I suppose that was a stab at the current GMO labeling debate. What I find most depressing about the whole debate, not just this attempt to be funny, is the focus on individual health as opposed to the health of the ecosystem.
When I buy organic meat that's not because I fear that meat grown using antibiotics will poison me. I know that using antibiotics to grow meat is irresponsible because it fosters antimicrobial resistance. Yet my choice to not support this process is derided as irrational, as a lifestyle choice.
When I oppose GMO that's not because I fear the tomato will be modified into a predator that jumps out of the salad to eat me. I oppose the process of drowning the fields in herbicide. (I know that in the bright GMOed future less herbicides will be necessary for some dreamy reasons but let's stay in reality please.)
It's most telling that the debate is being reduced to individual health, because that is the easiest part of it. When it comes to whole ecosystems, our predictive powers are basically zero. Here we see the people who literally cannot know what processes they are starting, we see them attacking other people for not knowing the difference between GMO and DNA. Worse, they're actually making fun of them for _wanting to know_.
One further point: GMO goes hand in hand with enormous monoculture and all the pernicious consequences that entails for the system. I've seen farmers who feel a little guilty (and recognize the business risk) who will plant GMO corn from 2 different vendors, but it doesn't really add any diversity to the system. I suppose one could argue that even though the gene pool for some crops is so small, having the ability to GM means we can manually intervene if our crops develop haemophilia
There's currently no commercialized herbicide resistant GMO tomato. There is currently a highly developed practice of selective herbicide application for tomato crops, for example:
One of the next likely GMO strategies for tomatoes would be something like the BT crops that produce their own insecticide. So that wouldn't lead to less herbicide, but it might reduce overall application of pesticides.
(The actual first GMO tomato, the Flavr Savr, made changes aimed at extending shelf life. It's not being commercially grown anymore).
I did not intend to make a connection between GMO tomatoes and herbicides. Reading what I wrote I can see how one would think that though, sorry for that.
I tried to show of how the debate is distorted away from the things that are difficult to address. What are the consequences of introducing new pesticides in tomato plants? Will the bees survive that? How sensitive is our ecosystem to the ever increasing dosage of Glyphosate dumped into it?
We could deplore the fact that people turn these questions that cannot get answered into fears for their own safety. I rather think that we should try to answer the questions, and move very conservatively meanwhile. But that's not what I see. What I see instead is shills brushing off concerns with statements like "Plants have produced their own pesticides since basically ever, so there is nothing to worry about."
To come back to what you wrote, I do think that you try to actually inform, rather than just telling people that their fears are silly. Thanks for that. My complaints are not addressed at you.
> What I see instead is shills brushing off concerns with statements like "Plants have produced their own pesticides since basically ever, so there is nothing to worry about."
Ah the shill gambit [1]. When you don't have any other leg to stand on, just KO the opponent's argument by accusing them of working for the enemy!
Well, do you think that it is a valid argument? I'm tired of hearing it repeated like it's some kind of deep truth even though it equates entirely different processes. I will call people shills when they're not interested in answering hard questions.
I don't oppose GMOs because I think they'll hurt me, at least not immediately. I think that the Conagras and Monsantos of the world will use the power that genetic engineering gives them to increase the sugar content of their foods.
It's not an unreasonable fear, they've been doing that using traditional breeding techniques forever, at the expense of world health. Genetic engineering only gives them more power to abuse. And I'd like to be able to avoid those foods.
For the most part sugar is selected against. People don't measure the sugar content of fruits and vegetables before they buy them. So breeding hasn't optimized for that. Instead we measure how big and round and perfect they are, so that's what gets optimized.
Similarly with grains, the elevators pay based on weight. I've always worried we might accidentally select for really heavy but useless crops. Similar to the Swedish farmer who replanted only the biggest kernels of wheat. And got a crop that produced single giant kernels of wheat.
From what I've heard and read and seen for myself, a lot of fruits and vegetables are bred for increased sugar. Apples is a good example. Corn is also much sweeter than it used to be.
But there are also lots of complaints that tomatoes aren't as sweet as the used to be. Or that modern giant strawberries and watermelons and other fruits aren't as sweet or tasty as old varieties. Even the apples you mention, people say that red delicious apples really aren't that good. Despite being the most popular and the biggest and reddest.
And none of that should be surprising, because no one tastes these things before they buy them. They judge based on appearance entirely.
Sweet corn is much sweeter than traditional corn because it was traditionally bred to be that way. But regular corn, and other staple crops like rice, wheat, etc, are just sold based on weight. They also do moisture tests and subtract the weight of the water content. But as far as I know they don't measure or care about sugar content.
I don't think it's so much about GMO as it is about all the dairy-free, gluten-free, whatever else-free diets, where people are eschewing whole food classes because it's trendy, rather than because there's a well-documented health advantage to it.
Some people _do_ have good medical reasons to engage in such diets. Lactose intolerance and celiac disease are a thing. They're just not nearly as widespread as some health food fans would have you believe, and I'm yet to see clinical evidence for the hazier "intolerances" some people use to justify those choices.
>They're just not nearly as widespread as some health food fans would have you believe,
Among adult white middle-upperclass coasties of mostly to entirely central european descent.
But America isn't just white people anymore. The doctors say lactose intolerance is around 90% for asians and 80% for american black people.
Its worth considering that American was like 90% lactose tolerant white people before the 60s immigration reforms, but now is only like 60% lactose tolerant white people, and dropping. The majority of children today are lactose intolerant to some level or another.
Like the wikipedia says "most lactose-intolerant people can tolerate a certain level of lactose in their diets without ill effects" But its very much like the Olestra debacle. You probably won't get sick from eating small amounts of undigestible oils, but you absolutely won't get sick if you don't eat them at all, and america being what it is, we have people who insist on binge eating and the digestive consequences of that can be quite gross. Better off just staying away and not eating it at all.
Conceptually, drinking the breast milk of another species on a regular basis is just weird, anyway.
I don't have coeliac disease but I do feel unwell if I eat gluten, consider it a fad if you want but I am just happy that I can go back to doing competitive sport.
They still pose the same problem as all the other pesticides in that they can one, contaminate the water if misused and two, they accelerate natural selection if misused because they weed out all the pests less the strong and resistant ones. This causes the pesticides to be used in greater capacity and so on and so on.
Source on contaminating the water? I've never heard of any issues with that.
Resistance is bad, but if you are against herbicides at all what's the issue? We can invent new herbicides faster than they can evolve resistance, and they will still work on most species of plants.
I was deploring the fact that the debate is being reduced to the direct effects on humans, instead of considering the whole ecosystem. Saying that herbicides are "harmless to the majority of the human population" is not only a gross simplification that is false on many levels, it also misses the point.
I'm guessing this is a not-so-subtle critique of GMO labeling. I'm not against GMOs, but anyone who is against labeling is caught up by propaganda. Everything else that goes into food is labeled - there is nothing wrong with mentioning that a food contains GMO as well.
But sadly (at least in Germany and the EU) not everything is labeled. For example if a juice is filtered using gelatin there is no need to label this, even if the possibility exists, that residuals still remain in the juice.
Just to name one example.
We also have no "need"/regulation for labeling of some ingredients, that were contained in the initial ingredients (and were useful there) but are not needed for the end-product and have no influence on the end product.
As an example take stuff needed to make curd. Has to be in the label for curd, but if you use curd in a product and the stuff needed to make curb has no influence on the end-product there is no need for labeling.
So a lot of stuff get omitted without a full declaration. And food lobby does everything to prevent full declaration from happening. Nobody really wants informed customers.
The problem is, when you make all sorts of labeling mandatory, any meaning is lost. Gelatin residuals have no health impacts. DNA or GM residuals have no health impact. You fill the packaging with unnecessary labels, and then the actually relevant things - like how much sugar something contains - are obscured.
This is similar to the over-cautious safety warnings that nowadays clutter all user instructions of devices and tools.
It should be left to user discretion whether to wear safety goggles when you use a hammer to hit a nail, for instance. Even if there is a one-in-a-million chance that a spark flies off and hits your eye.
The reason for labelling isn't just for health impact, though. It's also about being a responsible consumer. If you don't see what went into making a product, you can't use your purchase decision to vote on how you'd like the supply chain to be aligned.
Personally I'm against the over-industrialization of the food supply. Industry wants consistent predictable products it can mass-produce; that's explicitly what I don't want. I don't want every tomato to taste exactly the same, year in year out, everywhere around the world. I want more diversity.
That is a reasonable enough desire, but why make others do mandatory labeling to meet your requirements?
The law should be the minimum requirement for health and environmental concerns, and if there's value in consumer choice on ethical grounds (such as that you want to avoid GM food, or want to have halal meat) that labeling can be left to the discretion of the manufacturer/provider/seller.
Personally, I often try to avoid food labeled as "organic" (that being responsible for the most lethal food disaster in recent years, 50 people dead in Germany). Still, I don't want that it would be mandatory to label organic food as such.
The single biggest moral problem with capitalism is that it relies too much on price to transmit information. If your decision to buy something comes down to evaluating its value to you, comparing that with the price, and purchasing it if it is both more valuable to you than the price and relatively better than the alternatives, then you're not acting morally.
Inputs to products, like slavery, child labour, undemocratic governments right through to irresponsible use of antibiotics, are all obscured under this basis. In order to get pricing to have an impact on how products are made and inputs are chosen, the consumer needs to be informed. But the need for the consumer to be informed is in direct opposition to the interests of the producer: the producer wants to remove reasons for the consumer to reject the product. And this runs right along the supply chain to raw materials.
If the consumer doesn't have information on how something is produced, and no alternatives are available with more information, how can they make their purchasing decision affect the whole supply chain?
And let's not forget how pleasant it is to be unknowingly complicit in illegal or immoral actions that benefit you by price; what you don't know doesn't make you feel guilty. You got the product cheaply, do you really want to know why it was so cheap? Consumer psychology is part of the problem too: relying solely on pricing for information lets people get away with murder, indirectly.
Thus I think mandatory labelling throughout the supply chain is absolutely vital for moral capitalism. People need to know to what extent their purchasing decisions are indirectly funding oppression and harm elsewhere.
For those unfamiliar, this label is EVERYWHERE. It was on my car; it was at the coffee shop; it was at the entrance to my job. EVERYWHERE to the point of meaninglessness.
There are religious issues. There are no non-animal sources of gelatin, so that is an issue for vegans or vegetarians. I have absolutely no idea if gelatin used for juice filtering is kosher or halal.
There do exist somewhat more expensive sources of vegetable based biopolymers that are superficially somewhat gelatin like, or there are other technologies to filter juice or whatever, but if none of it is going to be labeled anyway...
It seems to me there's room to have mandated, policed labeling for certain things (e.g. common allergens, calories, certain nutrients) and voluntary, tort-enforced labeling for more moral or religious concerns. That seems reasonable, but maybe I'm missing some practical problems. Evidenced by this comment section, one issue could be categorizing certain things like GMO and antibiotic use.
You can label foods that are GMO free if you are catering to the small minority of people that care. Labeling all foods that contain GMOs is just silly and wasteful. And it implies something is wrong with the product or that they could be unsafe.
It doesn't make any more sense than labeling everything that contains DNA. Which as this article states, most consumers would prefer. And many think it is unsafe, and would avoid such foods!
No. Aspartame and Sodium Benzoate have been scientifically tested to be generally safe, but they must be listed on the label. No two genetic modifications are the same, and aren't all just inherently safe. They are safe because each one has been tested. You are making a logical error when you compare genetic modifications to DNA. DNA is just four amino acids, and the arrangement doesn't change the nutritional content. What if you made a GMO apple with no sugar that contained aspartame. Should that not be labeled? Different genetic modifications can produce different results, from increasing vitamins to creating toxins. It's NOT the same.
I don't have any issues with GMO labeling, so long as said labels describe the modification(s) that have been made. This is a lot more useful in helping a consumer make an informed decision
The "terminator" gene effects hybrid seed. Seeds you would never want to plant anyway because they have shit performance. Terminator gene (similar to male or female sterility genes) simply make hybrid seeds cheaper to produce. You don't have to pay armies of teenagers to detassel the 4-5 rows of female plants and you don't need to mow your 1 row of male plants.
While DNA free dining is clearly a hoax, I beleive this is targeted at GMO labeling. I'd argue that DNA labelling is also fine. That ways I can know my olive oil (among other food and drink) is actually olive oil: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/01/24/opinion/food-c...
I'm really unsure of the cry out against GMO labelling.
Like, I would happily eat GMO food. Some people wouldn't. Why force them to? They should be perfectly free to pump money into the organic industry and make ill/informed choices of what types of food to buy.
Just expand it as part of the nutrition label. Maybe some people would prefer to stay away from it for religious reasons?
I don't think it'd place any sort of unhealthy burden on the industries to write "This food may contain genetically modified organisms"
The size of the nutritional label is not infinite. The number of potential labels is. More importantly, by labeling GMO, you're simultaneously implying that there may be something unsafe about them, and distracting from far more important information, like allergens and sugar content.
> I don't think it'd place any sort of unhealthy burden on the industries to write "This food may contain genetically modified organisms"
Fruits and vegetables can be contaminated, for instance if they are grown or stored next to each others. For labeling purposes guidelines are set with some leeway within safe boundaries. Trying to do the same for GMO highlights the silliness of the exercise, since there are no such boundaries, because they are as safe to eat as their non-GMO counterparts.
Then there's processed foods - tracing which of the dozens of ingredients are non-GMO would be non-trivial. It is possible, of course, but why force companies to waste money for something that is of no health consequence?
And finally, there's the issue of GMO entering the food chain. It is at least possible to trace this for livestock, if you have a complete history of everything that they've ever been fed, but what about animals caught in the wild like fishes?
I'd love to have more transparency and information about the food on my plate - I want my fruits grown in areas that are not under water stress, and my vegetables grown sustainably, but let's not waste time and money trying to label things that don't need labeling in the first place.
Numerous factual errors in this (obvious) parody. In fact most things that they claim are DNA free have small traces of DNA! Anybody who really cares will homogenize their food, run it through a purification column/DNA trapping column, and then eat the resulting eluent. Yum.
"Last year, I wrote about an Oklahoma State University survey indicating that over 80 percent of Americans support “mandatory labels on foods containing DNA.” ... Obviously, such DNA labels would be absurd. Nearly all food contains DNA..."
While I can understand that it might be fun to point out the ignorance of most people, these kind of "gotcha" surveys/polls performed by supposedly reputable groups can be pretty annoying. I'm sure most people think "Contains dihydrogen monoxide" should be put on the label too.
That said, DNA can probably make certain foods slimy, which is a texture I'm generally opposed to.
It's useful for highlighting how useless these poll results actually are for policy making, because people have a propensity to hold opinions on things they have absolutely no knowledge of.
When I buy organic meat that's not because I fear that meat grown using antibiotics will poison me. I know that using antibiotics to grow meat is irresponsible because it fosters antimicrobial resistance. Yet my choice to not support this process is derided as irrational, as a lifestyle choice.
When I oppose GMO that's not because I fear the tomato will be modified into a predator that jumps out of the salad to eat me. I oppose the process of drowning the fields in herbicide. (I know that in the bright GMOed future less herbicides will be necessary for some dreamy reasons but let's stay in reality please.)
It's most telling that the debate is being reduced to individual health, because that is the easiest part of it. When it comes to whole ecosystems, our predictive powers are basically zero. Here we see the people who literally cannot know what processes they are starting, we see them attacking other people for not knowing the difference between GMO and DNA. Worse, they're actually making fun of them for _wanting to know_.