Post Punk Kitchen Forum

This is my understanding: the type of forking around that is done with GMOs and the type of breeding that happens with selective cultivation (or whatever it is we've been doing for thousands of years to get modern-day broccoli) are fairly different. There needs to be testing done to make sure that we're not creating stuff that might be toxic, poisonous, cancerous, and all that bad stuff. Testing not done by Monsanto. I am pretty sure that this is still a valid point that at least a few people in the scientific community agree with. I'm not anti-GMO as a rule, but I'm still avoiding GMO products for now.

And I don't buy that us whiny lefties are keeping small orgs from entering the market. I think that distinction can be given to Monsanto until further notice. Don't blame the public for demanding to know if their food is truly safe.

ETA: Not an "emotional" response. I was pretty stable while typing this.

The methods used for GMOs are very different than selective breeding, but the end result is a much more known quantity than that produced by selective breeding. In most cases, a single gene had been changed, whereas selective breeding can change many genes at a time, unmask recessive traits, or introduce entirely new genes due to errors in the normal transfer and reproduction of DNA. I'm certainly not claiming that we know all of the potential consequences of genetic engineering methods or that further research shouldn't be done, but we can't completely predict the consequences of selective breeding either -- in fact, there is usually a lot more guesswork involved in aiming to change only the desired traits and hoping the rest of the genes are the same.

If we demand rigorous safety testing for GMOs, we really ought to require it for new selectively bred varieties as well, and any existing plant lines that may have developed significant genetic differences from their progenitors over time due to mutations or other naturally occurring genetic changes (transposons, viruses, etc).

First let me say I'm fairly uneducated on this topic. But I thought one of the issues with GMO is that the GMO strains end up taking over other varieties - so for ex, GMO corn may contaminate the many native species of corn in Mexico and threaten the biodiversity, as discussed in this article:

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/525

viewtopic.php?p=511770#p511770

(Actually all of the worries raised in this thread seem to have been addressed in the thread linked to above to some extent).

It read as pretty stable.

I think the point of saying that "whiny lefties" have killed the GMO market is that at this point, the push back against GMOs is so strong that only very large and establish companies can survive in this environment-- Monsanto continues because they're huge. If somebody tried to start a a company today that was explicitly producing GM crops, imagine the backlash-- they'd need some pretty hardcore publicity and serious spin to get much past even revealing that they exist and have goals, let alone to get a product to market. So while ethical GM companies can exist, they don't because the political environment won't let them get started and nobody's going to take that much risk.

Does that make sense?

I would love to see the proof. We can all name companies that have been bought out by multinationals as soon as they started to get really profitable. Toms of Maine and Silk are two that come to mind. It is nothing to do with "activists and policymakers" it is simply that the large companies have the money to buyout the small ones.

OK.

Golden Rice:

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/may/11-big-idea-going-old-school-to-fight-hunger/



(The developer did go on to start using breeding techniques, but it's slower, and isn't GM the way we're talking about, so the point stands.)

http://www.acbio.org.za/index.php/media/64-media-releases/412-african-civil-society-calls-on-the-african-union-to-ban-genetically-modified-crops



16 years isn't very long, especially when government policies forbid actual field trials:

http://www.scidev.net/en/features/can-gm-crops-feed-the-hungry-.html



http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/23/gm-crops-africa-biotechnology





...so, yeah. Greenpeace and European groups have leaned on or lobbied African governments and convinced them to ban GMOs-- even field trials-- and have thus reduced the market for GMOs to places that don't regulate them as much, like the US. And Golden Rice wasn't even a big Monsanto thing, and was designed and sold (or given away) as a humanitarian aid in order to combat vitamin A deficiency, AND could be replanted from seed from the previous crop, so you can't argue that it was even supposed to be a yearly purchase thing like Monsanto crops.

i dont know how to feel about this. but i do know that i hate the blatent "gmo is bad. always. forever." attitude

but it is naturally occuring.
...?

i know linking to wikipedia is stupid in an internet argument, but the history seems pretty sound to me. he purchased the seed from a random guy who might have collected it from a scrap heap, he planted it and let it grow and it just so happened to have had some sort of mutation that people liked.
(or are you talking about how it's grafted? grafting is absolutely nothing like genetic modification.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hass_avocado

i really don't know what you're getting at. VIT specifically excluded hybridization in her comment. (nature makes hybrids all the time. so nature intended the haas to occur.)

::edit:: oh, maybe you're talking about how the mother tree doesn't exist anymore, so the genes are only being continued on the rootstock of other avocadoes. (most orchards will be made of grafted trees, whether it's apples, cherries, nuts etc. consistency and predictability is good when you have an orchard, so grafting will be widespread. (but like i said, grafting doesn't change the genes of the branches or fruit.)

This fallacious idea is, I think really common and frustrating. Nature has no intention. Hybridization happens naturally but that doesn't mean that the products of that hybridization are any more likely to be crafted for human consumption. In fact, hybridization can result in a crop that has properties making it less suitable for humans. And as was pointed out earlier, intentional cross-breeding for a certain trait very frequently brings along numerous other undesired or even unhealthy traits.

Whereas with genetic engineering, the overall genetic changes are much smaller and better understood.

deleted for redundancy because I don't read ahead.

i didn't imply that. (also, "nature intended" is just a figure of speech.)

Yes this.

I think its very hard to get over the emotion that that natural = better.