I think being anti-vac is an irrational position given the science behind its success. Being cautiously anti-GMO is not at all irrational given the lack of good science supporting its safe use. At the same time, I am not among those who will avoid the supermarket in fear that I’m eating cancerous vegetables. I trust the food supply until I have a reason not to.
I was a keen observer of the process for a national organic standards label in the mid-nineties, and even then, we complained a lot about this: organic was becoming big business, and big companies were looking for a way to get into organics by obeying the letter, not the spirit, of the term. “Sustainable” and “organic” aren’t the same; the former is a much thornier word, probably not something that’s easily bent to a federal standard.
GMOs have been around since 1982. That’s not long enough?
I don’t know any anti-vaxxers personally, but I know plenty that are anti-GMO. I’m parts of an environmental group and many greens are very much against GMO. To be fair their primary concern is the lack of diversity in agriculture but I have also heard the sillier worries like “what will it do to us?” “The plants are sterile” (Not accurate but a grain of truth that is true of many non-GMO crops also), etc.
Explanations that use of GMOs reduce the need for pesticides and even fertilizers does not appear to be enough for many on the left side of the political spectrum who have some really legit concerns about the honesty and integrity of huge corporations.
How do you know there’s been a lack of good science? What metric do you use to measure good vs bad science? By the metric you’ve selected, how much good science has there been? How much bad science? How much good science, by whatever metric you use, would be sufficient?
I don’t know. It also probably depends on what we mean by “modified”. Humans have modified foods for ages - that’s nothing inherently dangerous by itself. But when we talk about evaluating the safety of crops produced with seed coatings that contain herbicides, that might take more time to evaluate – like decades or more.
I have to say I appreciate the honesty of your answer. I work with plant physiologists and growers, so this isn’t strictly speaking my area of expertise so everything I’m saying is based on what I’ve learnt from them. It takes 6-12 years to fully develop a plant for wide-spread commercial use. And testing doesn’t typically stop after that, testing usually continues for another 3-6 years, typically a total of 15-20 years. Speaking only for myself, when I was first told this by one of the physiologists I was shocked. I had no idea that the process was so long (that’s one reason they’re very excited about my research as I can save them a couple of years, while maintaining the same level of rigour, which translates into a lot of money). Plant physiologists and growers, at least the ones I’ve met, don’t want to produce anything harmful (esp. the physiologists, growers tend to be a bit more profit oriented), anymore than a medical researcher wants to produce something harmful. They test the plants that are developed for a long list of characteristics to ensure that not only are desirable characteristics produced (e.g. water stress tolerance) but non-harmful characteristics are not being produced as well.
Now, all of that being said, I think it can be very fair to be critical of particular companies and their business practices. I personally think it is very dangerous to allow a small number of companies to have excessive control over the food supply because that’s an incredibly powerful lever. If the big banks were too big too fail, what about the food supply?
I am a Canadian Liberal (so very left of American centre) and I am also very much in favour of both GMOs and vaccines and tend to be slightly appalled at those who oppose GMOs and very appalled at anti-vaxers.
But this is the same argument used by the anti-vaxes. Just because we don’t know all about it doesn’t mean that the research hasn’t been done. I, personally, can’t understand any of the vaccine studies. I rely on the scientific consensus.
IME a lot of people confuse anti/non-GMO with Organic. I’ve had people come into my store, ask me if I have any non-GMO foods (or if this or that specific item is non-gmo) and when I say no, they’ll start talking about pesticides and fertilizers. At that point I sort of do that ‘walking away/not getting into this’ thing while also very quickly saying that they’re probably looking for organic food, not non-GMO.
Personally, I think that a big reason that the Non-GMO thing stuck so well is that the unwashed masses think they’re getting organic food and/or don’t understand that GMO isn’t something new, it’s been going on since we’ve been growing food.
Seriously? How much good science do you want? These are some of the most tested foods in existence.
The me-tooism in this thread about GMO’s just reminds me of an “intellectual” smugness much too prevalent here at SDMB.
Unlike Dopers, opponents of GMO have a variety of opinions. Here is a quote from one of the first Google hits just now:
There are severe ecological risks from the increasing emphasis on GMO’s, but this is not something that can be debated at the SDMB echo chamber. First will come the overly trite observation that man has been breeding crops for thousands of years. Then the shrill debate will “graduate” to the claim that those doubtful about GMO’s want to watch billions of humans starve.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough in my first two posts. I trust GMO foods that are likely enough to be in our food supply already to continue eating what’s in our food supply without much thought. I’m certainly not worried about mixing seeds together or coming up with new types of apples in a lab. All I’m saying is, I don’t think we should abandon testing of certain practices that are in the parlance of GMO discussions, things like seeds with pesticides injected into them. And I have no evidence to suggest that this practice is hazardous, but I don’t blame those who say, let’s study some of these practices over the course of 20 or 30 years, let’s do meta studies, and let’s do our rigor to make sure we understand how to assess the risks, however small or great they might be.
I think that is the biggest real concern from the left. We do not want pests, and higher yields are desirable, but ecology balance is a big issue. When we fuck with nature, we end up with problems in the long term. Our grandchildren starving because we wanted more is not a pleasant prospect. Perhaps these technologies have tremendous advantages when used judiciously, but history shows that judicious application is not what usually ends up happening. Doubts about whether GMO foods are safe to eat (irrational or not) swirl out, becoming the superficial dialogue that obscures the underlying concerns about keeping systems in balance.
Hey, we have had plastics around for far longer than that. They were a good thing. Now we are discovering serious problems with their overuse. Some countries are going so far as to criminalize plastic grocery bags. The broader effects of GMO crops may not be known in our lifetimes.
Yeah, I think there is alot of this going on. In the group I hang out with - mostly a very liberal set, particularly with regards to protection of civil liberties - there is alot of questioning going on. They are not antivax or antiGMO but they are skeptical.
In the vax debate; no one is questioning whether they work or whether they should vax, but they do wonder if the amount of chemicals introduced at such a young age is really the best way to go about it. and some wonder about how many adverse side effects are acceptable - and are skeptical that the govt and pharma comps are continuing to do research into newer and possibly better ways to achieve the goals.
As for GMO, they understand that most of the food we eat is a product of some form of modification, but feel that there is a big difference between selective breeding or cross pollination, etc and the more scary forms of GMO such as gene splicing and synthetics. They also add such techniques as irradiation and adding hormones and other chemicals to animal feed into the GMO category.
It all comes down to a skepticism that the govt and the companies involved in these areas really have what’s best for the entire population as their number one priority.
mc
The arguments I’ve ever heard relate to biological safety. But I admit once I figured out the dunderheads were just plain wrong about GMOs being dangerous, I stopped paying attention to that benighted side.
I want to apologize, and express gratitude, to asahi, eschereal, and mikecurtis posting after me, who each expressed differences from the “party line” about GMO’s. There is healthy skepticism here at SDMB.
Still, the holier-than-thou smugness of the Doper majority on this issue is annoying, and lowers the quality of debate.
It’s absolutely crucial, if we’re gonna have productive conversation, that nobody pretends that GMO literally means any crop whose genetics have been modified. It’s never meant that: it refers, as I mentioned above, to crops whose genetics have been modified not through cross-breeding, but through modern biotechnology methods, including but not limited to transgenic techniques. There’s no percentage in pretending it means anything else; it’s a cheap way to win, a straw-man argument. (Note I’m not trying to pick on y’all–y’all all just kinda touched on this semantic issue).
That said, gene splicing etc. were legitimately looked at askance in the eighties and nineties, but at this point I think the tremendous body of research on these techniques suffices to quell those fears. Folks should no longer be scared of them AFAICT.
Likely the most prevalent GMO plant we encounter in the US is the “Roundup ready” group. Does anyone actually think that making a plant that’s resistant to an herbicide which is banned as a carcinogen in Europe is a good idea? The plants soak up the Roundup (and in the case of wheat, many farmers do a heavy dose right before harvest to increase the weight of the harvest) and then we eat it–does that seem like a good idea?
And although I’m aware that it’s almost impossible to avoid GMO foods, putting it on the label is no more onerous than labelling that a food is produced in a facility that also processes nuts and dairy, etc. Somehow we’ve managed to survive that incredibly difficult hurdle–one more is not going to rip the fabric of the space-time continuum. Just freaking label it already, and if enough people don’t like it they’ll stop buying the products. That’s the free market in action, and isn’t that what we’re all about here in 'Murica?
Just because the science is there doesn’t mean that info has gotten out to the public. And there are newer and scarier (to the gen pub) types of modification happening all the time. What assurances does the public have that these new mods are thoroughly tested prior to implementation? What about long term effects? What about effects to the environment of manufacturing process? Maybe the gmo’s dont effect humans, but can effect others through contamination from our waste! When we are adding chemicals to the system or changing the genetic makeup of chemicals already there we should always be wary!
mc