And you know the future how?
Companies clearly DO NOT want to label, because they fear that a more informed public AND a more misinformed public will not buy their products. They are caught in a double bind, you might say.
I incontrovertably think that gmos should be labeled. And I understand that food safety research shows no harm.
AND, I get that a lot of people on my side in this conversation are sometimes not scientific, sometimes not specific, and too many times just plain wacky. Natural News, really? I’m on the same side as them???
I want GMO labeling more as an environmental notation than a food notation. The result of gmos has been increased use of pesticides – present AND FUTURE pesticides. The studies that have been done on the active ingredients in Roundup studied them at a lower level than they are actually being used. The incredible effectiveness of application after application has ballooned Roundup use far above what even the doomsday cassandras thought it would be.
With the growing resistance of weeds, we are now moving on to another pesticide which will no doubt go through the same life cycle. We will then move on to another one, and another one.
Farmers who put up the money for gmo seeds, chemicals, and fuel are certainly not going to watch their expensive crop go without water. So they pour it on.
I want to avoid gmo foods because I like to make good environmental choices when I purchase food.
Agriculture, done the way we are doing it, is going to kill us. I know that is hard for a lot of people to swallow, because we love cheap food and big portions. GMOs are a part of that whole cheap food industry. A big part. The whole factory farm industry relies on gmos and subsidies.
I do my best to grow my own and buy local but there are some things I have to go the the grocery store for, and it is impossible for me to tell sometimes what I am buying. I really want to keep my money out of the Big Ag stream because if I support them I pay for the destruction of ground water, surface water, soil and air quality.
Once again, Round-up is a herbicide. it kills weeds, not insects.
One of the aims of GMO crops is developing plants that are resistant to insects thus reducing the need for insecticides.
Example.
Better yields and better transport qualities also help feed a large portion of the world’s population by making foods available and cheap enough.
Are you aware how severe a problem hunger is in much of the world?
Are you ready to starve millions to satisfy your ideological paranoia?
There is putting the two letters, “GM”, in front of an ingredient on a label, and then there is the responsibility for starving millions. If ever there were a false dilemma, this is it.
In a world where money is speech, corporations are manipulating the law such that citizens are incapable of exercising their 1st Amendment rights of speaking with their dollars, being rendered incapable of choosing what they do or don’t purchase. The law ought not mandate that everyone buy some corporation’s products through misinformation (this is food, not insurance). This is un-American, possibly un-Constitutional, and it has to stop.
Label GM products and allow people to speak with their own dollars. They are theirs to spend after all, not Congress’, and not Monsanto’s.
Fine. Show some fucking proof of the harm that the consumption of these products do and stop spreading the same misinformation you condemn.
Pesticide is an umbrella term, it doesn’t refer only to things that kill insects. Weeds are a type of pest, just as insects, fungi, rodents, nematodes, molluscs (slugs and snails), bacteria, etc. are, and there are pesticides for each of them.
“Herbicides, also commonly known as weedkillers, are pesticides used to kill unwanted plants.”
“The term pesticide includes all of the following: herbicide, insecticide, insect growth regulator, nematicide, termiticide, molluscicide, piscicide, avicide, rodenticide, predacide, bactericide, insect repellent, animal repellent, antimicrobial, fungicide, disinfectant (antimicrobial), and sanitizer.”
If you’re going to correct someone, it’s best to make sure your correction is correct first.
You got me there. I’ve never heard anyone use pesticide to mean anything other than bug killer.
“There is accurately labeling the possible side-effects of vaccines, and then there is the responsibility for people dying of vaccine-preventable diseases. If ever there were a false dilemma, this is it.”
:rolleyes:
If labeling GM foods leads to a loss of market power for GM foods with no discernible benefit, then it’s hurting people for no discernible benefit. And once again I ask, with all the other issues of equivalent (ha!) value, why single out genetic engineering? Why not require labeling for hybridization? Why not require labeling for “non-heirloom”? Why not require labeling for “grown with the following pesticides”? Why the singular attention to GM? It’s all meaningless fluff with no actual value to the consumer, beyond the inherent stigmatization that comes from singling out something to label - “Oh, they had to label that? Why, is it dangerous or something?”
They’re rendered incapable of making a completely meaningless, harmful decision based on false information. I’ll call that a win.
I agree! Label all non-Halal foods! :rolleyes:
Untrue.
“Between 1996 and 2011, Bt corn reduced insecticide use in corn production by 45% worldwide (110 million pounds, or roughly the equivalent of 20,000 Olympic swimming pools).”
Sure, Roundup use has increased considerably following introduction of Roundup-resistant crops. But this development has decreased usage of far more environmentally harmful herbicides.
And you should look at worldwide trends before deciding that GMOs are a threat to the environment.
*"In parts of India, farmers spray more than 60 insecticides on their eggplant—known to locals as brinjal—during the growing season, mainly to protect the purple fruit from burrowing bugs, says Ponnuswami Balasubramanian, a plant molecular biologist at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University in Coimbatore, India. To reduce the insecticide load without losing the harvest, Balasubramanian, together with public sector researchers and a private Indian seed company, developed Bt versions of four varieties of eggplant that are popular in southern states. Monsanto was not involved, but still public outcry from GMO opponents blocked the eggplants from federal approval.
“It was madness to stop Bt brinjal” says Kulvinder Gill, an agricultural geneticist at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, who grew up in India and was not involved with the project. “People should not even be eating this brinjal because it has so much insecticide on it,” Gill says, “Anything to reduce that would be extremely beneficial.”*
If we’ve got to label foods based on their environmental footprint, GM crops (at least in some cases) should get an award. And there should be mandatory labeling of organic produce describing toxicities of their preferred pesticides (pyrethrin for example is harmful to bees) and noting that the extra land needed to grow adequate volumes of lower-yielding organic crops deprives wild creatures of valuable habitat.
But. . .but. . .but DNA!
I’m not spreading any misinformation, and I don’t have to prove something is harmful to not want to buy it. The burden is on Monsanto to explain why everyone in the country must have no choice but to buy their products.
Still, many would claim that Monsanto’s manipulation of our legal system is a harm.
Why not quit changing the subject? The thread is about GM.
Strawman.
Strawman.
Just to throw more fuel on this fire:
Mark Lynas is an environmentalist. He used to be anti-GMO, but he is now pro-GMO. (And no, despite the cries of his opponents, he didn’t become a “Monsanto shill.”)
He has an … interesting take on the labelling issue. He basicall wants GM food to be labelled so that the anti-GMO crowd will shut up about it – i.e. so that their main talking point can be taken away from them.
Here’s an audio recording of a presentation he gave on this topic in 2013. (Be warned, it’s 42 minutes long):
Talk about a strawman.
[QUOTE=Try2B Comprehensive]
The burden is on Monsanto to explain why everyone in the country must have no choice but to buy their products.
[/QUOTE]
Right. All those foods at the market labeled “non-GMO” and “organic”, plus all the vast amounts of food in the produce section for which there are no GMO versions must be a phantasm - an illusion created by Monsanto to delude us into thinking we already have lots of alternative choices.
They don’t call it “Mon-Satan-O” for nothing. :eek:
Because your justification for GM applies to everything else and becomes ludicrous very quickly when seen outside of the purview of GM. I see no reason to label GM, because GM has no effect on the final product. It’s like complaining that your beer was stored in cooling tanks cooled by glycol and demanding labeling for that.
You want GM labeling. Why? Give me one good reason that isn’t either completely arbitrary and doesn’t apply to whatever other random bullshit that nobody should reasonably give a shit about. That should not be difficult.
BBC, you do know that glycol is poisonous, right? 
Graciously said, thank you. The impression is probably because insects are the most common and numerous pests in various contexts, from agricultural to household, so you’re probably not the only one who thinks of it that way.
Yeah, well, if the coolant for the holding tanks is ending up in the beer you’ve got bigger problems. 