GM Food

Obv one shd excerise some caution when tampering with the building blocks of life itself like some blind and senile demiurge but most of the objections to GM are some bullshit on a par with the anti-vaccine lobby nicht war?

the history of agriculture is essentially the history of fucking with the genetic makeup of plants and livestock and yeah i know nobody cross-bred tomatoes with piranhas but only cos the tech wasn't there to do it.

meanwhile y'know big biz fucks with 3rd world farmers by putting terminator genes into corn and such but that seems like big biz's fault not the technology, and in the big picture anything that might increase food yield especially in the developing world feels way more important than whitebread Nimbyism for people who equate what they eat with morality?

just thinking about stuff, if you have compelling evidence that all GM crops are the fast track to armgageddon plz share

do you happen to know if neonicotinoids are bred into the plants or are just sprayed on

the analogy that springs to mind is to the pharmaceutical industry, where yeah the technology can be talked about in neutral terms, but the fanatical devotion to the protection of intellectual property that exists in the_west and that these are all for-profit corporations steering the ship means that benefits will only ever trickle down to the developing world if at all

yeah i get that. the business practices of companies like Monsanto seem to be the thing that is a big deal to me, whereas a lot of the anti-GM lobby focuses on this "Frankenstein food" guff

hah yeah i don't see any reason to mistrust the food itself

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/01/whats-changing-minds-on-gmos.html

I’d assumed that Terminator Technology was robbing farmers of the right to save seed. It turned out that hybrids did that long ago, and that Terminator never happened.

maybe it's a cultural issue, or an issue of genealogy (lol) - the path from creating penicillin in a lab -> creating vioxx in a lab is a lot more traceable journey and derives from the same set of general techniques than the path of passively interbreeding plants over multiple generations to injecting genes into a genome... plus people have seen jurassic park, no telling what would happen if these plants went clever

nyer article otm in that this taps directly into the strain of anti-intellectualism thinking that is so, so, american

Huh aren't Europeans the most anti-GMO? I get the distinct impression most American's are like "whatevs gimmee more corn."

^^^

Americans aren't even in the same league as Europe in the anti-Frankenfood sentiment

i've never been to europe

feel like that's a weird thing to admit, since it seems like most people i know have been multiple times. closest i got was scrounging all the euro change off of my roommates floor in college... got like 20 euros but then found out forex doesn't let you exchange coins. wth! a coin is way harder to fake than a banknote

Moms are the only demo in USA that seem to be on a euro level anti gmo kick

euro anti-gmo kick is somewhat related to slow food, preserving tradition/culture, there's definitely some anti-science aspect to it but it's somewhat more happenstance, a byproduct rather than the actual goal (cf anti-pasteurization), in america it's more directly anti-science tying into good ol' american paranoia and love of liberty, etc (cf anti-vaccination). would love it if debate was focused on patent law or just breaking up big ag but it's a little harder to gin up hysteria there i guess. kinda would love for someone to start a 'while you sheeple were worried about monsanto did you know what the supreme court was hearing arguments on this week?' high horse meme on facebook. i suppose there could be some alex jones listener that would be all 'wait, what's this about gay marriage?'.

most of the objections to GM are some bullshit on a par with the anti-vaccine lobby nicht war?

stopped clock property indicates there's going to be a parallel to thalidomide sooner or later

which I know is not a vaccine

http://www.ca.uky.edu/entomology/entfacts/ef130.asp

A donor organism may be a bacterium, fungus or even another plant. In the case of Bt corn, the donor organism is a naturally occurring soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, and the gene of interest produces a protein that kills Lepidoptera larvae, in particular, European corn borer. This protein is called the Bt delta endotoxin. Growers use Bt corn as an alternative to spraying insecticides for control of European and southwestern corn borer.

The Bt delta endotoxin was selected because it is highly effective at controlling Lepidoptera larvae, caterpillars. It is during the larval stage when most of the damage by European corn borer occurs. The protein is very selective, generally not harming insects in other orders (such as beetles, flies, bees and wasps). For this reason, GMOs that have the Bt gene are compatible with biological control programs because they harm insect predators and parasitoids much less than broad-spectrum insecticides. The Bt endotoxin is considered safe for humans, other mammals, fish, birds, and the environment because of its selectivity. Bt has been available as a commercial microbial insecticide since the 1960s and is sold under many trade names. These products have an excellent safety record and can be used on many crops until the day of harvest.

To kill a susceptible insect, a part of the plant that contains the Bt protein (not all parts of the plant necessarily contain the protein in equal concentrations) must be ingested. Within minutes, the protein binds to the gut wall and the insect stops feeding. Within hours, the gut wall breaks down and normal gut bacteria invade the body cavity. The insect dies of septicaemia as bacteria multiply in the blood. Even among Lepidoptera larvae, species differ in sensitivity to the Bt protein.

i fucking love science

Bt is pretty amazing, corn borers were the main cause of spraying shitloads of pesticides on fields, mostly ineffectively

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/01/whats-changing-minds-on-gmos.html

I’d assumed that Terminator Technology was robbing farmers of the right to save seed. It turned out that hybrids did that long ago, and that Terminator never happened.
― Leeena Dunham (Leee), Saturday, March 30, 2013 2:56 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^ would really encourage watching this speech btw

Certainly glad I read his full speech. Most of the gains he discusses are pre-GMO and I understand why the technological successes of the last 40 years have carried him over to an optimism for the next 40. If his argument is to simply keep an open mind as we experiment, that is an important point. Optimism has a clear advantage on fatalism, and many of the progressive arguments do ultimately lead to nothing more than mandating global starvation. Got me there!

Worth a direct link to his speech: http://www.marklynas.org/2013/01/lecture-to-oxford-farming-conference-3-january-2013/

His assertion that a GMO wheat crop in Australia had a 30% higher yield is the most persuasive argument in there. And it's news to me in that I have only ever read that GMO seeds rarely deliver on the promise of higher yields, but I'll keep reading

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/02/do-gmo-crops-have-lower-yields

I made the mistake of conflating pesticides with herbicides on the other thread; thanks to mh for straightening me out there. Helpful to understand the distance between the Bt bacteria and neonicotinoids. The FB jpgs are true: corn now contains pesticide, but microbial pesticides have feasible advantages to chemical ones. I'm glad Bt has an excellent safety record and can be safely sprayed onto our corn right up until the day of harvest, and I am sure that they ran the appropriate tests before making the leap to splicing it directly into the food itself.

http://www.nature.com/news/specials/gmcrops/index.html

from the nature editorial:

Armed with misinformation, debaters have taken to the streets, the supermarkets and social media. With a topic as sensitive and dear to people as the food they eat and give to their children, those who play to the fears, concerns and uncertainty surrounding GM crops often seem to have the upper hand. And the fears are entwined with mistrust of the seed companies. Supporting GM crops can seem a thankless job: it is worthwhile to stand up for good science and the promise that it holds, but defending profit-hungry corporations feels less rewarding.

Still, there is reason to stand up for the continued use and develop­ment of GM crops. Genetic modification is a nascent technology for which development has moved very quickly to commercialization. That has forced most research into the for-profit sector. Without broader research programmes outside the seed industry, developments will continue to be profit-driven, limiting the chance for many of the advances that were promised 30 years ago — such as feeding the planet’s burgeoning population sustainably, reducing the environmental footprint of farming and delivering products that amaze and delight. Transgenic technologies are by no means the only way to achieve these aims, but the speed and precision that they offer over traditional breeding techniques made them indispensable 30 years ago. They still are today.

Agreed.

Speaking for myself, I'll take glyphosate-ready crops over atrazine and picloram runoff every time.

The reason to hate Monsanto, Syngenta etc. is their oligopolistic domination of the seed industry, especially in the developing world. Their coercive elimination of traditional methods of seed saving/cleaning is a clear menace to food security in a world of genetically identical monocultures.

GM tech has a lot of promise, from self-fertilization (eliminating the need for nitrogenous fertilizer), and drought resistance (um, its gonna get a LOT drier in the world's bread baskets this century) for yield, to human health benefits like vitamin fortification or DHA pathways in oil seeds. If your salad oil gave you all the heart/brain benefits of cold water fish without the methylmercury and dioxins, would you hunt the tuna to extinction?

Gene injection technologies were originally developed in the public sector, and our (in the U.S) land-grant universities should remain in the business of supplying seeds, including GM ones, to farmers, free of intellectual property claims. Our legal authorities shouldn't be tools of megacorps driving smallholding farmers out of business.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/2013/09/09/film-review-omg-gmo-srsly-an-epicfail-in-exercising-our-right-to-know-about-genetically-modified-food/

haha omg this movie sounds great, looking forward to having it recommended to me on facebook. on a related note i recommended room 237 on facebook the other day (now streaming on netflix) and now one of my friends thinks the moon landings were faked.

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/30/vandals_hack_down_hawaiis_genetically_modified_papaya_trees/

way to go geniuses

from the nature editorial:

I see Nature has taken an editorial stance extremely similar to what I was writing in another thread (re: Monsanto?), and was getting some grief for, as being too anti-science, when in fact I was being anti-corporate-greed as the present driver for research and implementation of GMO foods. A go-slow approach seems more fitting in this case, however many promises are floated about The Future Wonderfulness of GMO Crops.

TBH I'm not the least bit familiar with anti-Monsanto sentiment, but a climate change enviro sold his biz to them and posted this in reply to the initial outrage: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/11/why-the-climate-corporation-sold-itself-to-monsanto.html

In 2004, I was working at Google when we announced Gmail. At the time, it was an extraordinary revolution—1GB of free email! Prior to that, I think you had to pay lots of money for anything 10MB or more. To make this service free, Google used its automated advertising system (AdSense) to identify keywords from the content in an email and provide keyword-triggered ads on the right side of the page. There was outrage over this “evil” technology (see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/03/google_mail_is_evil_privacy/). In addition to “reading your emails”, Google was accused of storing all your email for the Federal government to read, and Google now CONTROLED ALL YOUR INFORMATION. This blossomed into a nuclear mushroom cloud of evil-calling. A silent sadness fell over everyone for creating something they never thought of as “evil”—they were creating a great free product for the world that could make email as accessible as web browsing, helping billions of people around the world communicate more easily with one another. Over time, as the benefits of the service were better understood, the pundits learned about the complicated technology that enabled Gmail and its advertising system, and more people fell in love with its utility, the noise died down.

lol this guy doesn't sound too bright

not exactly a great precedent there with the gmail lol

http://www.irrawaddy.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/2.-China-GMO.jpg

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/us/on-hawaii-a-lonely-quest-for-facts-about-gmos.html

^^ this was such a great article btw

in other news, it looks like vermont is going to be the first state to require labeling. meh

vermont is going to be the first state to require labeling

when advocates of gmos want to argue in their favor, they argue that gmo crops are very much different than non-gmo crops, that they are something new, improved, unlike the old crops, but better!

when advocates for gmo crops are asked to label the products that contain them, they argue that gmo crops are absolutely no different than the old crops, completely indistinguishable, and it is just fear-mongering to label them as being any different whatsoever.

love too base my policy positions on other peoples positions