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Genetically Modified Rice Makes More Food, Less Greenhouse Gas
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.
... what's it taste like?
chicken, of course.
All the seeds that just any jerk can buy are all these heirloom seeds.
Given that the vast majority of seeds I see in catalogs are F1 hybrids, it's unlikely that your statement is even remotely true. Most of what is sold to home gardeners is the same varieties being sold to commercial growers. Most home garden catalog vendors are in turn purchasing their seed from the big boys that supply farmers - Northup King, Stokes, and so on.
There are a few - Territorial Seed and Johnny's Selected Seeds come to mind - that to some degree also actively work on developing their own seed stocks; but even with them, most of the seed is being purchased from a handful of huge companies.
The only places I see heirlooms dominating a company's listings is in catalogs from companies specializing in open-pollinated vegetables - Seeds of Change, Abundant Life, etc.
#DeleteChrome
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
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."
The trouble is, like most anti-GMO people, you have a fundamental lack of understanding of what genes actually do.
They mutate by themselves for one thing. Should we be running around ensuring that no natural mutations occur? No because that would be an insane exercise and would fly in the face of the fact that DNA has been doing shit for a billion years before you came along to worry about it.
Intermingling crops? Are the crops you're talking about native to the area you're in? Are those crops naturally occurring strains of plants or have they been only in human cultivation for a few thousand years?
I'm not gonna say we _can't_ kill the planet by messing with species, but I will say with the utmost confidence that we won't.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.