Excellent post.
The reasonable safety standards are considered that because many experts already did look at what standards are used and checked. And thanks to scientific progress a lot more testing is done nowadays and those standards are clearly reviewed thanks to the progress made.
http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/07388551.2013.823595
Research was done to keep an eye on the tests the industry has done. It is very clear that the testing is more intense than in other industries. The industry has to, because there is a lot of pressure for them to be on the safe side.
Sure, drawing confident conclusions that we are controlling all danger is not here, but that is why constant and new investigations are needed and will continue to be performed. The main point there is that as far of what has been found there is no good reason to stop the deployment of and the use of GMOs.
And another vote here for **Shalmanese **excellent post.
You can’t even keep your answers straight between posts.
First you said that a “mild” allergic reaction should cause the food in question to be labeled - now your view is that it “shouldn’t necessarily” be banned.
Your other “answers” to direct questions include “You’re asking me to enumerate all of the possible outcomes and what the policy should look like, but I don’t have that much time or information…I can’t enumerate a complex policy here…It’s a never ending process, you can’t say you ever arrived.”
Evasions all.
As noted before, you can’t or won’t say what level of GM food testing or safety will satisfy you, and prefer to harp on scenarios that are wildly improbable, while ignoring GM foods’ long-term excellent safety record.
Dude, you are embarrassing yourself (or just having fun).
Both statements are true simultaneously and one follows directly from the other.
If a food is labeled, that means it’s not banned.
If the response is labeling in this one case, that means that it’s not the case that allergic reactions automatically cause banning.
Other posters or mods:
Can anyone help Jackmannii through this basic logical inference?
Amazingly it sounds like you and I are in complete agreement.
As usual the problem is that the statements you make omit the context and the result is FUD.
Claiming that “there will be a problem due to GM foods that gets through the testing.” Does not sound impressive nor useful to recommend policy when one takes into account the testing and the checks already made and the ones that will be done in the future.
This is actually an interesting example that is worth exploring, it would be interesting for people to weigh in with their opinions on the following:
Scenario:
Assume that testing found the full nature of GM peanut’s impact on humans prior to hitting the market.
Questions:
1 - What do you think is a reasonable course of action at that point?
2 - Is it your opinion that it should go to market, maybe with some labeling?
3 - Do you feel the risk in this case to some individuals is ok?
I’m not sure what my opinion is, but these are some of my thoughts that would guide my decision making:
1 - Even though there are dangers in nature, it doesn’t necessarily mean we should accept the same level of risk from things we are creating and can control whether it hits the market or not.
2 - Again, the reason for the existence of the product is part of the calculation, if it saves millions of lives annually, then there is a stronger case for accepting risk for a smaller group of individuals, if it only gains the company money and no other benefit to society then there is a weaker case for accepting risk.
Impact: 0.6 to 1% of people have a peanut allergy of some kind. Roughly 50% of this number has a severe, life-threatening peanut allergy. This is the rough numbers of sufferers in the population.
At this point, when a problem is a pinpointed and not before, it would be rational to label the product as containing peanuts. However, this requirement is already there for most food products. Known severe allergens are labelled.
See #1.
A fairly nutritious food should be denied to 6.93 Billion people because 70 Million may have an allergy and 35 Million may have a severe reaction to it?
Now, I do have this concern in GMOs in general (introducing allergens to a previously non-allergenic food), but if we can consider the costs of manufacturing of the GM peanut in this scenario and it feeds more people with the same efforts of conventional foods in an equivalently nutritious way, why would we stop because of an individually-manageable health risk?
The problem is that general GMOs satisfy the second portion of this, less effort and energy to produce the same or more, without any problem being identified. Thus, there’s no reason to label it “GMO.” We aren’t giving information that’s useful, we are segregating a product for no reason other than politics and fear mongering.
Still courageously fighting the good fight against an imaginary opponent who is very busily saying ridiculous things that no person here in the real world is saying, I see.
Thanks for your responses.
I think my scenario was ambiguous.
I was assuming that making peanuts a GM food meant the public didn’t have previous knowledge of “peanut allergy”, that before the modification that peanuts caused no problems, after the mod an allergen was introduced similar to today’s peanut allergy.
The implications is that people wouldn’t really have the information they do today concerning that specific food-allergy combo and that just labeling it as “contains peanuts” wouldn’t necessarily communicate what the implications are.
So, given this expanded criteria, does that change your answer at all?
It seems to me it would make sense to indicate something along the lines of “contains allergen X” or something.
But if we assume the same nutritious food exists in non-allergen form, it seems your formula must change.
I think the question is how to make it manageable.
Somehow it would require clear communication so the risk can be avoided for people that would react.
I’m neutral on blanket GM labeling due to my own lack of knowledge.
Here is where it was stated:
You see the part where he says “current testing standards ensure it passes in the future”?
I quoted the “reasonable safety standards” because that seemed even broader than the “current tasting standards”…I was trying to choose the broadest thing he said that still captured the essence of his statement.
And my point still stands, GM foods are a process and the “question” is not and won’t be “answered”, ever. There will be new processes in the future, we will learn more about side-effects, which things are safe, which things are dangerous, it’s inevitable.
Reasonable testing standards include understanding exactly what you’ve done to the food, and adapting the testing protocol to check for things that might reasonably arise. That is, each and every GMO needs to be tested in a way that makes sense for that particular food. If I toss in a peanut protein, it would be stupid of me not to check for problems with peanut allergies, but if the protein is from, I don’t know, a jellyfish, such testing would be silly. “Reasonable testing standards” doesn’t mean “OK, we have figured out exactly which three tests we’re going to do on each and every single GMO food from now until infinity and we won’t ever bother thinking about it for even one second again”. It means, well, running tests that are reasonable, based on everything we have learned about biology in the last few hundred years, and constantly working to improve testing protocols as we learn more.
Is this a guarantee that each and ever single potential problem will be caught ahead of time? No, of course not. But the same is true for every single product ever made, and you have as yet failed to offer any evidence beyond vague fear-mongering for why we should expect problems to be more prevalent or more severe specifically in GMOs than in any other food.
Exactly.
So people shouldn’t just claim they are “safe”, as if the discussion is over.
It’s a complex topic that will continue to evolve and there is still much we don’t know.
Of course, I’ve never said otherwise.
But nobody is making the ridiculous assertion about other products, for example, that “any car available to consumers is safe” (of course we can all provide examples otherwise).
And GM foods are no different, nobody should be making blanket statements like that, but they do, as if the question is completely answered and “any fears are unwarranted”.
1 - How many and/or what percent of existing food products not modified by breeding have been pulled from the shelves due to a genetic change causing new allergen and/or toxicity?
2 - How many and/or what percent of non-GM hybrids failed testing and didn’t make it to market?
3 - How many and/or what percent of GM foods failed testing and didn’t make it to market?
I am aware of zero #1’s (I didn’t google for this one)
I am aware of zero #2’s (I googled a little and couldn’t find examples)
I am aware of 4 #3’s (I googled a little and found some examples)
Sure those numbers are small, and my knowledge is limited, but it’s at least a starting point.
How about you, what are you aware of in those categories?
Question. Are you this fiddly and nitpicky on every other subject? Because I feel like this is the disconnect here.
Yes, when it comes to overstating knowledge, that is a pet peeve of mine.
But how about this, try to look past any of the back and forth regarding “safe” and look at my questions regarding the peanut hypothetical.
I think it’s an interesting thing to discuss that doesn’t have to end up in arguments about absolutes - it’s a tricky question and there is no right or wrong answer.
Well that simplifies things. It’s entirely reasonable to say that according to the same standards of safety we hold basically everything else in our lives, GMO foods are “safe” (this word as used, again, with basically everything else in our lives).
Budget Player Cadet, did you look at the questions regarding the peanut scenario?
What are your opinions?
I don’t think it’s ambiguous. It sounded like you said “Peanuts don’t exist and we engineered them.” And I followed the rough course with the data that’s currently available on peanuts. I simply gave a bit of longevity and “Released” peanuts into the wild in 1995, giving us 20 years of “data”. After all, viewing the results after a month would hardly be useful. 
Not really. My point was that, had peanuts been a GMO released in 1995 - as nutritious and useful as they are in the food chain, the peanut allergies wouldn’t have been “Well, that sure sucks ass.” like what happened with real peanuts. There would have been a rather psychotic backlash against them as a crop.
Think of it like when some random outbreak of E Coli happens to your lettuce or tomatoes. Pretty much every contaminated batch of lettuce/tomato is destroyed whole sale. If it’s a manufactured lot of some kind (bags of lettuce, yogurt, etc) the batch numbers/manufacture dates to look for are given out on the news so that you can ditch it from your own home, too.
But, then, you get the stack of crazies that avoid all lettuce and tomato for six-plus months because “You never know! I could get the Black Ebola Plague and be gone in six seconds!” Yes, it’s certainly possible that you eat the only space spore on a random chunk of lettuce around the time that E Coli contaminated Ed’s Heads O’ Lettuce, but the actual probability is somewhere long after “You become Santa in a Tim Allen movie.”
I will certainly grant that there is some concern with things like allergens or pesticides and other fun death-dealing stuff that could potentially pop up in GMO. But we have engineered tests specifically to find this stuff out. All of the GMO problems that have cropped up have come from this testing, and they were fairly minor.
Now, if you come to me in 5 years (assuming I’m lord and master of Earth by that time) and can prove that Monsanto has shirked these tests and has released undertested product (with or without actual proven defect) I’d be more than happy to cut Monsanto with a rusty shank.
On the other side of the fence, if you come to me in 5 years and go “Hey, a GMO producing business could skirt the rules in <insert method here>. We should change those rules.” I would also happily support those efforts after reviewing the efficacy of using those methods.
I don’t see how.
Let’s start with a premise: Herbicide resistance added to corn. For sake of argument, make the following assumptions: The corn ear itself is completely unaltered from the original source of corn (the herbicides are dealt with by the stalk); each seed produces one ear of corn per season (easy maff)
Now, with regular corn, if you are trying to control weeds, you have to find a weed, kill it with a target sprayer or spread less effective herbicide (gentle enough for the corn, will kill some weeds) across the whole pasture. As a result, of the 100 seeds you planted, you get a yield of 80 ears of corn. (assuming no pests, perfect weather, etc, etc)
With the herbicide resistant variety, you simply use an herbicide the corn (and nothing else) is resistant to and destroy all of the weeds in the field. Your corn now yields 100 ears of corn.
They are equally nutritious per ear, but you have increased your land’s productivity. That’s worth it, in my opinion.
Like I said, that’s already a requirement of foods - and even, in a lot of places, kitchens and such that simply *prepare *foods.
And, as most people in this thread have opined, there is little reason to do so. A GWO does nothing special or unsafe to our foods.
GMO.
Splitter.