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Genetically Modified Rice Makes More Food, Less Greenhouse Gas

Posted by samzenpus on from the grow-it-better dept.

Applehu Akbar writes: A team of researchers at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences has engineered a barley gene into rice, producing a variety that yields 50% more grain while producing 90% less of the powerful greenhouse gas methane. The new rice pulls off this trick by putting more of its energy into top growth. In countries which depend on rice as a staple, this would add up to a really large amount of increased rice and foregone methane.

7 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Well, sure, but... by Locke2005 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... what's it taste like?

    --
    I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
    1. Re:Well, sure, but... by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But you forgot the first rule of the food religion: If it's not natural, then it tastes like chemicals causes cancer.

      Definition of natural meaning it was grown on cow shit and never pasteurized.

    2. Re:Well, sure, but... by sbaker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There is plenty of room on the label for a tinyurl.

      If you were to accept that you needed a smartphone in order to read food labels (a big "IF") - then the entire label could be replaced by a QRCode which links to a page with *ALL* of the information. The actual label could then be simplified to a really simple "UNHEALTHY/HEALTH" number going from 1..10 as proposed previously to simplify things for the 95% of people who aren't going to read anything more detailed than that anyway.

      For people like you - I'd imagine that using a phone to get vitally important data that would never fit on a label is less of an imposition. Furthermore, it would be easy to have software provided for you that would allow you to scan the product and get a personalized "OK TO EAT"/"DO NOT EAT!" indicator as set by your doctor.

      Come to think of it - you wouldn't even need any extra printing at all...pretty much all labelled food already has a bar-code on it - it would be simple enough to prepend a standard URL onto that number to turn it into something that a special app could use to pull all of the necessary information. Legislation to make product vendors add this information would then be simple enough.

      --
      www.sjbaker.org
    3. Re:Well, sure, but... by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

      therefore they have a right to know whether or not the food they buy contains GMO ingredients

      Then they should only buy food labeled as "GMO Free," which is manufactured specifically for people with those kinds of concerns.

      the federal government has a duty to endure that foods and other products are properly labeled, which in this case, would be a large, conspicuous "GMO" on the front label.

      Large, conspicuous, and the front of the label? You aren't interested in people being able to inform themselves. If that were the case, you would be satisfied with a line in the ingredients. Your goal is to make GMO scary to people, with a large scary label on the front.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    4. Re:Well, sure, but... by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The mistake isn't the GMO part. The mistake is considering *grains* food at all. It is not.

      ok, here's where you know you've gone off the deep end....when a food that people have eaten for millennia is considered not a food, you need to re-evaluate your dietary ideas.

      Cool history fact: do you know that the ability to store grains through the winter might be one of the major things that allowed humans to stay in the same place and build settlements? It helped them to rise above hunter/gatherer.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Policy should be based on facts by sjbe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    However, I also believe people have a right to their own paranoid delusions

    That depends heavily on exactly how harmful the delusion is. Some are harmless, others not so much. But public policy should be based on actual facts and real evidence.

    therefore they have a right to know whether or not the food they buy contains GMO ingredients

    Why do they have a "right to know"? Is there any actual evidence that they are harmful even a little bit? If the answer is yes then maybe you have an argument. But since the answer so far is an unequivocal no, despite large amounts of research into the question, then I cannot agree with you. I prefer my public policy decisions to be made on scientific facts and not made on ill informed paranoia.

    If there is a market for people who want to know if a food is GMO-free then you will see labeling to that effect on some products and that is fine. Although if they are truly paranoid I'm not sure how they could ever be sure the label was actually true.

  3. Re:I wish I could buy GMO seeds by Karmashock · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The meta protests don't make any sense and are counter productive. They should protest what they're really upset about rather than annoying me with shit that doesn't matter or that is actually good.

    What you're basically said here is that the modern environmental movement is run by sophists... aka disingenuous manipulators.

    That isn't a new thing. We've had sophists in various fields since always.

    If the environmental movement wants to retain its credibility it should note that if it doesn't stop it... they're going to run into the stoics eventually.

    And stoics vs sophists plays out the same way every time.

    Learn.

    --
    I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.