You appear to be unable to distinguish selecting from modifying.
Selecting is modifying. Selecting for traits changes the genes. Inserting traits changes the genes too. There's a difference, but not that great of one. In one case we change the genome, in the other we change the genome.
If I go to a bar and select a beer rather than a glass of wine, that doesn't make me a brewer.
If I go to a bar and raise my BAC, it doesn't matter if I did it with beer or wine.
Don't you see a big difference between selective breeding and mixing the genetic material of organisms that could never otherwise mate?
Cells don't. Its all the same code to them. I'm not saying there couldn't be problems with moving genes around with genetic engineering (in the same way that conventional breeding has produced poisonous potatoes and celery that caused nasty blisters) but it isn't that much different intrinsically, but since GE crops are so rigorously tested that's a moot point. In the end it's just two different ways of altering genes. Think of the cell like a browser and the DNA like the html file. A browser doesn't can if you copy & pasted the code, if if you wrote it yourself, it will display it the same either way. What matters isn't how the code was written or where it came from, but how it actually works. Cells, and plants, don't care if a gene is wild type, or altered by breeding, or inserted by biotechnology, and neither should people. What matters is the end result. It's the product, not the process.
No, but in spite of that, we still don't produce the majority of our food organically.
Yes, well, while we all wish that natural was always better, unfortunately, that nice simply idea died out with the Iron Age. Organic is nothing more than an appeal to nature. Even if, by some miracle, every single thing advocated in organic agriculture were true, it would still be bullshit. If you can't understand that, go back to your high school and demand a refund.
The inefficient and environmentally destructive method of farming involving pesticides
You mean the ones Bt crops cut back on?
and energy intensive fertilizers is the one involving GMO.
You mean the fertilizers that soil needs less of when you use the no till methods facilitated by herbicide tolerant GE crops?
We produce GMO crops to try to deal with the drawbacks of so-called "green revolution" agriculture, which is a fairly imaginative euphemism for "monocultural farming".
You mean the Green Revolution that saved a billion lives? The one that introduced techniques that raised the productivity so much that we would have to log pretty much every forest on the planet if we had pre-Green Revolution yields? Boy, sure is nice to live in those cozy post industrial nations. Sure, the Green Revolution had problems, and monoculture is not desirable, but it isn't nearly as black and white as you make it out to be. You completely neglect the issues of spare or share, and I doubt you'd be criticizing it if you were one of the billions who would be dead without it (and in the unlikely event you are, then that's pretty hypocritical).
The crops which are most commonly GMO (like corn and soy) are typically grown (in a "big agribusiness" context) continuously, meaning without crop rotation or even permitting the crops to lie fallow.
You're joking right? You honestly believe that so-called industrial farmers don't know what crop rotation is, that they'd rather spread fertilizer (the cost of which comes right out of their bottom line) than use crop rotation?
Attempts to grow monocultures for machine cultivation led to Monsanto's production of glyphosphate-resistant crops (aka "Roundup-resistant" — and Monsanto is still the world's largest producer of glyphosphate)
So?
which in turn has produced "superweeds"
The proper term is resistant weed. It has happened before, and without developing a long term rotation plan of crops resistant to multiple different herbicides to counteract individual resistances that immerge in weed populations, it will happen again. Weeds rotations have evolved dormancy in their seeds to take advantage of the rotation. Guess crop rotation is bad too , huh? The existance of selection pressure is only news to the clueless, which I suspect is why the emotional term 'superweed' is used.
which are not only resistant to roundup, but also bigger and stronger in general.
That's a new one on me. got a citation?
The pests are being driven to rapid evolution through the methods of agriculture which benefit (in the short term) from genetic manipulation.
That statement has been true since long before biotechnology was on the scene. I was going to say welcome to the 1930s but now that I think about it that problem is even older. Irish potato famine anyone? Ironically, those problems are caused by lack of genetic diversity, the same thing that transgenics, by definition, inserts.
Labor costs don't seem to be rising at all when it comes to crops, since we're still shitting on Mexico through both direct political intervention and through prohibition, which causes
Because, uh, nobody lived in the New World to eat (and breed, corn in particular) that food until the Europeans showed up?
That was the point I was trying to make about how the notion that humans co-evolved with their crops just doesn't mean anything here. Unless you're a Native American, you didn't get New World crops until then.
I note, also, that tetanus, botulin, diphtheria, and shiga toxins are all proteins.
So's snake venom. My point is that the vast majority of proteins, even if we include species that we don't eat, are still harmless. Again, not that it really matters since any protein inserted into GE crops is studied pretty intensively first.
Old-style crossbreeding is rather different from some of the stuff we're doing now.
Yeah, but its still changing the genes. If you breed some new trait, there's something controlling it. That isn't much different than just inserting it from some other source. Consider the three traits currently inserted into crops: the insect resistance trait (the Bt ones), herbicide resistance, and virus resistance. These are really pretty benign. The herbicide resistance trait is either a bacterial form of EPSP synthase (plants already have a form of this, the only difference is that this one lacks the site that the herbicide glyphosate binds to) or the enzyme produced by the bar gene that degrades glufosinate (which I confess I don't know as much about but I have no reason to suspect a specific enzyme of anything any more than any other enzyme making up all the pathways in plants). The virus resistance trait uses a gene from the viral coat protein of the virus, and you end up with a lot more of that protein in the non-GE version than the GE version (also, it relies on a defensive mRNA shutdown process so not all that horribly much is even converted into a protein). Neither of those seem exceptionally scary to me (and of course lets not forget that you can just as easily transfer genes from species we already eat, cisgenic genes from breeding compatable species, and anti-sense traits from the very same plant). And as for the Bt one...
Bt (bacillus thuringiensis) proteins, that was never in anything that we ate before.
Bt was applied to crops for about half a century before the genes were used in genetic engineering. We know very well how they work. They're very specific, binding to specific receptors in the guts of certain insects, and the form you eat isn't even the 'toxic' form. It doesn't become active until its in an alkaline environment (I'm sure you know that human guts are acidic). Here's something to think about: if the Lepidoptera didn't exist, we'd never know that the cry proteins from Bt were 'toxins'. And my previous point still holds true about how most proteins are digested. You don't have to step too far out of your culinary comfort zone to encounter new ones. Granted, they've been consumed to some extent unless you're going hyper exotic like mandapuça or butyagela or something, but there's still lots of things that are relatively new and unconsumed, so I don't really think that's a good argument to apply to inserted proteins in GE crops, especially considering that the protein has to be studied pretty well before it can be used.
on the other hand, profit-oriented business in the US has a long track record of telling us that whatever happens to make money for them is totally harmless. You'd have to be a complete idiot to not be skeptical of whatever happy talk you heard from anyone selling you stuff.
I don't disagree. But to go the complete other direction and throw out all the science supporting GE crops just because companies stand to gain is just as bad. I'm not saying to trust the companies. You don't have to. The analogy I like to use all the time is the case of the anti-vaxers. They always say, 'Don't trust the pharma companies.' That's not a
Are you trying to imply that the genetic change that has so far occurred in crops is not as significant as the introduction of human inserted transgenes because humans have co-evolved with those crops? Well, that's pretty silly for two big reasons. First, the changes to the crops are far too rapid for any sort of co-evolution. Things really sped up after the discovery of Mendelian genetics and they've only gotten faster since. Second, how many millenia has most of the world been eating corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, blueberries, or sunflower seed? Since those are all new world crops, not that long actually. I like lychees, persimmon, jicama, mayapple, amaranth, and goumi, among plenty of other 'new' crops. I'm probably the first person in my ancestry to try them. Kiwis, mangoes, macademia nuts, and starfruit are pretty new additions to the western diet. Who knows how many unique proteins exist in those species. If what you say is true, then it would make sense to restrict your diet to crops that were present wherever your ancestry was a few thousand years ago. Fortunately, that's really bad advice. The human body is designed to digest proteins (currently, the only things produced in GE crops are proteins, although building the pathways for secondary metabolites like beta carotene is possible), and aside from an very small minority that cause allergies, they're all processed the same. Doesn't matter where the protein came from or how it got there.
and those just wanting to know what they were drinking to force the secretary to backtrack on the order.
There's no difference. How can you 'know what you're drinking' if its the same thing? It doesn't matter if milk comes from a cow treated with hormones or not. I mean, come on, you're grinking something that came out of a lactating bovine, there's going to be hormones already in it. A bit more isn't going to make much of a difference, and you'd have to drink massive quantities of milk every day for it to matter. It reminds me of the people who think crops should be pesticide free, but neglect to consider all the pesticides that plants naturally produce to defend themselves. The hormone free thing is just more anti-food science bullshit from uneducated foodies who think complaining is better than learning the science behind what they're protesting.
If you actually cared, every time you drank a glass of milk, you'd dump just a tiny bit of it out. Sound stupid right? What if you drank that amount of milk instead? Is the milk suddenly unhealthy? That little amount represents the tiny bit of increased hormones you might get with rBST treated milk, and even whatever you'd manage to dump would be an overestimate.
I was angry and still am angry that a state official was comfortable hiding what was in our food for the sake of lobbying interests.
No, you were mad about new technological contribution to the efficiency of the production practice, not an attribute of the end product. I'm not saying I agree with the labeling, if milk producers want to label it as such then that's fine and dandy, and maybe there was some lobbying involved, but lets not pretend it has anything to do with the milk itself. This comes to mind.
I was just trying to make the point that we are being force-fed GM foods
Who, exactly, is forcing you to eat genetically engineered food? Because there's a huge difference between you being too lazy to learn what is GE and what isn't, and someone forcing you to eat it. You're free not to eat it. You're free to buy organic food, or foods containing only crops that aren't genetically engineered. That's like a Muslim saying he's being force fed non-Halal beef. Saying you're being 'force-fed' GE crops is just being dramatic and deceitful.
And before you give me the ever popular 'oh but its not labeled so how do I know?' schtick, then listen up: corn, soy, canola, cotton, papaya (from Hawaii), summer squash, and soon, suger beet and alfalfa. If it has those in it, assume its GE. No other crop currently on the market is GE (well, there were potatoes and tomatoes but they were discontinued, and in Iran they've got GE rice). 15 seconds on Google, now you don't have to play the lazy victim anymore. You're welcome. And for reference, guess what else isn't labeled: fruit from grafted trees or vegetables/grains from hybrid seed. Not the same thing? Funny because throughout history people have made the same accusations at them that people make at GE crops today. I get that agricultural history is pretty boring but it sure is insightful. In fact, no plant improvement method is labeled. If you didn't want food produced with mutagens, induced polyploidy, tissue culture/somaclonal variation, marker assisted breeding, sport selection, your argument holds the same weight. What if I don't want wheat bred from strains altered with mutagenic radiation, or apples selected from sports, or bananas produced from tissue cultured clones plants, or citrus with extra chromosomes? Because guess what, they're all there, on the market, right now, no labeling, no safety testing. The only difference is that no one's ever made stink about them. You're irrationally singling out one thing while irrationally ignoring all the other genetic changes that are made to crops, which are almost always much larger and much more random and less understood than inserting a gene or two with GE
there have been no long term studies as to safety.
So, these studies, this study, this one, this one, this one, didn't happen, and neither did any of these. You might want to do a bit more research before making statements like that. You know, they don't need to do safety testing for any other type of plant improvement, which is genetic modification (although not genetic engineering). I'm not saying they shouldn't be tested, but these things are plants, not drugs. If there isn't anything new in the that is biologically active, there is no reason to think that they're suddenly going to be dangerous (at least, no more than there is for any other type of genetic alteration). The cry proteins & EPSPS proteins (the two main ones inserted in GE crops right now) are NOT dangerous. That's not my opinion, that is the conclusion of pretty much all the literature on the subject, and just you haven't read it doesn't make it any less true.
Call me crazy, but I still want to make my own life choices, and not have the government and corporations make them for me.
Crazy, maybe not, but uninformed, absolutely. And government and corporations are not making the decision for you, they're making it for everyone else. If farmers want to g
I was just making the point that lobbying interests and governments are ramming GM foods onto the market with the safety of the public being secondary
That's happening in the same sense that they're ramming vaccines into hospitals without checking their safety. Sure, Monsanto and the others are pushing their products, just like Apple pushes iPads and Toyota pushes the Prius (of course, when any other company does it, its business, but when Monsanto does it, its a conspiracy), but that doesn't mean the science isn't there. Itis. We can sit here and talk about Monsanto and agribusiness all day long. That doesn't change the science.
If these foods are safe and wholesome, what is the problem with labelling them?
Nothing. It would be nice if there was a 'Biotech by choice' label. Anyone is free to label any food as containing GE ingredients, not containing them, or not labeling anything at all. They same way they're free to label or not label their produce as being produced with grafting, hybridization, somaclonal variation, sport selection, embryo rescue, chemical/radiation mutagenesis, induced polyploidy, wide crosses, marker assisted selection, ect. You might as well say if those things are so great (and they are), why aren't they labeled?
If you're talking mandatory labeling, then all of the above aren't labeled for the same reasons. It's still the same plant. For the three types of GE crop currently on the market (insect resistant, herbicide tolerant, and virus resistant), the GE plant is substantially equivalent to its non-GE isogenic counterpart. Sure, you can say that GE is different, and you'd be right, that's why we have a different word of it. But is isn't different enough, it is still just another method of changing the genes. You could say that genes don't go from species to species in nature, but then you'd both be wrong and making an irrelevant point. If anything, that would be reasoning to not label GE crops, since now you know exactly what genetic changes you make. I grew purple broccoli this year and ate a bunch of pink fleshed apples, and I don't have a damned clue what protein it had that produced those pigments, and those are just the visible phenotypes which doesn't even get into all the things you can't easily see. But if I had a GE corn that had the gene for Cry1Ab in it, I'd know exactly what produced its trait. Or compare the case of the Lenape potato with the University of Ghent's GE potatoes. Both were designed to be resistant to pests. The Lenape was produced with a wide cross to get resistance genes from wild potatoes, the GE ones had the genes directly moved. The Lenape brought the genes for producing a dangerous amount of glycoalkaloids and made people sick. The GE ones were destroyed by ecoterrorists. Yet if we mandated labeling, only the safe one would need to have to be labeled as being somehow different. That is simply idiotic. The process is not nearly as relevant as the product.
And furthermore, what purpose would such a label serve? Would you still buy it? You and I both know damn well that the only reason anti-GMO groups push for those labels is to scare people and undermine the credibility of genetic engineering. It's like the labels creationists were trying to push on science books stating 'Evolution is only a theory.' Sure, it was true enough, but all it did was undermine the credibility of evolution, which was exactly what it was supposed to do. Why did a fact undermine science? It was deceptive due to public ignorance. Same thing here. Maybe had anti-science groups like Greenpeace and vested interest groups like the Organic Consumers Association not spend the last two decades misinforming the public things might be a little dif
I think that's a lot of it. If my some magic everyone's skin color changed to reflect what class they were raised in, if those born in the upper class were red and the lower class blue, then we'd see red people in tech and blue people underrepresented. It wouldn't directly have anything to do with the color itself but the social circumstances behind the color. But since class isn't visible, while race is, its easy to ignore the real variable at play and attribute it to what can be easily be seen.
Ok, ok, maybe comparing it to Jenny McCarthy was a bit much. Maybe I'm guilty of exaggerating a bit there. Just a comparison to drive home that for many who know much about agriculture Food Inc is, well, not exactly the most complete picture. I mean, yeah, iit wasn't all bad. There are good points and criticisms to be made about the food supply in general, like worker's issues and animal abuse and whatnot. I just can't stand the overly dramatic 'we're going to tell you what THEY don't want you to know' one sided stuff. Like seeds. If you buy Monsanto's seeds, there are benefits and drawbacks that should be presented. If you think that signing the contract saying that you won't save seed (and if you do, pay the license fee for it) isn't worth the better weed control/elimination of tilling and/or pest control/reduction in the need to use pesticides (depending on which type of seed we mean), then don't buy it. Most farmers don't save seed anyway, and haven't since heterosis was discovered and farmers started taking advantage of hybrid vigor. Most seed sold today is hybrid seed (not to be confused with GE seed...all GE seed sold is hybrid seed, but not all hybrid seed is GE seed, and GE seed does not necessarily have to be hybrid seed), which produces better yields in the first year, but loses genetic stability the second year and isn't suitable for replanting. Of course, there's a lot more that could be said about nuances and complexities (like cross pollination issues and heirloom/OP seed), but in general I don't imagine most farmers take issue with it, but if you want to make the must see documentary of the year, you don't talk to most farmers.
I'm not saying it is optimal, but I'm not much bothered by it either. What would be optimal, IMO, would be apomixis traits, which would have the vigor of hybrid seed, but would breed true allowing farmers to save seed and have hybrid yields. No company is going to work on something like that though; it'd risk putting them out of business unless all they did was collect a yearly license fee. Which goes back to public research. That would have been a better topic for a documentary. Land grant universities were founded to contribute to agriculture, and now those departments are withering. I'm not sure that the universities should be a source of seed as in mass producing and selling the seed though, but development, yeah, that'd be pretty nice. I sometimes wonder if we would have the anti-GMO hysteria had universities been the main source of seed development from the get-go (although there is a history there). Even if we're not talking biotech, it'd be nice to see more university funded research, not just to avoid the need for contracts so that the company can ensure a profit and eliminate other inefficiencies, but because they can do things companies can't. Biodiversity research comes to mind (here's my rant). In the event that big diseases (like Ug99) or some other problem hits one or more major staple crops, then that's not going to end well. If staple (and other) crops were more diversified this lessens the likelihood that any one problem will be catastrophic. Companies can't do this research because no one is going to buy it at first...I mean, imagine the average consumer walks into a megamart and encounters oca, yacon, mashua, screwpine, breadfruit, sago, ensete, quinoa, fonio, teff, chaya, salicornia, nopales, jujube, pawpaw, goumi, naranjilla, cassabanana, canistel, jabuticaba, or (my favorite) lychee, to name a small few. What happens? They don't notice or care. Not a very good way of making money. Universities could do it though. Monoculture courts disaster (although there's nuance here too, to say monoculture is all bad is an oversimplification), and I think the improvement and introduction of such crops to the food supply would act as a hedge against risk. But there's not much funding for crop improvement anymore, and even less for undercultivated crops, and you're nuts if you think you can use biotechnology on them (regulatory barriers
My case in point is how Monsanto patented life in their seeds, and now dominate the markets
So? Aren't plant breeders allowed to have a return on their investment? My favorite apple, SnowSweet, is patented, and were it not for the success of the breeder's last patented apple, HoneyCrisp, it might not exist today. Why should Monsanto be any different? I don't care whether you like them or not, but they're not in the wrong on this one. And by the way, their first patent expires in 2014, and they plan to let it. Seems like they're doing it a lot better than the RIAA & MPAA are handling copyright.
Watch Food Inc. to get the gist of that nightmare
Ugh. That's like saying listen to Jenny McCarthy to understand the vaccine nightmare. Food Inc was biased rubbish geared towards people who know nothing about agriculture. I couldn't even stomach the damn thing. If it's patents you're concerned about, think about this tidbit:
"I have been for years in correspondence with leading breeders, nurserymen, and federal officials, and I despair of anything being done at present to secure to the plant breeder any adequate returns for his enormous outlays of energy and money. A man can patent a mousetrap or copyright a nasty song, but if he gives the world a new fruit that will add millions to the value of the earth’s annual harvests he will be fortunate if he is rewarded so much as having his name connected with the result. Though the surface of the plant experimentation has thus far been only scratched and there is so much immeasurably important work to be done in this line, I would hesitate to advise a young man, no matter how gifted or devoted, to adopt plant breeding as a life work until America takes some action to protect his unquestioned right to some benefit from his achievements."
Sound like paid defender of Monsanto? Nope, that was from a letter written by Luther Burbank, one of the most famous and visionary plant breeders who ever lived, who lived in an age when Mendelian genetics were still novel and was an early supporter of plant patents whose views helped create the Plant Patent Act of 1930 (though he died before it was passed). Plant breeding, and genetic engineering, is a hard, time consuming process that adds a lot of value to the world. Farmers wouldn't buy crops with production orientated traits if they weren't beneficial, and consumers tend to liek things that taste good (like HoneyCrisp apples, which just went off patent recently). Those who do contribute to the world in such a meaningful way deserve their fair share of the return for their investment.
When it comes to patents of science, I don't trust them
Fair enough, I'm not big fan of them either, and I can think of a few. By all means, keep a close eye on corporations, I'm not saying they're to be fully trusted, but there is a big difference between science and a product, and a big difference between a reasonable patent allowing the inventor to get a return on investment.
I like plant patents, I like like that those in plant improvement can make a living, and so should you. I like my SnowSweet, and the program that made it might not even be able to exist without patents. That's just the way of the world. Yes, it'd be nice if this stuff had more public funding (a lot more), but instead funding for these sorts of things at universities is being increasingly cut by short sighted assholes (at my university, the university's president, a pompous douchebag if ever there were one, cut the ag department's budget while increasing his own salary), and no wonder, when people know so little about agriculture that Food Inc wins awards, who can be surprised that this is where we end up, with large corporations leading the way?
You know what else they don't label? Naturally mutated varieties, plant sports, food produced with hybrid seed, wide crossed varieties (member the Lenape potato?), embryo rescue, chemical mutagenesis, radiation mutagenesis, somatic variation, plants produced with tissue culture, grafted plants, polyploid plants, crops treated with colchicine, ect. Pretty inconsistent to think that inserting a single very well known and well studied protein (even one like the cry protein that people have been eating for decades) should be labeled, meanwhile give all the other things that cause a lot more genetic change a free pass. Allergies are caused by just a few proteins out of the tens of thousands you eat every day...saying that genetic engineering is any more likely to spontaneously produce one than other crop improvement techniques (with a well understood protein anyway, particularly one already in the food supply) is just magical thinking. And if allergies are you concern, I notice no one is protesting the hundreds of new proteins and compounds in biodiverse foods. Fun fact: more people have died from starfruit than GM crops (granted, not from allergic reactions, but people have had reactions to relative newcomers to mas production like kiwi). Of course, it is no coincidence that only one of these things is well known by the public (although when hybrid seed first became big, people said the same thing about it, hell, there people who were against grafting...both things are now ubiquitous in grain/vegetable and fruit production respectively). And because there is not a shred of evidence to suggest the GM food is in any way different than non-GM food, it is no different than mandatory labeling for Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, ect. dietary laws. Of course, you could say that there is no proof that they're not causing allergies, but you could say the same thing about everything else I listed, or pretty much anything, including invisible pink unicorns.
And yes, the term frankenfoods is just an overly emotional appeal, just like calling resistant weeds 'superweeds'' or calling cross pollination 'genetic contamination.'. Fearmongering. Anyone who knows anything about crop domestication knows everything we eat is already 'frankenfoods.' Of course, that's natural, so it's totally different. By the way, the Rainbow papaya isn't labeled either. It was produced by the University of Hawaii. So, what was that about evil corporations again? Here's an idea. Maybe if people want a specific thing labeled, they should stop lying about it. Of course, telling lies to scare people into buying fancy overpriced organic food is somehow morally superior to making people do 15 seconds of looking it up
The problem here is that next to no one solely protests Monsanto (and Syngenta and DuPont and Bayer and BASF ect). It is always protesting Monsanto AND genetic engineering, which is a lot like saying 'Merck are jerks, therefore vaccines cause autism.' I have never seen any of those anti-GMO groups complain about Monsanto while staying within scientific facts and supporting non-corporate GMOs, like the Rainbow papaya, Golden Rice, BioCassava, HoneySweet plum, ect. Look at research vandalism: the low glycemic index wheat in Australia, the virus resistant grape rootstocks in France, the fungus resistant potatoes in the Netherlands...all destroyed, all non-corporate and funded by the respective governments. Even for small companies, like the people who made the Arctic apple, people complain about those too, the very thing that may someday bring more competition to the industry. Or look at how every anti-GMO group out there claims that GM food well harm human health, when that is blatantly false (shit, aside from vague and incoherent what-ifs, they can't even come up with a scientifically plausible mechanism as to how that could even happen, let alone evidence that it actually does). Hating on the corporation is one thing, but making stuff up is another. So, without ignoring pretty much every anti-GMO group ever (and note that they're anti-GMO, not anti-Monsanto) you can't sit there and say this is all about corporations, because it is absolutely about the science itself. If this were really about corporations, we'd see support for GMOs like the Rainbow papaya and we'd see agreement with the facts about even Monsanto's GMOs. But we don't.
In fact, you did just this in your post. GM seeds have nothing to do with lock-in, at least, no more than any other hybrid seed does. Sorry to assume, but you sound like one of those people who thinks that before GM seed farmers just saved their seed from year to year and were completely independent of big seed corporations. Not true. Once it ways found that hybrid seed could give better yield than open pollinated seed (at the cost of losing genetic stability the next generation), almost everyone switched. That's been going on since the 1930s, and by the 70s, almost all seed grown crops were hybrid seed. This is not something that suddenly happened when GMOs came on the scene, the only difference is now they have to pay a licensing fee (after signing a contract agreeing to this) if they choose to buy GM seed and replant them.
As for herbicide tolerant crops, actually, they are better. People like to think of freshly tilled soil as nice, healthy soil. This is a myth. Tilling your soil erodes the soil and degrades the soil quality, releases CO2, and causes fertilizer runoff into aquatic environments. Why do farmers do it? To control weeds. However, with herbicide resistant crops, they don't need to do that anymore. Of course spraying something like that is bad for the environment, no one is claiming otherwise, but so is farming itself. It isn't about what causes harm, it is about what causes the least amount of harm. Furthermore, the particular type of herbicide commonly used (with the Round-Up Ready crops anyway, the Liberty Link ones use something else) is actually one of your more benign herbicides, having replaced others that were worse. You can feel however you want about a company that makes two products that are designed to work together, whatever, but for all the ill will directed toward them, the fact is herbicide tolerant crops are really a big environmental win.
As for the terminator genes (not in use BTW), do you not see the irony of talking about cross pollination right after them? Like I already said, farmers buying GM seed aren't going to be saving seed anyway, so who do you think is going to benefit most from genetic use restriction technology? And yes, I'm sure the company will too, but that goes back to an anti-corporate argument, not a scientific one. As for the suing of farmers, that only happens when the one farmers intention
If they can't guarantee that the genes won't spread, then they shouldn't be doing the research. End of story full stop.
Genes have always spread. It's what they do. If you prevent that (terminator technology) everyone freaks out. What if I don't want the sd-1 gene in my rice, should people doing rice breeding stop? Singling out genetic engineering is nonsensical in light of all the other genetic change humans have caused in food crops (and don't give the 'oh but that's natural' baloney). If you have an issue with the product, fine, but the process is not the issue (unless you know very little about it and view it with magical thinking).
the fact is that GMO products aren't necessary, most of the things they're trying to do are directly related to incompetent agriculture in the first place.
Do you have any idea the types of precautions that must be taken before a field trial can be approved? Obviously not, so don't you think it is a bit arrogant to assume they don't?
the fact is that GMO products aren't necessary,
Are they necessary? Well, not at the moment (unless you're a papaya farmer in Hawaii or anyone else who loses whole crops to pathogens that can't otherwise be controlled), although the whole spraying less pesticides and reduced soil damage is pretty nice.
most of the things they're trying to do are directly related to incompetent agriculture in the first place
You mean the agricultural practices that feed you? The ones that have improved so much in the past century that we'd have to log just about every forest on the planet if we used the practices we did just a century ago?
We wouldn't need golden rice if the farmers would be growing a traditional mix of greens along with the rice.
And if they had the means to transport and store fresh produce, and if the people who needed Golden Rice could actually afford it. Do you honestly think that simply eating a more diverse diet never occurred to anyone developing Golden Rice? You're right of course, it would be better than Golden Rice, and wouldn't it be great it it were so simple, but your solution is basically 'let them eat cake.'
Can't tell if trolling or just very ignorant. I could have modded, but I'd rather educate. First off, treating all GMOs as if they have the same traits is just stupid. There are bunches of different genes that have been inserted and potentially any gene could be used, so acting as if one trait should matter for every other one is beyond senseless. Second, the traits you're talking about were not designed for that purpose (although that was a side effect the companies no doubt considered), but rather was to prevent the flow of the genes to other people's crops (the very thing people are trying to sue Monsanto over now...they're evil bastards if they do, and evil bastards if they don't. Third, those traits are not in use anyway. Because most seed sold nowadays is hybrid seed (hybrid and GMO are different and commonly confused but not mutually exclusive things) farmers typically want to buy new seed anyway, as they have been doing long before GMOs came on the scene. Before you complain about something, might want to do some basic fact checking first. Fourth, I highly doubt the study you mention was done all that well in light of the hundreds showing no harm from GM food and the fact that the best causative mechanism for why GMO food would be inherently dangerous is...oh wait, no one has ever proposed any coherent way that could happen. Fifth, this new paper (assuming it is accurate) says nothing about GMO safety. There are thousands of genes for all sorts of stuff in every single thing you eat. I highly doubt transgenes are going to behave differently, especially considering that the only three traits currently in use (the Bt gene, an EPSP synthase gene, and viral coat protein genes) can very easily be found in non-GM food too. So basically, no, this has no relevance on genetic engineering whatsoever, but I have no doubt someone out there will cite it as such.
If this works, five bucks says within a decade there are hoards of twats screaming about all the 'hidden dangers' of the treatment that mainstream science doesn't want you to know and about how AIDS never killed anyone in the first place and claiming it was dropping before the cure. This will happen, especially if it involves gene therapy.
Artificial Fertilizers tend to distort the natural soil microbiology
Not on the land they're not applied. Consider what the ability to produce more food on less land does for the overall environment. People act like artificial fertilizers are this big horrible thing, but they're actually a pretty decent trade-off.
cause stunted root development
Uh, yeah, plants grown in high nutrient environments grow less roots. Those in need of more nutrients grow longer roots to seek out more nutrition, those already with enough don't.
balance and moderation is the key.
The same holds true in inorganic and organic (and by that I mean the real definition of organic, not the new magical one) fertilizers.
But what would they know compared to our few hundred years of research in Western medicine?
Not enough to know that there's no such thing as chi/ki/prana apparently. As for this mind-gut connection, enlighten me, does it say anything specific or relevant to anything related to gut flora? Or is it just that eating good food makes you feel better (which falls firmly into the no shit category), mixed with a heaping helping of nonsense about 'yin foods' and 'yang foods'? I'm not making that up; TCM practitioners actually believe that some foods have magical heating (yang) or cooling (yin) abilities, and that eating too much of the one or the other will screw you up. And before you say 'well yeah, cucumber is cool and pepper is hot' take note that the lychee (one of the best foods most westerners have never heard of, tastes kinda like a grape, but grows on a tree and has a hard red skin) is one of the yangiest foods (cherries and pineapples are also yang). Could there be a scientific basis behind it? Dunno, maybe a thousand years of anecdotes amounts to something. But given the complete lack of actual science to back those points, and the plethora of just plain stupid things TCM guys also believe in (ever seen the dried lizard/worm/wood/who-knows-what-else infusions they make?), I sure as hell don't buy it until someone gives me more than the Chinese equivalent of the four humors (which, I have no doubt, if some magical foreigners had invented, these morons would be buying that too, but since it's European then it is just dumb).
Adam Smith has a rebuttal to that all the way back from 1776: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest." Monsanto is a company acting to make a profit, not a charity. So what? Plant geneticists are supposed to work for free now? There's nothing wrong (inherently anyway, which is not to say abuse cannot occur) with seeking a return on your R&D investment, whether it is in crop science or any other field. You could certainty make the argument that there should be more publicly funded options but it does not follow that private ones should not be an option. The comparisons you make are over the top.
In the world? More than you just listed, by far. Rices, Potatoes, Fruit cultivars, and much, much more.
No, in commercial production. Yeah, at some universities around the world you can find GMO just about anything, but right the only fruit approved the rainbow papaya and the only vegetables approved are corn, summer squash, and I guess soy is a vegetable (I forgot that one...I don't eat edamame much so I forget that you can eat it as a vege), the discontinued Flavr Savr tomato, the discontinued New Leaf potato, and the Amflora potato in Europe (although it is for industrial starch production not human consumption). Rice is a grain, not a vegetable, and the only approved rice strains are IIRC bt rice in China and Iran (developed in those countries I might add). Obviously, everything is genetically modified in that everything's genes have been modified from their original forms by man, but that's all on the market that uses biotech improvements at the moment.
And in reality, plenty of heirloom cultivars last AS LONG as their GMO counterparts in shelf-life.
I wish someone would tell that to the Ananas Noire, Carbon, and White Tomesol tomatoes that I've got turning to mush. Although I'll give you that I shouldn't have painted heirlooms with such a wide brush...the term 'heirloom' describes hundreds of varieties with many different traits.
It's breeding for mechanical picking that begins the real fuckups.
Given the rising cost of labor and people disliking the exploitation of migrant workers, unless you really like eating nothing but a grains and a handful of other crops, mechanical picking is the future by necessity. Those were bred for a reason. However, uniform ripening traits and delayed ripening traits in GM plants are designed to keep quality while allowing mechanical harvesting, and they should also help out in the developing world where spoilage is a HUGE problem.
You do realize the terminator gene isn't actually in use, right? And that organic farmers aren't sued unless they intentionally knowingly save the seed and select for the trait...organic farmers are not sued for simply cross pollenation. The opposite however is not true.
What does that have to do with GMOs? First, there's a difference between GMOs and hybrids. Your studies seem to be citing vegetable crops. How many vegetable crops are GMO? Just two: summer squash and sweet corn. Most are hybrids, and while it is true that the GMOs are also hybrids, their nutritional qualities are unrelated to the trasngene (except for some biofortified crops like Golden Rice and BioCasava which presently are not available).Second, that's exactly the reason we should have more GMOs. Breeders didn't intentionally try to decrease nutritional content, they did so as a by product of altering other things, like uniformity and shelf life (which as an aside demonstrates why those who say GE is inherently more dangerous and unpredictable are full of shit).. That higher nutrition doesn't mean shit when an heirloom cultivar with a shorter shelf life rots before someone eats it or if they just won't buy if for being funny looking (people have very small comfort zones when it comes to food. Try feeding someone who thinks all tomatoes are red and perfectly round an Ananas Noire.or Kellog's Breakfast tomato sometime). With genetic engineering, it would be possible to introduce genes for uniform growth & ripening and longer shelf life (or whatever else is needed) in heirloom vegetables, or use biofortification to increase the nutrient content of other crops.
Aren't you that guy who claims to have done just about everything? Cause this is some pretty basic stuff, and if you knew anything about horticulture, you'd know these things already.
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You appear to be unable to distinguish selecting from modifying.
Selecting is modifying. Selecting for traits changes the genes. Inserting traits changes the genes too. There's a difference, but not that great of one. In one case we change the genome, in the other we change the genome.
If I go to a bar and select a beer rather than a glass of wine, that doesn't make me a brewer.
If I go to a bar and raise my BAC, it doesn't matter if I did it with beer or wine.
Don't you see a big difference between selective breeding and mixing the genetic material of organisms that could never otherwise mate?
Cells don't. Its all the same code to them. I'm not saying there couldn't be problems with moving genes around with genetic engineering (in the same way that conventional breeding has produced poisonous potatoes and celery that caused nasty blisters) but it isn't that much different intrinsically, but since GE crops are so rigorously tested that's a moot point. In the end it's just two different ways of altering genes. Think of the cell like a browser and the DNA like the html file. A browser doesn't can if you copy & pasted the code, if if you wrote it yourself, it will display it the same either way. What matters isn't how the code was written or where it came from, but how it actually works. Cells, and plants, don't care if a gene is wild type, or altered by breeding, or inserted by biotechnology, and neither should people. What matters is the end result. It's the product, not the process.
No, but in spite of that, we still don't produce the majority of our food organically.
Yes, well, while we all wish that natural was always better, unfortunately, that nice simply idea died out with the Iron Age. Organic is nothing more than an appeal to nature. Even if, by some miracle, every single thing advocated in organic agriculture were true, it would still be bullshit. If you can't understand that, go back to your high school and demand a refund.
The inefficient and environmentally destructive method of farming involving pesticides
You mean the ones Bt crops cut back on?
and energy intensive fertilizers is the one involving GMO.
You mean the fertilizers that soil needs less of when you use the no till methods facilitated by herbicide tolerant GE crops?
We produce GMO crops to try to deal with the drawbacks of so-called "green revolution" agriculture, which is a fairly imaginative euphemism for "monocultural farming".
You mean the Green Revolution that saved a billion lives? The one that introduced techniques that raised the productivity so much that we would have to log pretty much every forest on the planet if we had pre-Green Revolution yields? Boy, sure is nice to live in those cozy post industrial nations. Sure, the Green Revolution had problems, and monoculture is not desirable, but it isn't nearly as black and white as you make it out to be. You completely neglect the issues of spare or share, and I doubt you'd be criticizing it if you were one of the billions who would be dead without it (and in the unlikely event you are, then that's pretty hypocritical).
The crops which are most commonly GMO (like corn and soy) are typically grown (in a "big agribusiness" context) continuously, meaning without crop rotation or even permitting the crops to lie fallow.
You're joking right? You honestly believe that so-called industrial farmers don't know what crop rotation is, that they'd rather spread fertilizer (the cost of which comes right out of their bottom line) than use crop rotation?
Attempts to grow monocultures for machine cultivation led to Monsanto's production of glyphosphate-resistant crops (aka "Roundup-resistant" — and Monsanto is still the world's largest producer of glyphosphate)
So?
which in turn has produced "superweeds"
The proper term is resistant weed. It has happened before, and without developing a long term rotation plan of crops resistant to multiple different herbicides to counteract individual resistances that immerge in weed populations, it will happen again. Weeds rotations have evolved dormancy in their seeds to take advantage of the rotation. Guess crop rotation is bad too , huh? The existance of selection pressure is only news to the clueless, which I suspect is why the emotional term 'superweed' is used.
which are not only resistant to roundup, but also bigger and stronger in general.
That's a new one on me. got a citation?
The pests are being driven to rapid evolution through the methods of agriculture which benefit (in the short term) from genetic manipulation.
That statement has been true since long before biotechnology was on the scene. I was going to say welcome to the 1930s but now that I think about it that problem is even older. Irish potato famine anyone? Ironically, those problems are caused by lack of genetic diversity, the same thing that transgenics, by definition, inserts.
Labor costs don't seem to be rising at all when it comes to crops, since we're still shitting on Mexico through both direct political intervention and through prohibition, which causes
Because, uh, nobody lived in the New World to eat (and breed, corn in particular) that food until the Europeans showed up?
That was the point I was trying to make about how the notion that humans co-evolved with their crops just doesn't mean anything here. Unless you're a Native American, you didn't get New World crops until then.
I note, also, that tetanus, botulin, diphtheria, and shiga toxins are all proteins.
So's snake venom. My point is that the vast majority of proteins, even if we include species that we don't eat, are still harmless. Again, not that it really matters since any protein inserted into GE crops is studied pretty intensively first.
Old-style crossbreeding is rather different from some of the stuff we're doing now.
Yeah, but its still changing the genes. If you breed some new trait, there's something controlling it. That isn't much different than just inserting it from some other source. Consider the three traits currently inserted into crops: the insect resistance trait (the Bt ones), herbicide resistance, and virus resistance. These are really pretty benign. The herbicide resistance trait is either a bacterial form of EPSP synthase (plants already have a form of this, the only difference is that this one lacks the site that the herbicide glyphosate binds to) or the enzyme produced by the bar gene that degrades glufosinate (which I confess I don't know as much about but I have no reason to suspect a specific enzyme of anything any more than any other enzyme making up all the pathways in plants). The virus resistance trait uses a gene from the viral coat protein of the virus, and you end up with a lot more of that protein in the non-GE version than the GE version (also, it relies on a defensive mRNA shutdown process so not all that horribly much is even converted into a protein). Neither of those seem exceptionally scary to me (and of course lets not forget that you can just as easily transfer genes from species we already eat, cisgenic genes from breeding compatable species, and anti-sense traits from the very same plant). And as for the Bt one...
Bt (bacillus thuringiensis) proteins, that was never in anything that we ate before.
Bt was applied to crops for about half a century before the genes were used in genetic engineering. We know very well how they work. They're very specific, binding to specific receptors in the guts of certain insects, and the form you eat isn't even the 'toxic' form. It doesn't become active until its in an alkaline environment (I'm sure you know that human guts are acidic). Here's something to think about: if the Lepidoptera didn't exist, we'd never know that the cry proteins from Bt were 'toxins'. And my previous point still holds true about how most proteins are digested. You don't have to step too far out of your culinary comfort zone to encounter new ones. Granted, they've been consumed to some extent unless you're going hyper exotic like mandapuça or butyagela or something, but there's still lots of things that are relatively new and unconsumed, so I don't really think that's a good argument to apply to inserted proteins in GE crops, especially considering that the protein has to be studied pretty well before it can be used.
on the other hand, profit-oriented business in the US has a long track record of telling us that whatever happens to make money for them is totally harmless. You'd have to be a complete idiot to not be skeptical of whatever happy talk you heard from anyone selling you stuff.
I don't disagree. But to go the complete other direction and throw out all the science supporting GE crops just because companies stand to gain is just as bad. I'm not saying to trust the companies. You don't have to. The analogy I like to use all the time is the case of the anti-vaxers. They always say, 'Don't trust the pharma companies.' That's not a
Are you trying to imply that the genetic change that has so far occurred in crops is not as significant as the introduction of human inserted transgenes because humans have co-evolved with those crops? Well, that's pretty silly for two big reasons. First, the changes to the crops are far too rapid for any sort of co-evolution. Things really sped up after the discovery of Mendelian genetics and they've only gotten faster since. Second, how many millenia has most of the world been eating corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, blueberries, or sunflower seed? Since those are all new world crops, not that long actually. I like lychees, persimmon, jicama, mayapple, amaranth, and goumi, among plenty of other 'new' crops. I'm probably the first person in my ancestry to try them. Kiwis, mangoes, macademia nuts, and starfruit are pretty new additions to the western diet. Who knows how many unique proteins exist in those species. If what you say is true, then it would make sense to restrict your diet to crops that were present wherever your ancestry was a few thousand years ago. Fortunately, that's really bad advice. The human body is designed to digest proteins (currently, the only things produced in GE crops are proteins, although building the pathways for secondary metabolites like beta carotene is possible), and aside from an very small minority that cause allergies, they're all processed the same. Doesn't matter where the protein came from or how it got there.
And something I forgot:
and those just wanting to know what they were drinking to force the secretary to backtrack on the order.
There's no difference. How can you 'know what you're drinking' if its the same thing? It doesn't matter if milk comes from a cow treated with hormones or not. I mean, come on, you're grinking something that came out of a lactating bovine, there's going to be hormones already in it. A bit more isn't going to make much of a difference, and you'd have to drink massive quantities of milk every day for it to matter. It reminds me of the people who think crops should be pesticide free, but neglect to consider all the pesticides that plants naturally produce to defend themselves. The hormone free thing is just more anti-food science bullshit from uneducated foodies who think complaining is better than learning the science behind what they're protesting.
If you actually cared, every time you drank a glass of milk, you'd dump just a tiny bit of it out. Sound stupid right? What if you drank that amount of milk instead? Is the milk suddenly unhealthy? That little amount represents the tiny bit of increased hormones you might get with rBST treated milk, and even whatever you'd manage to dump would be an overestimate.
I was angry and still am angry that a state official was comfortable hiding what was in our food for the sake of lobbying interests.
No, you were mad about new technological contribution to the efficiency of the production practice, not an attribute of the end product. I'm not saying I agree with the labeling, if milk producers want to label it as such then that's fine and dandy, and maybe there was some lobbying involved, but lets not pretend it has anything to do with the milk itself. This comes to mind.
I was just trying to make the point that we are being force-fed GM foods
Who, exactly, is forcing you to eat genetically engineered food? Because there's a huge difference between you being too lazy to learn what is GE and what isn't, and someone forcing you to eat it. You're free not to eat it. You're free to buy organic food, or foods containing only crops that aren't genetically engineered. That's like a Muslim saying he's being force fed non-Halal beef. Saying you're being 'force-fed' GE crops is just being dramatic and deceitful.
And before you give me the ever popular 'oh but its not labeled so how do I know?' schtick, then listen up: corn, soy, canola, cotton, papaya (from Hawaii), summer squash, and soon, suger beet and alfalfa. If it has those in it, assume its GE. No other crop currently on the market is GE (well, there were potatoes and tomatoes but they were discontinued, and in Iran they've got GE rice). 15 seconds on Google, now you don't have to play the lazy victim anymore. You're welcome. And for reference, guess what else isn't labeled: fruit from grafted trees or vegetables/grains from hybrid seed. Not the same thing? Funny because throughout history people have made the same accusations at them that people make at GE crops today. I get that agricultural history is pretty boring but it sure is insightful. In fact, no plant improvement method is labeled. If you didn't want food produced with mutagens, induced polyploidy, tissue culture/somaclonal variation, marker assisted breeding, sport selection, your argument holds the same weight. What if I don't want wheat bred from strains altered with mutagenic radiation, or apples selected from sports, or bananas produced from tissue cultured clones plants, or citrus with extra chromosomes? Because guess what, they're all there, on the market, right now, no labeling, no safety testing. The only difference is that no one's ever made stink about them. You're irrationally singling out one thing while irrationally ignoring all the other genetic changes that are made to crops, which are almost always much larger and much more random and less understood than inserting a gene or two with GE
there have been no long term studies as to safety.
So, these studies, this study, this one, this one, this one, didn't happen, and neither did any of these. You might want to do a bit more research before making statements like that. You know, they don't need to do safety testing for any other type of plant improvement, which is genetic modification (although not genetic engineering). I'm not saying they shouldn't be tested, but these things are plants, not drugs. If there isn't anything new in the that is biologically active, there is no reason to think that they're suddenly going to be dangerous (at least, no more than there is for any other type of genetic alteration). The cry proteins & EPSPS proteins (the two main ones inserted in GE crops right now) are NOT dangerous. That's not my opinion, that is the conclusion of pretty much all the literature on the subject, and just you haven't read it doesn't make it any less true.
Call me crazy, but I still want to make my own life choices, and not have the government and corporations make them for me.
Crazy, maybe not, but uninformed, absolutely. And government and corporations are not making the decision for you, they're making it for everyone else. If farmers want to g
I was just making the point that lobbying interests and governments are ramming GM foods onto the market with the safety of the public being secondary
That's happening in the same sense that they're ramming vaccines into hospitals without checking their safety. Sure, Monsanto and the others are pushing their products, just like Apple pushes iPads and Toyota pushes the Prius (of course, when any other company does it, its business, but when Monsanto does it, its a conspiracy), but that doesn't mean the science isn't there. It is. We can sit here and talk about Monsanto and agribusiness all day long. That doesn't change the science.
If these foods are safe and wholesome, what is the problem with labelling them?
Nothing. It would be nice if there was a 'Biotech by choice' label. Anyone is free to label any food as containing GE ingredients, not containing them, or not labeling anything at all. They same way they're free to label or not label their produce as being produced with grafting, hybridization, somaclonal variation, sport selection, embryo rescue, chemical/radiation mutagenesis, induced polyploidy, wide crosses, marker assisted selection, ect. You might as well say if those things are so great (and they are), why aren't they labeled?
If you're talking mandatory labeling, then all of the above aren't labeled for the same reasons. It's still the same plant. For the three types of GE crop currently on the market (insect resistant, herbicide tolerant, and virus resistant), the GE plant is substantially equivalent to its non-GE isogenic counterpart. Sure, you can say that GE is different, and you'd be right, that's why we have a different word of it. But is isn't different enough, it is still just another method of changing the genes. You could say that genes don't go from species to species in nature, but then you'd both be wrong and making an irrelevant point. If anything, that would be reasoning to not label GE crops, since now you know exactly what genetic changes you make. I grew purple broccoli this year and ate a bunch of pink fleshed apples, and I don't have a damned clue what protein it had that produced those pigments, and those are just the visible phenotypes which doesn't even get into all the things you can't easily see. But if I had a GE corn that had the gene for Cry1Ab in it, I'd know exactly what produced its trait. Or compare the case of the Lenape potato with the University of Ghent's GE potatoes. Both were designed to be resistant to pests. The Lenape was produced with a wide cross to get resistance genes from wild potatoes, the GE ones had the genes directly moved. The Lenape brought the genes for producing a dangerous amount of glycoalkaloids and made people sick. The GE ones were destroyed by ecoterrorists. Yet if we mandated labeling, only the safe one would need to have to be labeled as being somehow different. That is simply idiotic. The process is not nearly as relevant as the product.
And furthermore, what purpose would such a label serve? Would you still buy it? You and I both know damn well that the only reason anti-GMO groups push for those labels is to scare people and undermine the credibility of genetic engineering. It's like the labels creationists were trying to push on science books stating 'Evolution is only a theory.' Sure, it was true enough, but all it did was undermine the credibility of evolution, which was exactly what it was supposed to do. Why did a fact undermine science? It was deceptive due to public ignorance. Same thing here. Maybe had anti-science groups like Greenpeace and vested interest groups like the Organic Consumers Association not spend the last two decades misinforming the public things might be a little dif
I think that's a lot of it. If my some magic everyone's skin color changed to reflect what class they were raised in, if those born in the upper class were red and the lower class blue, then we'd see red people in tech and blue people underrepresented. It wouldn't directly have anything to do with the color itself but the social circumstances behind the color. But since class isn't visible, while race is, its easy to ignore the real variable at play and attribute it to what can be easily be seen.
Ok, ok, maybe comparing it to Jenny McCarthy was a bit much. Maybe I'm guilty of exaggerating a bit there. Just a comparison to drive home that for many who know much about agriculture Food Inc is, well, not exactly the most complete picture. I mean, yeah, iit wasn't all bad. There are good points and criticisms to be made about the food supply in general, like worker's issues and animal abuse and whatnot. I just can't stand the overly dramatic 'we're going to tell you what THEY don't want you to know' one sided stuff. Like seeds. If you buy Monsanto's seeds, there are benefits and drawbacks that should be presented. If you think that signing the contract saying that you won't save seed (and if you do, pay the license fee for it) isn't worth the better weed control/elimination of tilling and/or pest control/reduction in the need to use pesticides (depending on which type of seed we mean), then don't buy it. Most farmers don't save seed anyway, and haven't since heterosis was discovered and farmers started taking advantage of hybrid vigor. Most seed sold today is hybrid seed (not to be confused with GE seed...all GE seed sold is hybrid seed, but not all hybrid seed is GE seed, and GE seed does not necessarily have to be hybrid seed), which produces better yields in the first year, but loses genetic stability the second year and isn't suitable for replanting. Of course, there's a lot more that could be said about nuances and complexities (like cross pollination issues and heirloom/OP seed), but in general I don't imagine most farmers take issue with it, but if you want to make the must see documentary of the year, you don't talk to most farmers.
I'm not saying it is optimal, but I'm not much bothered by it either. What would be optimal, IMO, would be apomixis traits, which would have the vigor of hybrid seed, but would breed true allowing farmers to save seed and have hybrid yields. No company is going to work on something like that though; it'd risk putting them out of business unless all they did was collect a yearly license fee. Which goes back to public research. That would have been a better topic for a documentary. Land grant universities were founded to contribute to agriculture, and now those departments are withering. I'm not sure that the universities should be a source of seed as in mass producing and selling the seed though, but development, yeah, that'd be pretty nice. I sometimes wonder if we would have the anti-GMO hysteria had universities been the main source of seed development from the get-go (although there is a history there). Even if we're not talking biotech, it'd be nice to see more university funded research, not just to avoid the need for contracts so that the company can ensure a profit and eliminate other inefficiencies, but because they can do things companies can't. Biodiversity research comes to mind (here's my rant). In the event that big diseases (like Ug99) or some other problem hits one or more major staple crops, then that's not going to end well. If staple (and other) crops were more diversified this lessens the likelihood that any one problem will be catastrophic. Companies can't do this research because no one is going to buy it at first...I mean, imagine the average consumer walks into a megamart and encounters oca, yacon, mashua, screwpine, breadfruit, sago, ensete, quinoa, fonio, teff, chaya, salicornia, nopales, jujube, pawpaw, goumi, naranjilla, cassabanana, canistel, jabuticaba, or (my favorite) lychee, to name a small few. What happens? They don't notice or care. Not a very good way of making money. Universities could do it though. Monoculture courts disaster (although there's nuance here too, to say monoculture is all bad is an oversimplification), and I think the improvement and introduction of such crops to the food supply would act as a hedge against risk. But there's not much funding for crop improvement anymore, and even less for undercultivated crops, and you're nuts if you think you can use biotechnology on them (regulatory barriers
My case in point is how Monsanto patented life in their seeds, and now dominate the markets
So? Aren't plant breeders allowed to have a return on their investment? My favorite apple, SnowSweet, is patented, and were it not for the success of the breeder's last patented apple, HoneyCrisp, it might not exist today. Why should Monsanto be any different? I don't care whether you like them or not, but they're not in the wrong on this one. And by the way, their first patent expires in 2014, and they plan to let it. Seems like they're doing it a lot better than the RIAA & MPAA are handling copyright.
Watch Food Inc. to get the gist of that nightmare
Ugh. That's like saying listen to Jenny McCarthy to understand the vaccine nightmare. Food Inc was biased rubbish geared towards people who know nothing about agriculture. I couldn't even stomach the damn thing. If it's patents you're concerned about, think about this tidbit:
"I have been for years in correspondence with leading breeders, nurserymen, and federal officials, and I despair of anything being done at present to secure to the plant breeder any adequate returns for his enormous outlays of energy and money. A man can patent a mousetrap or copyright a nasty song, but if he gives the world a new fruit that will add millions to the value of the earth’s annual harvests he will be fortunate if he is rewarded so much as having his name connected with the result. Though the surface of the plant experimentation has thus far been only scratched and there is so much immeasurably important work to be done in this line, I would hesitate to advise a young man, no matter how gifted or devoted, to adopt plant breeding as a life work until America takes some action to protect his unquestioned right to some benefit from his achievements."
Sound like paid defender of Monsanto? Nope, that was from a letter written by Luther Burbank, one of the most famous and visionary plant breeders who ever lived, who lived in an age when Mendelian genetics were still novel and was an early supporter of plant patents whose views helped create the Plant Patent Act of 1930 (though he died before it was passed). Plant breeding, and genetic engineering, is a hard, time consuming process that adds a lot of value to the world. Farmers wouldn't buy crops with production orientated traits if they weren't beneficial, and consumers tend to liek things that taste good (like HoneyCrisp apples, which just went off patent recently). Those who do contribute to the world in such a meaningful way deserve their fair share of the return for their investment.
When it comes to patents of science, I don't trust them
Fair enough, I'm not big fan of them either, and I can think of a few. By all means, keep a close eye on corporations, I'm not saying they're to be fully trusted, but there is a big difference between science and a product, and a big difference between a reasonable patent allowing the inventor to get a return on investment.
I like plant patents, I like like that those in plant improvement can make a living, and so should you. I like my SnowSweet, and the program that made it might not even be able to exist without patents. That's just the way of the world. Yes, it'd be nice if this stuff had more public funding (a lot more), but instead funding for these sorts of things at universities is being increasingly cut by short sighted assholes (at my university, the university's president, a pompous douchebag if ever there were one, cut the ag department's budget while increasing his own salary), and no wonder, when people know so little about agriculture that Food Inc wins awards, who can be surprised that this is where we end up, with large corporations leading the way?
The US has messed up priorities.
This visual comes to mind.
You know what else they don't label? Naturally mutated varieties, plant sports, food produced with hybrid seed, wide crossed varieties (member the Lenape potato?), embryo rescue, chemical mutagenesis, radiation mutagenesis, somatic variation, plants produced with tissue culture, grafted plants, polyploid plants, crops treated with colchicine, ect. Pretty inconsistent to think that inserting a single very well known and well studied protein (even one like the cry protein that people have been eating for decades) should be labeled, meanwhile give all the other things that cause a lot more genetic change a free pass. Allergies are caused by just a few proteins out of the tens of thousands you eat every day...saying that genetic engineering is any more likely to spontaneously produce one than other crop improvement techniques (with a well understood protein anyway, particularly one already in the food supply) is just magical thinking. And if allergies are you concern, I notice no one is protesting the hundreds of new proteins and compounds in biodiverse foods. Fun fact: more people have died from starfruit than GM crops (granted, not from allergic reactions, but people have had reactions to relative newcomers to mas production like kiwi). Of course, it is no coincidence that only one of these things is well known by the public (although when hybrid seed first became big, people said the same thing about it, hell, there people who were against grafting...both things are now ubiquitous in grain/vegetable and fruit production respectively). And because there is not a shred of evidence to suggest the GM food is in any way different than non-GM food, it is no different than mandatory labeling for Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, ect. dietary laws. Of course, you could say that there is no proof that they're not causing allergies, but you could say the same thing about everything else I listed, or pretty much anything, including invisible pink unicorns.
And yes, the term frankenfoods is just an overly emotional appeal, just like calling resistant weeds 'superweeds'' or calling cross pollination 'genetic contamination.'. Fearmongering. Anyone who knows anything about crop domestication knows everything we eat is already 'frankenfoods.' Of course, that's natural, so it's totally different. By the way, the Rainbow papaya isn't labeled either. It was produced by the University of Hawaii. So, what was that about evil corporations again? Here's an idea. Maybe if people want a specific thing labeled, they should stop lying about it. Of course, telling lies to scare people into buying fancy overpriced organic food is somehow morally superior to making people do 15 seconds of looking it up
The problem here is that next to no one solely protests Monsanto (and Syngenta and DuPont and Bayer and BASF ect). It is always protesting Monsanto AND genetic engineering, which is a lot like saying 'Merck are jerks, therefore vaccines cause autism.' I have never seen any of those anti-GMO groups complain about Monsanto while staying within scientific facts and supporting non-corporate GMOs, like the Rainbow papaya, Golden Rice, BioCassava, HoneySweet plum, ect. Look at research vandalism: the low glycemic index wheat in Australia, the virus resistant grape rootstocks in France, the fungus resistant potatoes in the Netherlands...all destroyed, all non-corporate and funded by the respective governments. Even for small companies, like the people who made the Arctic apple, people complain about those too, the very thing that may someday bring more competition to the industry. Or look at how every anti-GMO group out there claims that GM food well harm human health, when that is blatantly false (shit, aside from vague and incoherent what-ifs, they can't even come up with a scientifically plausible mechanism as to how that could even happen, let alone evidence that it actually does). Hating on the corporation is one thing, but making stuff up is another. So, without ignoring pretty much every anti-GMO group ever (and note that they're anti-GMO, not anti-Monsanto) you can't sit there and say this is all about corporations, because it is absolutely about the science itself. If this were really about corporations, we'd see support for GMOs like the Rainbow papaya and we'd see agreement with the facts about even Monsanto's GMOs. But we don't.
In fact, you did just this in your post. GM seeds have nothing to do with lock-in, at least, no more than any other hybrid seed does. Sorry to assume, but you sound like one of those people who thinks that before GM seed farmers just saved their seed from year to year and were completely independent of big seed corporations. Not true. Once it ways found that hybrid seed could give better yield than open pollinated seed (at the cost of losing genetic stability the next generation), almost everyone switched. That's been going on since the 1930s, and by the 70s, almost all seed grown crops were hybrid seed. This is not something that suddenly happened when GMOs came on the scene, the only difference is now they have to pay a licensing fee (after signing a contract agreeing to this) if they choose to buy GM seed and replant them.
As for herbicide tolerant crops, actually, they are better. People like to think of freshly tilled soil as nice, healthy soil. This is a myth. Tilling your soil erodes the soil and degrades the soil quality, releases CO2, and causes fertilizer runoff into aquatic environments. Why do farmers do it? To control weeds. However, with herbicide resistant crops, they don't need to do that anymore. Of course spraying something like that is bad for the environment, no one is claiming otherwise, but so is farming itself. It isn't about what causes harm, it is about what causes the least amount of harm. Furthermore, the particular type of herbicide commonly used (with the Round-Up Ready crops anyway, the Liberty Link ones use something else) is actually one of your more benign herbicides, having replaced others that were worse. You can feel however you want about a company that makes two products that are designed to work together, whatever, but for all the ill will directed toward them, the fact is herbicide tolerant crops are really a big environmental win.
As for the terminator genes (not in use BTW), do you not see the irony of talking about cross pollination right after them? Like I already said, farmers buying GM seed aren't going to be saving seed anyway, so who do you think is going to benefit most from genetic use restriction technology? And yes, I'm sure the company will too, but that goes back to an anti-corporate argument, not a scientific one. As for the suing of farmers, that only happens when the one farmers intention
If they can't guarantee that the genes won't spread, then they shouldn't be doing the research. End of story full stop.
Genes have always spread. It's what they do. If you prevent that (terminator technology) everyone freaks out. What if I don't want the sd-1 gene in my rice, should people doing rice breeding stop? Singling out genetic engineering is nonsensical in light of all the other genetic change humans have caused in food crops (and don't give the 'oh but that's natural' baloney). If you have an issue with the product, fine, but the process is not the issue (unless you know very little about it and view it with magical thinking).
the fact is that GMO products aren't necessary, most of the things they're trying to do are directly related to incompetent agriculture in the first place.
Do you have any idea the types of precautions that must be taken before a field trial can be approved? Obviously not, so don't you think it is a bit arrogant to assume they don't?
the fact is that GMO products aren't necessary,
Are they necessary? Well, not at the moment (unless you're a papaya farmer in Hawaii or anyone else who loses whole crops to pathogens that can't otherwise be controlled), although the whole spraying less pesticides and reduced soil damage is pretty nice.
most of the things they're trying to do are directly related to incompetent agriculture in the first place
You mean the agricultural practices that feed you? The ones that have improved so much in the past century that we'd have to log just about every forest on the planet if we used the practices we did just a century ago?
We wouldn't need golden rice if the farmers would be growing a traditional mix of greens along with the rice.
And if they had the means to transport and store fresh produce, and if the people who needed Golden Rice could actually afford it. Do you honestly think that simply eating a more diverse diet never occurred to anyone developing Golden Rice? You're right of course, it would be better than Golden Rice, and wouldn't it be great it it were so simple, but your solution is basically 'let them eat cake.'
Can't tell if trolling or just very ignorant. I could have modded, but I'd rather educate. First off, treating all GMOs as if they have the same traits is just stupid. There are bunches of different genes that have been inserted and potentially any gene could be used, so acting as if one trait should matter for every other one is beyond senseless. Second, the traits you're talking about were not designed for that purpose (although that was a side effect the companies no doubt considered), but rather was to prevent the flow of the genes to other people's crops (the very thing people are trying to sue Monsanto over now...they're evil bastards if they do, and evil bastards if they don't. Third, those traits are not in use anyway. Because most seed sold nowadays is hybrid seed (hybrid and GMO are different and commonly confused but not mutually exclusive things) farmers typically want to buy new seed anyway, as they have been doing long before GMOs came on the scene. Before you complain about something, might want to do some basic fact checking first. Fourth, I highly doubt the study you mention was done all that well in light of the hundreds showing no harm from GM food and the fact that the best causative mechanism for why GMO food would be inherently dangerous is...oh wait, no one has ever proposed any coherent way that could happen. Fifth, this new paper (assuming it is accurate) says nothing about GMO safety. There are thousands of genes for all sorts of stuff in every single thing you eat. I highly doubt transgenes are going to behave differently, especially considering that the only three traits currently in use (the Bt gene, an EPSP synthase gene, and viral coat protein genes) can very easily be found in non-GM food too. So basically, no, this has no relevance on genetic engineering whatsoever, but I have no doubt someone out there will cite it as such.
If this works, five bucks says within a decade there are hoards of twats screaming about all the 'hidden dangers' of the treatment that mainstream science doesn't want you to know and about how AIDS never killed anyone in the first place and claiming it was dropping before the cure. This will happen, especially if it involves gene therapy.
Yeah, they're minus 100 points.
In a perfect world, yes, but try explaining that to poachers, or to people demanding more land for living, farming, ect.
Artificial Fertilizers tend to distort the natural soil microbiology
Not on the land they're not applied. Consider what the ability to produce more food on less land does for the overall environment. People act like artificial fertilizers are this big horrible thing, but they're actually a pretty decent trade-off.
cause stunted root development
Uh, yeah, plants grown in high nutrient environments grow less roots. Those in need of more nutrients grow longer roots to seek out more nutrition, those already with enough don't.
balance and moderation is the key.
The same holds true in inorganic and organic (and by that I mean the real definition of organic, not the new magical one) fertilizers.
But what would they know compared to our few hundred years of research in Western medicine?
Not enough to know that there's no such thing as chi/ki/prana apparently. As for this mind-gut connection, enlighten me, does it say anything specific or relevant to anything related to gut flora? Or is it just that eating good food makes you feel better (which falls firmly into the no shit category), mixed with a heaping helping of nonsense about 'yin foods' and 'yang foods'? I'm not making that up; TCM practitioners actually believe that some foods have magical heating (yang) or cooling (yin) abilities, and that eating too much of the one or the other will screw you up. And before you say 'well yeah, cucumber is cool and pepper is hot' take note that the lychee (one of the best foods most westerners have never heard of, tastes kinda like a grape, but grows on a tree and has a hard red skin) is one of the yangiest foods (cherries and pineapples are also yang). Could there be a scientific basis behind it? Dunno, maybe a thousand years of anecdotes amounts to something. But given the complete lack of actual science to back those points, and the plethora of just plain stupid things TCM guys also believe in (ever seen the dried lizard/worm/wood/who-knows-what-else infusions they make?), I sure as hell don't buy it until someone gives me more than the Chinese equivalent of the four humors (which, I have no doubt, if some magical foreigners had invented, these morons would be buying that too, but since it's European then it is just dumb).
Adam Smith has a rebuttal to that all the way back from 1776: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest." Monsanto is a company acting to make a profit, not a charity. So what? Plant geneticists are supposed to work for free now? There's nothing wrong (inherently anyway, which is not to say abuse cannot occur) with seeking a return on your R&D investment, whether it is in crop science or any other field. You could certainty make the argument that there should be more publicly funded options but it does not follow that private ones should not be an option. The comparisons you make are over the top.
In the world? More than you just listed, by far. Rices, Potatoes, Fruit cultivars, and much, much more.
No, in commercial production. Yeah, at some universities around the world you can find GMO just about anything, but right the only fruit approved the rainbow papaya and the only vegetables approved are corn, summer squash, and I guess soy is a vegetable (I forgot that one...I don't eat edamame much so I forget that you can eat it as a vege), the discontinued Flavr Savr tomato, the discontinued New Leaf potato, and the Amflora potato in Europe (although it is for industrial starch production not human consumption). Rice is a grain, not a vegetable, and the only approved rice strains are IIRC bt rice in China and Iran (developed in those countries I might add). Obviously, everything is genetically modified in that everything's genes have been modified from their original forms by man, but that's all on the market that uses biotech improvements at the moment.
And in reality, plenty of heirloom cultivars last AS LONG as their GMO counterparts in shelf-life.
I wish someone would tell that to the Ananas Noire, Carbon, and White Tomesol tomatoes that I've got turning to mush. Although I'll give you that I shouldn't have painted heirlooms with such a wide brush...the term 'heirloom' describes hundreds of varieties with many different traits.
It's breeding for mechanical picking that begins the real fuckups.
Given the rising cost of labor and people disliking the exploitation of migrant workers, unless you really like eating nothing but a grains and a handful of other crops, mechanical picking is the future by necessity. Those were bred for a reason. However, uniform ripening traits and delayed ripening traits in GM plants are designed to keep quality while allowing mechanical harvesting, and they should also help out in the developing world where spoilage is a HUGE problem.
You do realize the terminator gene isn't actually in use, right? And that organic farmers aren't sued unless they intentionally knowingly save the seed and select for the trait...organic farmers are not sued for simply cross pollenation. The opposite however is not true.
What does that have to do with GMOs? First, there's a difference between GMOs and hybrids. Your studies seem to be citing vegetable crops. How many vegetable crops are GMO? Just two: summer squash and sweet corn. Most are hybrids, and while it is true that the GMOs are also hybrids, their nutritional qualities are unrelated to the trasngene (except for some biofortified crops like Golden Rice and BioCasava which presently are not available).Second, that's exactly the reason we should have more GMOs. Breeders didn't intentionally try to decrease nutritional content, they did so as a by product of altering other things, like uniformity and shelf life (which as an aside demonstrates why those who say GE is inherently more dangerous and unpredictable are full of shit).. That higher nutrition doesn't mean shit when an heirloom cultivar with a shorter shelf life rots before someone eats it or if they just won't buy if for being funny looking (people have very small comfort zones when it comes to food. Try feeding someone who thinks all tomatoes are red and perfectly round an Ananas Noire .or Kellog's Breakfast tomato sometime). With genetic engineering, it would be possible to introduce genes for uniform growth & ripening and longer shelf life (or whatever else is needed) in heirloom vegetables, or use biofortification to increase the nutrient content of other crops.
Aren't you that guy who claims to have done just about everything? Cause this is some pretty basic stuff, and if you knew anything about horticulture, you'd know these things already.