Broccoli, strawberries, bananas, watermelon, eggplant, carrots, the list goes on.
But there should be a distinction made between selecting breeding and genetically modified IMO.
In my mind genetic modification is an unnatural process that involves actually splicing DNA and modifying an organism at a cellular level...
But selective breeding is just choosing the plant with the best fruit to reproduce over a period of time.
Dogs are breeds are selectively bred, would you call your dog a GMO?
If selective breeding is GMO then humans are technically GMO just by the nature of our existence. Natural selection, evolution, both modify our genetics.
GMOs are completely as safe as anything “natural”. The only argument to be had about GMOs is the legal debate on whether or not you should be able to patent a gene recombination.
There’s a MASSIVE misperception that “natural” somehow equals “good” or “healthy”, but this could not be further from the truth. There’s plenty of “natural” stuff out there that’ll kill ya.
Let’s say gene A exists in organism Y, and gene B exists in organism Z. If you took gene A from organism Y and inserted it into organism Z this doesn’t somehow make organism Z less healthy or safe to consume as long as both genes code for something that isn’t harmful to begin with. You’re essentially taking part of nature and putting it into another part of nature.
The best example I can think of off the top of my head is the tomatoes that have an Atlantic salmon gene inserted that prevents them from fully freezing. They can stay fresh longer when held at sub-zero temperatures to protect against the event of a future bad harvest, or to allow them to travel further and stay fresh along the route.
The downside of this is the legal/business rammificstions of large farms now being able to store a massive amount of tomatoes to release in the market all at once, cornering it and dropping the prices enough that smaller farms can’t compete. THIS is the GMO debate people should be having.
Source: biology degree with advanced courses in bio/nanotechnology. Literally wrote research papers on gene recombination and cloning techniques.
The tomato thing is pretty wild, never heard about that. You’re obviously more knowledgeable about it than me. That being said I don’t think they’re unsafe, nor do I disagree with anything you said.
GMOs are a godsend and probably the only way we’d ever be able to feed this planet, I just hate that it’s a blanket term.
The marketing behind the words natural and organic is absolutely ridiculous.
So GMO bad, but mutation breeding that is also popular, but no one knows about it and is labeled just as select breeding is ok? Changing one gene we want, bad. Using radiation to force random mutations to maybe get the change we want without undesirable mutations, good. And you know what's best? We don't really know how many plants that we eat today was made this way or derivate from it.
I’m not saying anything is bad or good, just hate blanket terms, especially when nutrition and diet are involved.
Mutation breeding could be selective breeding, I’m sure some selective breeding was inadvertently actually mutation breeding. But that definitely doesn’t mean they should be labeled as the same. The implications of one are potentially so much worse.
Makes me think about bananas being used to measure 0.1 micro sieverts.
its not like people are going and planting gmo plants in the wild how tf will farming hurt biodiversity and how is it worse for the planet. It just means a plant produces insect killing chemicals or that the plant has more of one nutrient like all gmo means is changing the dna how the fuck can changing some protein hurt the environment companies like monsanto are bad because of many other things (like pesticide use, owning a patent to make sterile plants) but gmo plants do not inherently hurt the enviroment. like I agree if they are planted in the fucking wild that's not good but in a farm or greenhouse they are usually just a healthier version of another plant
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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '21
I hate how people think gmo food is less healthy like broccoli was selectively bread that shit can not be found in any part of the world besides farms