damn insidious by Pro-GMO Big Ag.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/nation/regions/08/09/13/militants-wreck-gm-rice-test-farm
If you actually study the green revolution and agriculture, it is indeed an accurate figure.
The only difference between modern GMO food and previous versions, is that radiation mutation was used to create the variants. Now, with targeted gene sequencing and replacing there is no need to use messy, time consuming and partially random radiation mutation methods.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Have you actually looked into the actual court cases surrounding Monsanto?
You would be surprised. The examples that people trot out of "Farmer Brown" as you say, had the farmers lose in court as they were deliberately and knowingly taking GMO seeds.
Monsanto will in fact, pay farmers for any crops contaminated via cross pollination for farms that do not have an agreement.
The truth of the matter in agriculture is much more complex than all the IT people here on Slashdot would have you believe.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
The existence of GMOs have NOT boosted production in the slightest. What GMOs do is make the plants immune to a particular herbicide. This herbicide immunity, by the way, is an immunity being acquired by other "pest" plants which were the original target of the herbicide.
In the absense of GMOs the people would still be fed. GMOs do not represent a world-saving technology. What they represent is a danger to the world's food supply not only because it comes under control of a small collection of companies, but because it reduces the varieties of plants available. In the event a disease develops to wipe out these GMOs, there may be extreme starvation and human suffering due to the continual growth of GMO use.
Please shill for Monsanto elsewhere. You're just wrong about so much.
Quiet - does not fit political narrative.
Well, so far, we're not too stupid to have labels required for ingredients, for % of nutrients...
We're not too stupid to have labels required on things like fish, to know what their country of origin is....
So, what's the deal with giving us a label to know if it is GMO or not? I'd dare say, most people too stupid to study this and make an "informed decision" are likely not ever going to bother looking at the labels.
But for those that do want to know..what's the harm? When is having information about your food ever a bad thing?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
The original poster gave ALL the credit for feeding a billion starving people to (only) Genetically Modified/Engineered seeds, completely ignoring the better irrigation, fertilization, insect control, and crop rotation practices, and yes, hybrid seeds that have been being exported to the third world for the last 60-or-so years. I was simply taking exception to his outrageously false claim. Yet somehow, he's Insightful, and I'm Overrated. I think many people would have much less of a problem with GMO foods in general if Monsanto's business practices weren't so oppressively evil, and the notion of routinely spraying Roundup on all our cereal grains (both for humans and livestock) weren't quite so heinous.
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.'"
I'm seriously sick of this ignorant crap. There is absolutely no known possible mechanism for GM foods to cause cancer because they're GM.
That's kind of like all the anti-drug people who say that there is no scientific proof that marijuana has any medicinal value. It was absolutely true. But the reason it is true is because you needed the DEA to give you a permit to work with banned drugs and they only like to give out permits projects researching adverse effects, not beneficial effects.
Same thing with GMO's -- the testing coverage of GMOs is very weak. There is this get out jail free card they use to legally avoid testing called substantial equivalence - the theory is that if you are just mixing genes from two different kinds of food, then its all good. They do very limited testing to make sure there is nothing obviously wrong (like the potatoes genes haven't turned the new GMO crop into belladonna) but the basic testing is all that's ever done if they can claim equivalence. Of course they do this because comprehensive testing would be really, really, really expensive. So, you know, let the customers beta test it.
So yeah, there is no known mechanism because no one is looking for one.
You're not getting it. It's not about the absolute rightness or wrongness of GMO . It's about the fact that a very significant portion of the people WANT GMO labeling.
People also want a lot of things I could do without, but so what. Who am i? Who are you? Who is Monsanto to decide we can't know true facts about the things we put in our bodies???
The worst disasters in history haven't been because people had too much information some of which was useless. The worst disasters come about because some small segment of our population thinks it knows what's good for the rest of us and tries to impose it's will on us. So that's shit like Vietnam and all kinds of imperialism generally. People want this- it means something to them. People also want kosher shit because it MEANS something to them. People want country of origin labeling for meat for GOOD reason- because some nations practice poor CJD defense and some don't. People want dolphin free tuna because it MEANS something to them and their value system. Stop telling people what should and should not be significant to them.
Just. Stop it.
Also, as a matter of fact, you don't know that all present and future GMO products are not unsafe in ways people fear. I know what because I looked into it and decided for myself that the risk it low, but by no means zero. By no means.
The first world generally has negative population growth, not counting immigration. So yes, it is the third world that needs population control, and there is nothing racist about that statement. I suppose you could debate whether the first world should be putting pressure on them or just let them figure that out themselves, but the pressure is applied via strings attached to foreign aid: are you suggesting we should stop giving them aid and just let them starve?
True, the so called "Green Revolution" is not principally due to Genetically Modified Organisms, at least not in the sense those words are used today. (The above referenced wiki article on this subject is about as biased as anything I've ever seen on wiki, bordering on the vitriol normally seen regarding political campaign.)
However, there is no doubt that prior methods of gene selection (breeding) resulted in massive increase in grain crop yields, with Rice crops developed in the US saving many different countries in South East Asia from huge famines. Resistance to pests was accomplished by selective breeding long before gene splicing was invented. But there is no doubt that these grains were genetically modified.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Nobody needs to kill themselves to control population, just not reproduce so much. You first? Sure. Who's next?
Many developed countries already have low or declining population growth so again; us first? Working on it. Who's next?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_growth_rate
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
There's reasonable evidence that the prevalence of obesity is related to the liberal use of high-fructose corn syrup on prepared foods. And a part of the reason for that use of corn is GM corn. More of the reason, of course, is government subsidies, Of course the government subsidies are totally unrelated to lobbying from Monsanto, the vendor of the GM corn seeds. And the only legal vendor of those seeds.
Yeah, I'd have a lot less problem with GM foods, if they weren't leading to monopolization of the food provision chain by one or a very few companies.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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
Right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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
Selecting something is not modifying it. Genetic modification (in today's context) is about producing individual specimens with modified or new genes, not just differently mixed genes of its parents. Trying to muddle this is dishonest.
Actual genetic modification is going to be the biggest revolution in human history, possibly biggest revolution in the history of life on this planet if we don't destroy our civilization before it becomes as ubiquitous as cell phones are today. Saying it's just extension of what we've been doing for millenia is like saying updating globally accessible Wikipedia article with mobile device on-location and real time is just extension of prehistoric people drawing stuff in sand with a stick. Sure, it is, if you select your viewpoint carefully.