If you like.
Yeah, sure, because food crops spontaneously start synthesizing poisons all the time. :rolleyes:
Oh, wait, no they don’t. I don’t think you understand how incredibly slow real macro-evolution actually is.
Really? I’m trying to think of one.
Here’s how much faith Monsanto employees have in GM food:
GM food banned in canteen for Monsanto drugs factory in Buckinghamshire
If you think it’s safe, maybe you’re just a sucker. We already know from their intellectual property stance that the company are deeply, deeply antisocial and of a perverse morality. It’s no great leap to suspect that they would happily position to deliberately poison or at least malnourish nations while eating “safe” unaltered food themselves.
I thought you were a misanthrope, but apparently when it comes to science you’re a rosy-eyed optimist. 
Selective breeding can be pretty fast, as can alterations made by mutagens. And again; pre-transgenic methods produced plenty of new genes. They just did so randomly, and the people breeding the new plants had no way of knowing what most of the changes were. If are going to label food as genetically altered - not because it has something questionable in it, but just because it’s altered - then almost all of it should have that label.
“Organic” potatoes IIRC are one example.
I don’t think it’s automatically safe; I just don’t think it’s automatically unsafe either. If a food has something unhealthy in it, label it as having that unhealthy substance. This isn’t about labeling foods according to whether they are dangerous, it’s about labeling them as being made from plants that at some point were altered with a particular technique, in an attempt to panic people.
And this is somehow unique to companies that use plants altered with a particular technique? And it’s irrelevant anyway; again, this is not about labeling foods because they are dangerous.
And many of the Luddites would be perfectly happy to see most of humanity die off. Lets not pretend this is some good guy versus bad guy situation. Both sides are at best amoral; one driven by profit, the other an anti-technology ideology.
10 Reasons to Say No to Genetically Engineered Crops and Foods
Looks like a way to wipe out organic farmers.
Look, I’m a Yank. I understand that to many people, “conscience,” “good,” and “nature,” are incredibly offensive words. I get that as a conservationist, I will spend the rest of my life contending against radical anti-nature fanatics who will call me an anti-human Malthusian. You know what? I’m OK with that. It doesn’t matter what the vampire says as he’s trying to justify eating your family. There is a good side and an evil side, and it’s pretty clear which side you’re on when you start denouncing nature.
“Organic” food isn’t about nature, or especially healthy either. And just from the title, I’m rather untrusting of the objectivity of anything from something called “beyondpesticides.org”
And again; this is all irrelevant. This has nothing to do with whether or not a food should be labeled as “GM food” just because some plant that went into it at some point in the paste had alterations made to it with a particular technique, while other genetic alteration techniques apparently don’t merit a label.
And how do you know the vampire wouldn’t be the one extolling the virtues of nature? He’s “just part of the food chain”.
I’ve read of a “shotgun technique,” almost literally, where plant seeds were lined up and blasted, so that the chromosomes physically impacted and intersected. It was a random approach to moving genes from one plant into another. It didn’t involve viral vectors or microscopic manipulation; anybody with a shotgun could do it. Heck, a bird could easily do it accidentally. Natural, or not?
Meanwhile, am I “denouncing nature” by brushing my teeth? Naturophiles aren’t making themselves clear here.
Not true. Selective breeding would be the cultivation of offspring (F1 generation) with desired traits from the parental generation; this is independent of viral transfer, which for all intents and purposes, are very rare events. You mentioned that humans have viral genes, yes, we do, they’re called transposons and insertion into a gene renders (in most cases) that gene non-functional. Transposons do not encode for functional proteins from other species (as in the case with Bt-engineered food). Humans will never, ever gain the ability to synthesize green fluorescent protein (from jellyfish) or bt toxin (from bacillus thuringiensis) due to viral transfer because transposons do not enable an organism to synthesize novel proteins with novel functions from other organisms. Would be awesome if it worked that way.
Anyway, inserting bacterial genes into corn is not natural and the likelihood that this would occur in the natural world is so low that it’s infinitesimal. Genetically engineered corn that exudes bacteria-derived toxins to kill pests isn’t the result of selective breeding but the amalgamation of biotechnology and in vitro genetic modification. Now, this is not a bad thing, but let’s call it what it is without the saccharin.
- Honesty
Checking the wiki article, it looks like I was wrong and 8% of our genome is from viruses, not 2%; that’s not all that rare.
On occasion, it does. The mammalian placenta for example uses viral-derived genes to perform its function.
But the chance that something equally unlikely has, is and will happen is a certainty. Again; the real difference is control; people are freaking out over a method that is less likely to do something unforeseen.
OK, I see your point here.
But when it comes to biotech, I think the presumption should be that it’s not legal until it’s approved, not that it is legal until it’s banned.
Remember Caulerpa taxifolia? Or kudzu? Same kind of problem. A GMO can be functionally a new species, and present the same dangers as a naturally-occurring-but-somewhere-else species.
Note that foolsguinea has this habit of espousing basically impossible and impractical concepts. Like various lefty economic theories long disproven, ways of regulating and doing business that would lead to massive economic devastation, and now various nonsense about foods. People point out he’s on the wrong side of economic science and he creates threads crying about how he is being labelled a “Communist.” People point out that there is no scientific evidence GM foods are any more dangerous than non-GM food and he puts himself on a cross and says “I know as a conservationist I"ll always be vilified, woe is me!!”
There is strong evidence our bodies break down over time because of various problems associated with eating food, breathing the air, and drinking the water. Basically our body converts inputs into energy and this conversion process is probably something that has always contributed to our bodies breaking down over time. I’ve read recent studies suggesting eggs can cause cancer, recent studies suggesting they don’t and that they’re healthy. Eating too much of one type of food can lead to excessive sodium intake or insufficient potassium intake, or vice versa.
While few people want to come out and say it, all evidence points to the environment as a whole playing some part in why humans naturally break down over time. That and the normal aging process. For that reason there is a certain baseline unhealthiness to everything. You have to question at some point how do we define safe and unsafe, healthy and not healthy.
Pesticides on plants may poison water tables and even the people who eat the produce, slowly and over time causing problems. Maybe, we don’t know all the specifics. Preservatives also might cause problems.
So what do we do with no pesticides and no preservatives? What do we do without modern fertilizers? Well, I’ll tell you what a lot of organic farmers do. They use manure as a fertilizer and they use sometimes various “green” pesticides and things that might help preserve the food (or not), and the results are telling. People dying from large e.coli and salmonella outbreaks directly tied to organic farming. (By large I mean a few dozen.) Not using antimicrobial preservatives makes the food more dangerous too.
What’s more dangerous, modern day chemicals or the various other stuff? Who knows, probably someone has studied it, I haven’t. What I will say is this, as recently as the early 19th century in the Western world we’ve had large scale dying related to famine. Lack of preservation technology and modern fertilizers leads to famine. Famine causes death in very short order. Just as recently as the mid-19th century outbreaks of bacterial diseases, sometimes tied to unsanitary food half rotten or etc lead to large scale death.
At worst modern farming practices may contribute to various afflictions “over time.” Meaning at some point in your three score and ten it may cause a chronic illness or even cancer (maybe.) The farming practices of the past caused more immediate death, from famine, bacterial infection and etc. If you’re asking me to pick and choose between a farming technique that might lead to long term poor health versus one that might lead to short term death, I’ll take the long game any day of the week.
When it comes to public safety, I think people have a right to be informed. So if you can find a scientific way to say something is GM versus non-GM, you can label it. Fine by me. Make the research publicly available on the producers websites and government websites. Require a little notice on the label saying “Lots of research has been done into the safety of genetically engineered foods, please read more here at www.thisurl.com.” Put everything that is truly peer reviewed out there and let people make a decision for themselves.
But when it comes to things as simple as plants and animals, I don’t want the government’s default position to be “prove this as safe or it’s banned.” Billions of people eat GM foods and by and large we’ve not seen any epidemic level problems. Meaning whatever problems GM foods have, they aren’t of immediate cataclysmic concern.
Let’s also recognize the truth of the organics industry, just to get it out there.
For something to be USDA certified organic, basically they have to pay a fee and get an inspection from the USDA and pass certain guidelines. I’ve been in business for a long time, and anyone who has done business in a regulated industry knows all the regulations are either followed on the day of the inspection because the business owner “knows” it’s coming, or they fail inspection but are given a window to rectify it. They rectify it enough to pass inspection then they’re good to do whatever they want for the rest of the year.
Some farmers are ideologically committed to organic, and they’d feel immoral if they sold something as organic but were taking shortcuts. But some look at organics as a way to sell produce at a higher price per pound, and if they can get that USDA certificate but still farm the old way, they reap all the financial benefits of growing organic without having to pay the price. If this isn’t happening on some scale I’d be shocked and happily proven wrong about human nature.
So if you trust that USDA Organic certificate, you’re naive.
What about the big organic grocers and producers? Most of them are spin-off businesses or subsidiaries of large multibillion dollar companies that engage in all kinds of non-organic practices in their mainline business. They moved into the organic business basically to cash in on human stupidity, these companies know there is no proven benefit to eating organic and in some areas it is less safe. You’re trusting that this company and its supply chain doesn’t “fill in holes here and there” with non-organic food. If you know anything about large scale food producers and you believe that, you’re being naive.
So in all reality, unless you exclusively buy at a farmer’s market where you know that farmer personally and know how they run their farm, you’re trusting various institutions that are either inefficient or have reason to lie for profit, in fact they profit by lying to you. So keep that in mind as you stroll through Whole Foods.
Another thing about the organic industry. They have been very smart at recruiting “fellow travelers.” A lot of these companies, many ran by conservative Republican types, looked at the yuppie crunchy granola crowd and realized if they could market something as being “green” and good for the environment and also healthier they’d get a lot of “advocates.” They’d get people who felt not only was this food better for them, it was ideologically pure, and those crunchy granola types become free, amazingly effective word-of-mouth advertisers. In crunchy granola type groups there is tons of groupthink, everyone wants to fall over themselves to be progressive and as “environmentally conscious” as possible. It’s great when you have an ideologically captive audience paying a premium price for your product.
It’s basically “lock-in” and creates great profit incentives. It’s almost like Kosher foods, for the people that eat Kosher they absolutely insist upon it. They come to trust certain Kosher brands and they generally pay more money for a similar Kosher product versus a non-Kosher equivalent. However, it’s a lot easier to convert already crunchy granola type people into being “green/organic eaters” than it is to convert people to Kosher-observing Jews, so the organics market is like the Kosher market except with a lot of growth potential.
Wouldn’t that also then be the strongest argument against medicine?
Anyone who thinks that ‘limiting the human population’ is a good argument against anything is a crank or a misanthrope.
Jeez, why not just line up all the undesirables and shoot them? If reducing human population levels is an ultimate good, then why do we try to stop wars or reduce traffic fatalities? Every death is a big win for Gaia, after all.
If a beaver builds a dam and floods an ecosystem, that’s ‘natural’. But if humans build a dam, it’s an affront to mother nature. The only difference between the two is that one species has evolved enough intelligence to develop the capacity for self-loathing.
Well then, epidemics are a natural response to this ‘problem’. Do you oppose vaccination?
No, people screamed about it in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and you don’t hear much about it now because they were wrong. The population is stabilizing, and may even shrink in the next 100 years. This has been known for a long time. You might want to look at the U.N’s population projections.
Also, humans are not a liability - they are an asset. Every human adds to the collective intelligence of mankind. Every increase in population improves the odds of another Einstein or Edison emerging. The increase in human capital allows for more specialization and improvements in economic efficiency.
It’s only the radical left that thinks humans are a blight on the planet and need to be eradicated or their ‘herd’ thinned. The result of us rather like people.
What would be an ‘acceptable plan’ for rapid population reduction? Perhaps a large-scale Spandau Ballet? Making vaccines illegal so we ‘naturally’ die from epidemics? Perhaps a one-child policy enforced at the point of a gun? Forced sterilization?
Here’s a perfectly feasible plan: WAIT. The population is doing just fine. In fact, the larger worry today is population decline in select areas. Japan may lose half its population within the next 75 years. Europe’s birth rate is way below replacement. Birth rates have even fallen in 3rd world countries.
Then why on earth would you be ‘generally supportive’ of it? It makes about as much sense as a law demanding that foods be labeled to indicate which astrological sign a food was harvested under.
Labels to show meaningless things do not improve information flow. They reduce it. A label competes with every other label on a product. Festoon your foods with irrelevant labels and it becomes harder to find the label which says, “Warning: may contain peanuts”.
Labeling foods with non-scientific labels because it ‘helps inform the consumer’ sounds suspiciously like the argument creationists use to get their material into schools: “Hey, we’re not stopping the teaching of evolution - we just want alternate theories to be heard. The more information the better, right?”
I guess you’ve never heard of dolphin safe tuna.
There are potential health hazards from GM food, but even if there were none possible at all there are other reasons to label the food.
GM foods have been involved in bad practices such as abusing patent laws, and there’s also the simple fact that many are engineered solely for pragmatic benefits such as pest resistance, size, hardiness, etc which can come at the cost of taste and nutrients.
Now, if you think forcing a GM label on those foods goes too far, that’s fine. But it is to everyone’s benefit to allow non GM foods to have their own certified voluntary label.
And who’s stopping the industry from doing that? It sounds like ‘Fair Trade’ products - a voluntary labeling standard. Manufacturers are more than welcome to grow and label non-GM foods if they can find a market for them.
All of this you’ve said applies just as much to crops that are developed with traditional methods. You haven’t said anything new or different about GM.
No one would object to that. No one.