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Genetically Engineered Seafood Coming To a Restaurant Near You (indianapublicmedia.org)
"The first genetically-modified animal for human consumption could be arriving in grocery stores across the United States as early as next year." Long-time Slashdot reader tomhath tipped us off to Indiana Public Media's report on AquaBounty Technologies:
AquaBounty will produce a GMO salmon that CEO Ron Stotish says will grow faster than freshwater-raised fish. "It does so because we've given it the ability, using the same biological process that regulates growth in the unmodified salmon, to grow about twice as fast reaching market rate about half the time," Stotish says. The technology has been around since the 1990s, but it took until 2015 to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, due to concerns about people eating genetically-modified animals. The genetic makeup of the biotech fish takes a growth-hormone regulatory gene from the Pacific Chinook salmon with a promoter gene from an ocean pout and puts it into the genome of an Atlantic salmon. The result causes for the growth hormone to remain on leading to faster growth rate than non GMO salmon.
The modified fish is able to grow to market size using 25 percent less feed than the traditional salmon, increasing cost efficiency... Stotish says his operation causes less harm than traditional fish farming. "We're not using coastal waterways, we're not putting antibiotics and medications into the water," Stotish says. "Our fish are in a controlled environment, we don't need antibiotics, we don't have to treat for sea lice."
The company says that every year Americans consume about 350,000 tons of Atlantic salmon -- more than 95% of which has to be imported.
The modified fish is able to grow to market size using 25 percent less feed than the traditional salmon, increasing cost efficiency... Stotish says his operation causes less harm than traditional fish farming. "We're not using coastal waterways, we're not putting antibiotics and medications into the water," Stotish says. "Our fish are in a controlled environment, we don't need antibiotics, we don't have to treat for sea lice."
The company says that every year Americans consume about 350,000 tons of Atlantic salmon -- more than 95% of which has to be imported.
Seriously, tuna and salmon are the 2 most eaten fish in world. Tuna should also be farmed, so fast growth is useful.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
as long as it is clearly labeled so that I can make an informed choice.
Let's see why don't we alter the natural progression of growth and see what happens
I'll tell you what happens right now, you get all the meat and very little of the flavor, just like with over-fertilized vegetables.
The regular farmed fish already has mushy flesh with little flavor compared to wild fish. This is going to taste more like pollack than salmon; it will just be boring. But it will be fish, and it will taste like "a fish."
I'm not gonna be the guinea pig for this experiment either, if I wanted to eat bland mushy fish I'd go down to the river a catch a Northern Pikeminnow or 50.
A lot of things can go wrong here. No, its not something that you can say with high confidence is safe. Likely what happened was that someone with big bags of cash paid off someone in the agencies to approve this thing. Money talks, and big business will play fast and loose.
It will end up in the environment and it would probably overproliferate and have some devastating effect on the food web.
The growth hormones could have disasterous effects on humans including promoting cancers. All around a foolish and dangerous expirement.
We hear this argument from GMO shills but its a fallacious argument. Most foods are not GMO. GMO specifically refers to direct intentional manipulation of DNA by inserting or removing DNA. We've been doing selective breeding for a long time, this is NOT GMO, and the process cannot produce the same effects and dangers of GMO. Also selective breeding isnt necessarily safe, you can end up with toxic effects. The probabilities with GMOs are much higher because it allows changes which would never occur due to a sexual process and allows it to happen with a severity and rapidity that would not occur with breeding. Selective breeding imposes certain limits and constraints on things because genes can only transfer within the same species and the mutations happen at a lower rate.
That you refer to selective breeding breeding as GMO destroys your credibility and your just trying to mislead people.