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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.
"Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies has developed a biotech salmon that it plans to grow near no major body of water, in a production facility in the small town of Albany, Indiana. The company producing the breed of high-tech fish hopes to change the aquaculture industry."
Not seafood.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
All the fools speaking against GMO have no idea where the real issues are. The objection to gmo in plants has been about increased use of pesticide, namely Roundup, which IS a concern. But the actual GMO is not the real issue other than Gene transfer to weeds, which is happening. But corn made drought-resistant is useful. Or plants made to resist certain pests by transferring genes from other edible plants(iow, we already eat that protein) ARE useful. Now, we are looking at seafood that is being destroyed in the oceans and now we have the ability to farm these economically and stop depleting our salmon. Ideally, we would do the same for tuna, and soon. This would also allow us to stop the massive commercial fishing going on by other nations, who are depleting these fish.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Imagine tuna stack vertically in cages like chickens all in farm in the basement of the amazon warehouse.
PrimeSashimi delivered by drone. No parasites to worry about.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
as long as it is clearly labeled so that I can make an informed choice.
The salmon's orange color comes from the caroteniods in its food, and has nothing to do with GMOs. Wild salmon *tends* to pick up an orange color if it has eaten a lot of krill and shrimp, while farmed salmon almost always is orange because carotenoids are added to its feed, as the customers expect it.
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.
Let's see why don't we alter the natural progression of growth and see what happens.
If you compare almost any crop or animal grown for food, to the wild type it came from, there are dramatic differences, especially in the progression of growth. We have been adapting food crops to our needs for at least 10,000 years.
These salmon are bred to grow quickly, but that means they are more dependent than ever on a steady supply of food and an absence of predators. So if there is an accidental release, they are less likely to survive in the wild than non-GMO salmon, and less likely to interbreed with wild fish, so they are environmentally safer.
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.
Before domestication, maize plants grew only small, 25 millimetres (1 in) long corn cobs, and only one per plant.
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.
I'm guessing no one asked for GMO insulin and GMO cheese 30-40 years ago either, but dropping society's dependence on chopped-up cow pancreases and calf stomachs allowed us to significantly ramp up production and lower costs.
Would there be the possibility that some of it may be kindly purveyed upon us in the soon-to-be 51st state?
--
J. Rees-Mogg c/o The Houses Of Parliament, London.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't know about you, but I can tell the difference between farm and fresh by the taste, not texture. It's the feed they give the farm raised. It tastes more chemical-y and less buttery-fatty, for lack of a more accurate description.
And they dye it pink for chrissake!
... If you're not one of those salmon.
That's just asking for trouble. Predicted over 18 years ago, too!
So selective breeding is not 'genetically modifying' an organism? What is it doing then?
I'm happy I'm more or less migrating to Thailand.
Most fish is "farmed" here, and is rather boring, just Nil perch and catfish. But it is so delicious made on char coal. (Obviously I can buy sea fish and trouts farmed in the Chiang Mai area).
Farmed means: everyone has a pond, full with fish. No need to GMO anything, and I bet you could do the same in the US ... but alas ... profit profit profit.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Like with GMO or hormone poisoned beef, I wonder how long it takes the US will try to force the EU (or asian countries) to allow to sell it there.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What if they manage to engineer seafood that you won't be allergic to?
Ezekiel 23:20
I wouldn't be so harsh on people for using the term "GMO" incorrectly, as the term itself is unspecific, and is often broadened to include anything that has had its genes altered[1], even by nature.[2] [3]
It would be so much simpler if people just referred to the specific technologies being utilized, as they all suffer from risk/reward issues, and there aren't clear ethical borders. An incomplete list of the technologies used include:
* Nature's own technique of random mutations with a natural selection filter on top
* Artificial selection by humans, which in ~10,000 years gave us massive, delicious mutants like the modern wheat and corn crops, and docile cows, pigs and dogs
* Cloning started around the 1800s in order to perpetuate popular varieties of e.g. apples, oranges and bananas, whereby a branch of the tree is cut off and re-planted
* Forced hybridization has been around the 1900s, where two distinctly inbred parental lineages are perpetually bred to produce sterile offspring (e.g. seedless watermelons, or mules for use by the British Empire as amazing pack animals)
* Radiation-induced mutation breeding (mutagenesis) has been around since around the 1930s, which forcefully increases the mutation rate and splits chromosomes in order to allow breeding with other species -- a technique the EU even calls GMO (see [1])
-- a lot of western staple crops are based on, or hybridized from, crops produced from this technique
* Chemically-induced mutation breeding is a more modern version of mutagenesis that's doesn't cause as much DNA damage -- still a GMO in the EU though (see [1])
* Transgenic modifications, where specific genes can be takes from unrelated species, was invented in the 1970s
* Cisgenic modifications, where the specific genes are taken from a species where it would have been possible to acquire it naturally through conventional breeding,[4] have been a classification of GMOs since around the year 2000
So GMO debates could be untangled massively if people just spoke about the specific technologies. For instance, I suspect based on your comment that you would be against transgenic GMOs and mutagenesis, but for cisgenic GMOs... while being on the fence about forced hybridization?
I can taste the difference in farmed and wild caught salmon. Perhaps I could be less skeptical of your position if your first link wasn't to Alltech, an aquaculture proponent site, and your 2nd link wasn't to a fish farm management site.
While taste is a consideration, it is not the only one. I consume some healthy things that do not satisfy the taste buds nearly as well as many of the things thought to be most unhealthy. Wild caught salmon seem to have spent less time marinading in a broth of antibiotic soup than their farmed cousins.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
They don't dye the flesh. That's one of the myths listed in the first article I linked -- tl;dr: farmed salmon is fed with the same caroteniods that wild salmon gets from crustaceans.
Personally, I can't taste the difference between farmed and wild, nor frozen or fresh. But uncontrolled anecdotes are next to useless.
Where are you getting the info that GMO rennet is mostly used by the US? It's widely used in Denmark and Sweden as well. I would almost assume the same for any western country where the demand for hard cheese outpaces the demand for veal.
As for the comparison made, the parent I responded to specifically said "GMO anything," which I saw as fair game. But I think you're right in that topic which the article is about, this has been an unnecessary tangent.
I appreciate the scrutiny of my sources for potential bias and conflicts of interest. I was worried about this as well, which was why I aimed for three corroborating sources. But you didn't specifically refute any points that were made, and instead just dismissed the authority of the article writers.
As for your claims, which contradicts my first reference, what are your counter-evidence that farmed salmon spend a considerable time swimming in antibiotics? And what is your evidence that use of said fish-specific antibiotic is detrimental to human health?
"...what are your counter-evidence that farmed salmon spend a considerable time swimming in antibiotics? And what is your evidence that use of said fish-specific antibiotic is detrimental to human health?"
Well, first... it seems unlikely fish not swimming in antibiotics would need to be defended and/or prosecuted to the standard of not detrimental to human health.
2ndly through fourthly: Farmed salmon full of antibiotics
wild salmon vs farmed
Salmon farming in crisis: 'We are seeing a chemical arms race in the seas'"
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Well, first... it seems unlikely fish not swimming in antibiotics would need to be defended and/or prosecuted to the standard of not detrimental to human health.
Antibiotics are administered to the salmon as medicated feed. A responsible farm would only administer it when a bacterial infection is detected. Farmed fish doesn't "swim in it," as you make it out to be. Norway, which produces about 1 million out of 3.2 million tonnes of globally farmed salmon,[1] [2], also use alternatives to antibiotics, such as vaccinations and separating generations, and disinfecting empty holdings.[2] The quantity of antibiotic use in Norway has dropped from 48 tons in 1987[3, page 271] to 1 ton in 2015[2], and the total antibiotic quantity used in 2009 was one twentieth of what the meat industry used per unit of meat produced in Norway. Then there's indoor tanks as mentioned in the article, which have little to fear from sea-borne bacterial infections, and don't use antibiotics.
The antibiotics used in farming in general also tend to be different from ones given to humans, and those farm animals that have been treated aren't slaughtered until a while after the antibiotics has run its course. So again, can you show that fish farming practices in general is detrimental to human health? It seems to me that it can indeed be done responsibly.
2ndly through fourthly: Farmed salmon full of antibiotics
So the specific claim (at 1:50):
This doesn't make sense to me. What does a purported food preference have to do with microbial infections? Neither the video nor the article it's referencing elaborates on that. It also assumes that fish being treated with antibiotics will be sent to the slaughter before the antibiotics have run their course, which isn't necessarily the case if, again, the fish farm is acting responsibly.
wild salmon vs farmed
Salmon farming in crisis: 'We are seeing a chemical arms race in the seas'"
These articles present a lot of text about antibiotics. Could you extract the specific argument you wanted to make? I'm not going to do your job for you.
Do you happen to have some video evidence of this? Why doesn't it happen when its refrigerated at the store, is there a specific temperature where this occurs? Why isn't its scale dyed? And why would the farmers go through the trouble of dying flesh, when feeding them carotenoids is so much simpler?
One study estimated that GMO rennet (a.k.a. FDC/FPC) could account for up to 80% of the global market share of rennet.
As for taste, there shouldn't be a difference between the chymosin enzyme produced in calf stomachs and the chymosin enzyme produced by microbes. As described in a comparison of Gouda and Cheddar cheese making, there was no major sensory difference between bovine rennet and bovine FPC. Though camel-based FPC interestingly led to reduced bitterness.
What do you propose is the mechanism for your claim that non-GMO cheese taste better? It seems to me that you're engaging in some motivated reasoning.
It's not that simple, even just selective breeding can accidentally produce or spread very dangerous organisms such as Heracleum sosnowskyi. The main dangers of any modified organism (regardless of its GMO status) is toxicity and damage to the ecosystems from its rapid spreading. GMO organisms are very carefully tested/studied before entering market, this can even sometimes take decades. Even after entering market if any issue is reported, the product will be recalled. Most people who are scared of GMO usually have very limited knowledge about genetics and the process of food digestion. All normal proteins are fully broken down into amino acids in the digestive system, so the original protein doesn't even matter (except for very few exceptions). You can even drink very toxic snake venom and not die for same reason, of course, if there are no wounds in the mouth or in the stomach.
We have enough natural and farmed salmon. Why not genetically modify a 'problem' fish like silver carp . It's a problem fish here in North America where it also has low culinary value (even though it has high culinary value in China). Why not change silver carp to address some of its shortcomings?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.