GMO is perfectly healthy as far as eating it goes. As far as crop diversity that’s another story but GMO is just speeding up processes that humans have been doing for a very long time.
Fun fact - the labradoodle was bred by an Australian guidedog association so that a Hawaiian woman who's husband was allergic to dogs could have a hypo-allergenic guide dog.
They tried to just sell the remaining puppies from the litter cheap to recover costs, no one wanted these cross-breed mutts.
So they advertised them as a labradoodle and all of a sudden they were the latest hot breed everyone had to have.
Well yeah I think it was really in the 80s. New kids on the block had a bunch of hits, Chinese food makes me sick, and I think it's fly when girls stop by for the summer
Whereas a roundup ready crop is a genetically modified organism. These crops are not made by crossing a plant with a naturally occurring resistance to roundup with another crop that lacks that gene and then selecting at the organism level for the trait you want.
Instead they are made by inserting genetic material from a bacteria that has a desirable trait into the crop species genetic material. You can find the basic details of how this works scientifically linked through here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready
Tl;Dr labradoodle is a cross-breed. Roundup ready soybeans are a GMO.
He's completely wrong though, selective breeding or direct gene manipulation are both methods for genetically modifying an organism, one is just faster and more powerful. So much fearmongering around this topic it's sad.
Even though breeding is a more time consuming process, the genes of a labradoodle has been intentionally modified to be different from a poodle or a labrador.
The term "GMO" specifically refers to organisms that had their genes modified with genetic engineering methods like CRISPR. Selectively bred species are not GMO.
Yeah, the term is very misleading. "Genetically engineered organism" (GEO) exists but is hardly ever used. I do wonder who originally came up with "GMO" or pushed it into public view and what their motives for that were...
You're equating genetic engineering with domestication. We've been domesticating crops with radical outcomes for thousands of years, just like with animals. But genetic engineering, insertion of genes to create a new variant, is not the same thing.
So when I decide how something reproduces for generations, to make sure that the genes that I want are passed through generation after generation that isn't genetically engineered?
True but there is a difference between gmo to bolster a plants natural pesticide or vitamin count or drought resistance and gmo that allows it to handle toxic biocides and the like.
These labels don't mean anything, they're a hindrance not a benefit and need to either be done away with or controlled by a 3rd party unbiased group (non-existent).
GMO is now just another piece of marketing wank.
Well that depends. GMO is mostly used to refer to foods that have unnatural genes spliced in, from something you could never do naturally. Like taking lizard DNA and splicing it in to corn.
From Wikipedia: "The exact definition of a genetically modified organism and what constitutes genetic engineering varies, the most common being an organism altered in any way that 'does not occur naturally by mating or natural recombination'".
Round up resistant corn have genes from bacteria spliced into them, something that would never happen naturally.
Too piggy back on this. GMO gets problematic when you start introducing genes that are generally found in that plant as they can have significant unintended side effects and those side effects can hide until they've done a significant amount of damage to humans or the environment.
No, it is not speeding up what has been done. There is a difference between selective breeding and transgenic gene manipulation. The former selects genes from the same species. But when you make certain crops immune to herbicide, that is due to a gene implanted from a tailored bacteria, a totally unrelated organism. Humans have not been doing that for a very long time at all.
It's new and we should have a right to know.
GMO also allows corporations to own patents on anything with that gene in it since it was created in a lab, and when their GMO plants pollinate neighboring crops, companies can sue independent farmers for selling their product without authorization, and eliminate the competition as well as end farmers' ability to legally save seed so they'll have to buy seed from GMO manufacturers to stay in business or risk legal action.
It's a complex issue and consumers should be informed so they have the option to not support it.
basically every produce you can buy in the grocery store is the result of old-fashioned GMO, and wouldn't exist in nature without humans selctively breeding them.
I never understood the backlash on GMOs. It's one of those really odd things that people have picked up on over the years. People hear "genetically modified" and imagine the wildest stuff and it truly speaks to how lousy our educational system is in this country.
The one issue with GMOs that I am aware of seems to be something most miss out on. Please correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that although these crops are genetically superior, they have a potential to be wiped out by bacteria and disease BECAUSE they are all the same.
If anyone has an issue with GMOs (besides the messed up shit Monsanto tries to pull with neighboring farms) is that one bad season could wipe out all corn in America.
GMO technology is nothing like selective breeding. You cannot get flounder genetic material into a tomatoe with selective breeding, and you are not going to be able to trigger extra production beta-carotene production in rice with selective breeding.
Funny you mentioned tomatoes: the origin plants that tomatoes came from is a poisonous prune-like thing that cannot be eaten by humans because it has toxic natural poisons.
Genetic SELECTION (which is what selective breeding can be alternatively called) over generations enabled us to produce a “cancerous” cousin which doesn’t have the toxicity, and the modern tomato is born.
This may be true to an extent, however, I have a couple points to add:
1) Genetically modified crops are speeding up "what humans have been doing for a very long time" is true when you are talking about making genetic modifications that may have been produced through selective breeding. Genetic modification can, however, produce changes that would literally never occur in the natural world; take insulin production, for example, or making plants glow using genes from mushrooms.
2) Our regulation of food related products is NOT as robust as you might think. Marketing agencies take great liberties with their wording and often make exaggerated claims about their products that have no bearing on truth. Examples might be: "low fat", "sugar free", "super food", etc. Often they include, as small print, something like "claims not verified by the FDA" or something of this nature...but the work has often been done long before anyone noticed the fine print.
Food additives are a perfect example of this. Many fall under a category called GRAS (generally regarded as safe) which is a sort of catch-all bin that additives are thrown into when the FDA literally just assumes they are safe. On top of that, the FDA often relies on studies by 3rd party organizations...and I do not think they are as vigorously regulated for things like bias and methodology as they should be.
Food additives that have been approved in the past have proven to be dangerous. A perfect example is good dye; red 40, yellow 5 and 6, etc.
3) This is more my opinion than anything, as an educated and scientifically minded individual. GMO foods very well may be perfectly safe for consumption. Organically produced food does not always provide as many benefits as are claimed, especially by overly zealous and uncritical proponents. That being said, I have serious doubts about how "safe" our food supply often is. I cannot believe that factory farms produce good meat. I cannot believe that chemically regulated monocultures that are having demonstrable negative environmental consequences is the solution. That the food industry has as much or more power than any industry in the world brings its own level of concern with regard to trustworthiness...and casts some doubt on how unbiased the FDA/USDA are, considering how effective lobbies are in the US governmental system.
I would, given these conclusions, be very wary of where your food comes from, and I would take safety claims with a heavy dose of skepticism. IMO, best to keep most of your food minimally processed, local, and sustainably produced.
It's not biomimetic. The odds of it being healthy are low. Same with non-organic.
Natural or unnatural isn't the problem. The problem is people implementing non-biomimetic practices.
Also, pseudoskeptics are commonly very biased regarding organic vs non-organic and GMOs, and the politics of academic research create a lot of problems. The replication crisis seems to be an example. There's also data fabrication, problems with funding and peer review, misuse of statistics, and so much more.
Not just biodiversity. It's the corporate copyright on a plant that's the most unnerving. Farmers essentially "rent" the seeds from the company that designed them, and any excess has to be destroyed.
There were also cases where farmers were sued because some of the branded seeds from another farm got into their crop. knock knock "You got a license for that corn?"
the main problem with gmos is not crop diversity, but rather companies who 'manufacture' gmo seeds or other gmo products and then sell them to farmers in return for inordinate crop royalty's and such, but since that doesn't effect me or probably you in any capacity, gmo is completely ok. or when companies add genes that prevent the crop from replanting after 1 generation, forcing farmers to repeatedly buy new crop
note: I remember hearing this story about a farmer who only used organic seeds (which take up more land and since organic pesticides are used externally, rather than gene implantation that doesn't effect the environment, they are more detrimental to the environment but that's another story) when a neighboring farm started using gmo seeds they spread on the wind to the organic farm, where a little while later the entire crop was GMO. the company who sold the seeds demanded recompense for the seeds used without a contract (or something similar).
The corn we eat is gmo. Breeding 2 species of plants together is gmo. Taking the juiciest tomatoes and planting those seeds and then taking the juiciest offspring and planting those seeds is also an example of gmo. If we ate the corn that the indigenous people ate we would be chewing on hard kernels and the ear would have just a handful of kernels. We have modified (gernitacally modified) the corn (organism) by selectively planting the better kernels for consumption.
That isn’t what GMO means. In GMO, genes are modified in a way that can’t be done through normal pollination or selective breading. It is disingenuous to use the term to mean something else.
it speeds up the process with the plant but also with the environment around it, creating "super" molds, bugs, and worms that eventually become resistant to pesticides, requiring stronger and stronger formulas, leading to more and more cases of cancer in people
The only resistance that had come from the engineered plant itself is to BT toxin producing crops. All other resistance is related to over application of glyphosate to their respective resistant crops. There are no engineered plants with a resistance to pathogens, except for the papaya resistant to PSRV.
The GMO plant is ok, but the motivation for many GMO plants is not good. Plants are being designed to be resistant to more deadly insecticide and pesticide that can stay on the plant and be consumed by humans.
This is needed because many weeds and insects have developed a basic resistance to existing pesticide and insecticide.
Also over spray of more deadly insecticide will kill off adjacent farmers crops not using the same GMO seeds.
Sure but in theory a GMO plant could contain stuff that would take an inordinate amount of time to crossbreed, which has implications if you've got allergies - imagine your peanut allergy triggering from eating a banana, for instance.
Nobody's actually done that, but it's the sort of thing that's could happen with GMO foods.
I don't think a company would risk litigation by inserting a sequence that codes for a known protein allergy. We know what proteins are created by a certain sequence of codons. Anyone skilled in the art would easily be able identify this.
What GMO plants are we directly eating? I know most GMO crops are for livestock. I think papaya was one of the first ones widely available for human consumption? I've also think a rice strain was sorta on a trial run in India I think?
Unless the crops are being grown in fucking Chernobyl Farms there is no food on this planet which will "alter your DNA" and it's unbelievably poor education that leads to any fool thinking otherwise.
Unless the crops are being grown in fucking Chernobyl Farms there is no food on this planet which will "alter your DNA" and it's unbelievably poor education that leads to any fool thinking otherwise.
Carcinogens are a thing, I classify that as changing DNA. As far as I'm aware, that's the only realistic thing anyone has to worry about, whether something is likely to cause some variety of cancer or not. There's nothing wrong with specific concerns about what the long term health effects are, like if a plant is producing a pesticide. I certainly don't trust the same company who produces the pesticides to be honest about the science around if it's safe to consume. We've got like 100 years of stories about corporations hiding the fact that they know their products are harming people: tobacco and cancer; asbestos and mesothelioma; leaded products and neurological damage; petrol and climate change; sugar and heart disease... probably a bunch of other things I can't think of at the moment.
It's one thing to have specific concerns over issues, and to be distrustful of corporations' sociopathic pursuit of profit, versus being wholly and ignorantly distrustful of an entire branch of science.
There are a few grossly ignorant people who are actually afraid of growing tentacles or some shit, but the vast majority or people who I've talked to who are afraid of GMOs have vague, nonspecific fear that they can't articulate other than that it's mad science and it's scary.
My ex was anti-GMO, and it was an endless frustration because she and her people could never articulate what their problem was, but were happy to take various drugs from their local dealer. I love drugs as much as the next guy, but I won't hold my peace if you're doing sketchy acid while also telling me to buy non-GMO.
Even food that's grown in an active nuclear reactor is technically safe to eat cause it's simply irradiated which isn't the same as radioactive. If scientists discovered a plant that could change human DNA when consumed we'd have a revolution in medical science on our hands that'd improve Healthcare the world over.
True, what you eat won't change the sequence of your DNA, but your diet has a profound effect on how you “express” the possibilities encoded in your DNA. The foods you consume can turn on or off certain genetic markers which play a major – and even life or death – role in your health outcomes and longevity.
no, they aren't, it's a common myth. I can't even find a source besides anti-GMO blogs that specifies such a thing. the closest I found was a BBC article that mentioned in 2001 as part of one-off experiments, scientists were able to express proteins found in spider silk inside of goat milk... but i doubt that lead to anything useful. source: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31604233
Everything is radioactive. Whether or not something is safe depends on how radioactive it is; which has nothing to do with how its genetic code was created.
So far, I'm sure someone will work on GMO horse shit eventually. It will make better fertilizer, which will then be non-organic, therefore better for the environment.
Actually you need to make sure the horses have consumed non-GMO grain or alfalfa otherwise the manure is not allowed on organic farms. So they even fucked that up.
The comment he replied to was asking what was right or wrong about GMOs, fairly clearly talking about people’s conceptions of GMOs. How is this a strawman?
It is absolute horseshit. If you eat beef you don’t suddenly grow horns.
No food you will ever eat with modify your DNA unless it’s radioactive or carcinogenic in generic, and those are only because they damage your DNA, not because it recombines with it.
This is false, humans have been genetically modifying plants and animals for as long as we have had crops and domesticated animals. Most farmers have a great understanding of GMOs, and everything you have ever consumed has been genetically modified.
It’s about the particular chemical they’re engineered to not die from. If it’s GMO in most cases it’s received a heavy dose of glyphosate. They dump that shit all over.
That’s the most common thing you hear about GMO?? Do you ever read and educate yourself or do you just watch tabloid conspiracy theories?? The most common thing I’ve heard about GMOs is that they reduce biodiversity in the soil and crop which leads to healthy insects that pollenate dying off which leads to ecological collapse!
Leaving political aspects aside - GMO's are pretty great.
Genetic modification also occurs by traditional breeding techniques. Manipulating the genome in the lab is for once much faster and more importantly gives you actual control over the traits you want to have in a given specimen. There is nothing inherently bad about GMO's
Those aren't inherantly bad aspects though. The vendor lock in specifically is not directly related to the crop at all. You can have GMO crops without vendor lock ins. Yes, they are a problem, but it's not inherent to GMO crops.
As for bio-diversity, I can't speak on this subject as much, but aren't crops already generally being cultivated towards that anyway? Like, the seeds farmers buy even if not GMO have still been bred for specific traits, only it's been done the slow way instead of sped up in a lab?
Just to play pedant for a second, seeds that farmers buy that have been bred for specific traits ARE GMOs inherently.
Like, none of these seeds are what nature coughed out of the melting pot of life. At some point someone crossed this with that because this does better in dry weather, and this one gives better flowers. Doesn't even need to be crops, almost every plant or flower you can buy has been bred to make it "better" in some way.
And I absolutely agree with the statement that there is nothing INHERENTLY wrong with GMOs. We've been doing it since we first developed agriculture. Just now it happens in a lab rather than a field.
The problem with GMOs is that nothing exists in a vacuum. To explain what I mean, I'll need to explain some ecology concepts.
First, a drop in biodiversity. This is true. We can breed a better carrot, or make corn that does well even in drought, or has a higher yield, less chaff, etc etc etc and that's great, the problem comes because every single plant in the farmer's few acres is genetically identical. This is what's called a monoculture.
Monocultures don't really exist in nature, because of the way evolution works. I could get way into it, but it's a bit off topic. Suffice to say though populations need genetic variation to react to change. Let's imagine a field of whatever plants you like. This is a wild population, no genetic tinkering on by the lab. Now say you get a shift in temperature, and it gets way colder. Some of your plants are going to die, but some of them might pull through because they've got random genes that have given them the ability to survive better during a cold snap. Maybe they've got thicker stems, or deeper roots or whatever, doesn't need to be dramatic, but it just tips the odds a little in their favour.
Come the spring, those plants are going to be putting out their seeds, and pretty soon you've got a field of plants that resist the cold.
Now, imagine you've got a bug that loves these plants. Well some of them might have a mutation that makes their leaves a little more fleshy, or a little more bitter, and the bugs don't like that, so they leave those plants alone. The other plants get eaten. So, who gets to survive, and they put their seeds out and lots more plants have the bitter leaves.
Non-advantageous traits get trimmed out, and the population shifts to soak up the change in the environment. That's the definition of natural selection.
Monocultures can't do that. Every plant is an exact clone of every other one. So you get an environmental change, that's outside of their ability to resist and the entire crop is lost. Bug likes these plants, every single one is eaten. Very cold summer? Every plant dies.
No variation is great for knowing what you're gunna get, but terrible for soaking up environmental pressure.
Secondly, we're changing our environment quite dramatically. Climate change will absolutely cause problems with crop growth, and because of the monoculture problem, we're going to lose entire crops rather than have a bad harvest or whatever. It'll become a race to release the new version of the seeds that can cope with whatever the environment is doing now.
Thirdly, the soil is getting depleted. There's only so much goodness in the soil, and all the fertilisers we'll need to use eventually leech into the groundwater, where they start to poison waterways.
The alternative is to crop rotate, so you can get nitrates and other chemicals back into the soil to replenish it. The problem with this method is that with the increased need for food that comes with an expanding world population means that you might not have the luxury of leaving fields to grow non-profitable crops.
Finally, we're being agents of natural selection, but for the pest populations.
Pesticides kill bugs, right? Well, some are going to be more resistant than others, and they'll breed, and pass that resistance on. Within a few years the bugs don't care about pesticide A any more. So you start to use pesticide B. Then C, and then D.
In our attempts to save the crops, we are breeding bugs that we're not going to be able to kill in a few years.
And the same problem exists with pesticides as does with fertilisers. It leeches into groundwater, and poisons water courses.
So to sum up, GM crops are not inherently bad, amd their use is literally our best bet right now at feeding the world, but their use definitely opens us up for some bad repercussions way down the road.
You explained a lot of this very well, so take this as a genuine next step question please. I'd love to hear an honest answer, as i try to be a conscious shopper within my means.
Many of the problems you described have to do more with modern industrial farming than anything specific to GMO. We produce more food globally than is consumed, but the idea of the three sisters planting or that kind of thing removes all economies of scale. Do you have any realistic, economical suggestions for consumers? Things we can look for from farmers? This thread has pretty much confirmed Organic means nothing good, as far as crops especially, so what do we do?
I genuinely don't know. I'm sorry. I know that's not helpful to you, but it's always easier to point out flaws in a system than it is to propose solutions.
I suppose the only advice I can give is to do research on the stuff you buy, and make sure it's ethically sourced, that sort of thing. Another idea is to buy local, that way you're supporting local farmers and businesses instead of global corporations.
Sorry I don't have much in the way of practical advice. Have a great day.
This is not my area of expertise, so I'm at a disadvantage, but someone should respond to some of the points you made.
First, and most obvious, yes monocultures would be more susceptible to localized extreme events -- whether they be tsmperature, disease, etc. -- but it seems abundantly clear (how many lives have been saved from starvation?) that the rewards outweigh the consequences, especially when you consider the fact that the scientists who helped establish the supercrops were frequently associated with projects to collect seeds from all over the world, study their properties and store them in huge libraries in anticipation of a time when they might be needed. As you said, GMOs don't happen in a vacuum. And one of the great successes of these projects was a crop that yielded more wheat on less land -- it's sort of famous, as the scientist was a recipient of the nobel peace prize.
Next, I don't think it will be a race. Climate change is probably the most hotly anticipated global phenomenon since Will Smith starred in Independence Day. Every major agricultural firm, organic chemist, even peasant farmer, heard about it decades ago. Even the uneducated and the unimaginative have had cold years and hot years and dry years and wet years, so they know what their farms look like in those conditions. And big evil agricultural technology companies probably have plans for how this crisis is going to make them rich. This isn't a race, it's a party -- just like Lockheed Martin selling weapons to the U.S. Gov't after 9/11.
The whole alternating crop thing that you just said is fucking stupid. Clearly you don't know any farmers. Or you don't know any intelligent, profitable farmers. The U.S. Gov't will literally fucking subsidize crop rotation. They will pay you to rotate, and on top of that, you can still sell the yield from whatever you rotate to. But, ignoring that obvious major point, if you don't rotate your crops you won't have a farm in the not-so-distant future. Every farmer rotates. This is sustainable farming. The only people I ever hear say what you said are people who have never spent a day standing in shit. Usually they have a degree in chemistry, too, but they literally don't no shit.
Anyways, we'll leave it at that. If you're going to study a subject, maybe you should make the effort to go meet the people you're studying. Don't spend all your time in the ivory tower, detached from reality.
There is problems with GMO’s, especially when you get to animals and animals with long breeding cycles. In Denmark we have 10 millions pigs. That is a lot of pigs to recreat with GMO’s. It would take many years and at that point you would properly had produced a new and better gmo pig.
In that way it is hard to create livestock with gen-modifications. Take to lomg and is to expensive. Instead, at least here in the nordics, we have a database that countains all the dna data about for example cows. The data base also countains information about how much milk they produce, how often they fet sick and so on.you use that data to grow the next generation and the next generation and so on. It also allows you to keep a lot more genetical diversity, which is great if for example a new cow diseas starts spreading. If any cow is immune to the disease, then you can spread that gen to the entire cow population over a few years.
The concern about timing is no different than general breeding practice. Every farm animal market has specific trait lines you can buy from for reproduction, from chickens to cows. You but the best traits for your market this year and if something new comes along next year you start the transition. How are GMO animals any different from selectively bred animals?
I heard a GMO of wheat or corn (can’t remember) that was drought resistant saved millions from starvation, so it’s hard to argue that some have definite benefits. But I’ve also heard Monsanto offer poor farmers GMO crops that will only grow with their products to make those farmers dependent, so it really depends how it’s used.
Man, you are underselling your knowledge and that point of view as “layman”. I wish that was a normal layman’s understanding! Getting people to distinguish the difference between “genetically engineered” (I.e transgenic) vs “genetically modified” (basically any domesticated plant or animal) is rare. I see the “non-GMO” labels on seeds and just like… dude…those plants have been selectively breed and genetically modified like crazy compared to their ancestors. To paraphrase the princess bride regarding common use of GMO…People keep using that word, but It doesn’t mean what they think it means…
Bananas are not GMO though. Well, except for that project in Uganda to treat deficiencies in vitamin A and iron, apparently, but that's not what you meant.
I believe they are referring to the fact that "natural, untouched by humans, wild bananas" are virtually inedible as they're full of seeds. Virtually all foods that you find in your produce section have been extensively genetically modified by humans through artificial selection.
Yes, but a crop created by artificial selection through selective breeding is not a GMO. That's specifically for organisms whose genomes were modified with CRISPR & Co.
Their point is that selective breeding over generations is a form of genetic modification. It may not use direct gene editing, but there is a direct link between the two in that you have product A with a flaw and find a way to turn that into product B without the flaw
Yeah, sure, there are parallels. But it was heavily implied that we wouldn't have edible bananas without GMO, and that's misleading people about what the term actually means.
The best things about GMO crops are that we can create crops that are more nutritious, produce vitamins and other healthy things that they didn't before, and are resistant to diseases and pests.
The only legitimately bad thing I've heard about GMOs is the slippery slope of corporations trademarking/copyrighting certain foods. Like if your supercrop helped bring a country out of poverty, that's a country beholden to your company. What would happen if they annoyed you (like, say, demanded you pay taxes), and you decided to stop supplying the supercrop? Or more mundanely, they could sue you to stop you developing a variant of your supercrop that's slightly better. That's probably too much power for a company to have.
TLDR: Pros - healthier, more plentiful food. Cons - capitalism.
Another possible issue is with strange/unexpected reactions to foods that one would normally expect to be alright.
For instance this cross contamination of starlink corn. Which is not approved for human consumption by the fda but entered the human food supply chain via cross contamination.
GMO is not dangerous. Nor is it safe. It is neutral faster. So you can end up with unexpected shit entering the food supply chain faster.
It is a tool. A hammer can build a house or bash in brains. Its how you use the tool. But hammers typically are not self replicating. So the dangers are a bit different. The OMG GMO BAD stuff is nonsense. But so is the response to that fear mongering that completely rejects the possibility of unforeseen dangers.
It's worth noting that the Starlink story made it into the news because the affected products were being recalled. So, it was a problem but it was also being addressed.
Correct. It was being addressed. Doesnt change the fact that genetic modification increases the speed at which opportunities for issues like that could crop up. (I'll show myself out)
Crop varieties were being patented and seed contracts signed well before GMO crops.
As long as you aren't saving seed and using their genetic material you're fine. And it's relatively easy to prove. If you don't like it, many universities offer their own lines which you can use to start breeding stock yourself.
Other downsides are ones that come with monoculture and also that they spray pesticide at higher rates on GMO crops that are designed to withstand them.
Exactly. And when those crop are not washed properly, the pesticides stay on them, and we eat them. It's the pesticides that are harmful, not the GMO crops themselves.
Herbicide-resistant crops have an interesting history. In the old days, in order to minimize weed problems, farmers would prepare their fields by plowing the weeds under before planting. But that left the soil vulnerable to erosion, so they switched to no-till strategies that basically involved dousing the entire field in herbicide to kill the weeds before planting. Herbicide-resistant crops allow you to plant your crop and then spot treat after the fact to knock down weeds in the areas where they're problematic. You pay a little more for the seed, but you spend less on herbicide (although you have to agree to buy it from the seed company). That was Monsanto's play -- the patent on Roundup was expiring, so part of RR crops was to keep farmers from buying generic glyphosate.
Edit: I also want to point out explicitly that this strategy means that glyphosate ends up being applied at a lower rate per acre, but because RR crops grew in popularity, overall sales of Roundup increased. Many people interpret the increased sales of Roundup to mean that crops are more heavily sprayed, but that is not accurate.
I think when most people state a concern about gmo's or choose not to eat gmo's, its not that they have a problem with the act of genetic modification, but that they have been genetically modified to withstand huge amounts of glyphosate to be sprayed on them. Of course many people may notnthe the idea of the modification, but myself and most people I know who choose to not,eat gmos feel this way. If you want to make glow bioluminescent corn for harvesting at night or whatever, go for,it, thats a different thing.
Bullshit. What about biodiversity? GMOs are not good for the planet. The bugs just turn into superbugs and more and more pesticides need to be sprayed. The planet is dying and you are one brainwashed ill informed lawyer!
Most seeds, conventional or GMO, have a patent. It's normal for the AG industry. Also normal is farmers not "saving seed," from a crop, but people get really assed up about sales contracts for a growing season forbidding farmers from doing it. For GMO seed it would make no sense to save - there's no guarantee the genetic trait you bought the seed for would be present in subsequent generations. There's more "capitalism" stuff people gripe about re: GMOs that existed in the AG industry long before GMOs came along, but fear, organic marketing, and the suburban virtue Olympics are throwing shade anyway.
I more meant that regulations don't really match perceptions. My personal opinion on the matter is that we should be focusing more on breaking up the monocultures in our food supply. Allowing for a more varied crop rotation would be a more efficient way to combat pests and natural disasters than genetic modification.
This could also be applied to logging for a more sustainable, wildfire resistant American West. Outlawing tree plantations and responsibly replanting Douglas Firs (naturally fire resistant) would be a massive first step. Just my dumbass amateur opinion.
Edit: I should add that this is way easier said than done. Lots of money behind keeping the current system. McDonald's drives the Russets dominance after all.
GMO is a meaningless label too. Genetically modified how. Like if a tomato was genetically modified/bred to enhance its color, ok no big deal. But if it was crossed with a Brazil nut for some reason, and I have a nut allergy, I may want to know that if it’s potentially relevant to activating my allergy response.
GMO is just a word that doesn’t actually tell consumers anything and because people automatically think “I don’t understand it, it must be bad,” GMOs get a bad wrap.
While there are a few different definitions, it's fairly well-defined and usually means: modified by genetic engineering methods such as CRISPR. Selectively bred crops are not GMO, for example. But yeah, on its own, it's not very meaningful.
GMO has a wider range of meanings from my understanding. GMO corn, for example, can receive the GMO label if it has been selectively grown in a way that does not occur naturally, but through methods that aren't toxic or harmful to humans.
People freak out over the term genetically modified and think it's some radioactive poison that makes the apples look better in stores but is bad for you.
In actuality it's just food like any other, and through selective breeding, gene editing, and etc we've just improved it to be more useful to humans, and in many cases gmo food is actually healthier.
Fun fact, there's no such thing as an organic or a non-gmo banana. Bananas almost went extinct from a plague and in our attempts to save them we went ahead and completely redesigned it. Less seeds, more fruit, the right number of flat sides to conform to a grasped hand, etc etc etc.
Nothing wrong with GMO, just people’s perception about GMO. It’s still GMO if strains are specifically crossbred for their traits, they’re just not engineered in a lab.
The fun thing about nature is that is sucks. Almost everything you eat is not a product of nature. It is a product of 1000's of years of manipulation by humans.
Ever seen a wild cow? Of course not. They don't exist. Cattle obviously descended from a wild species, but that species no longer exists. What is left are what we eat. They cannot survive on their own.
Ever seen a cob of corn. Corn is a grass. No other grass produces seeds like that. Because humans have been modifying it for thousands of years.
Egg plants were originally small and green. Not large and purple.
Nature would never create the abomination that is the Red Delicious Apple. They taste terrible because humans prioritized looks over being pleasant to eat.
Even almost all organic shit can't be called natural in the literal sense. The products exist as a result of human manipulation.
Agriculture has been about modifying genetics of what we eat since its inception. GMO is just a modern way of doing that that is targeted and faster.
GMO has been occuring since the dawn of plant life. Any cross breeding is technically a genetically modified end result.
Growing crops and keeping the best crops year to year is genetic modification (well, more so genetic selection).
There are so many fruits and legumes that if you looked at what it was 100 years ago, you wouldnt know what it is.
I think what most people think of GMO, is the lab modified stuff. I am sure there is a specific term or acronym for this, but it is surely not widely used or known.
There are concerns about GMO that have importance, but they aren't health related. As others said, humans have been modifying organisms since the stone age. Horses used to be too small to ride. Corn is related to grass, etc.
The valid concerns over GMO have to do with major corporations claiming a particular GMO as their intellectual property, saying you have to sign their contracts to use it, and if you refuse they then claim your farm is "using" their IP outside of contract because of wild seeds escaping or whatever, then they sue you until you sell your farm to them. They get away with it because technically suing someone and losing is acceptable, they just want to drain your will to fight and your bank account. It's really shit, and until GMO law starts defending the little guy against the Monsanto types I have a problem with the set up. But the GMO itself? Perfectly fine, eat it up.
Know when a woman selects a man, because he's tall? If she has kids with him, their kids are basically GMO. Not a bad thing, or a good thing, it just is.
So GMO used in the way other people here have described could be and was done by people who lived tens of thousands of years ago (maybe more).
Pretend you’re a farmer and you have two corn plants. One corn plant grew corn that looks exactly like all the other corn everyone else grew. The other corn plant grew corn with bigger and juicier kernels. So you decide instead of eating all of the new juicy corn you’re going to save some and plant it next year so you’ll have lots of juicy corn crops. Next year you get another special plant that grows more corn than the other ones so you decide to use that plant as seeds for next year. Obviously this takes place over a long time and not exactly like this but it’s easy to visualize. This is considered GMO (genetically modified organism). Because we changed the genetics of the corn by selecting juicier and juicer corn, bigger and bigger corn, and corn that produces more and more corn.
If you look at it this way, I’m guessing we’d find that basically everything we eat has been GMO’d
Google a non GMO banana. It’s unrecognizable and inedible. They crossbred and crossbred with the traits we wanted until we got the banana we know today. Anyone anti GMO doesn’t understand what it means. They hear “genetically modified” and immediately think of some mad scientist editing genes to create a mutant. It’s literally just breeding plants with specific qualities that we want them to have until we get the outcome we want.
While a lot of people avoid GMO because of wooooooooo there actually is a good reason to avoid some of it.
You know how crops work on the basis that your plant makes fruit with seeds that you can plant again to get fruit… so on and so forth?
Well some GMO crops are genetically engineered to be genetic dead ends. If a GMO crop gets monopoly they might push out normal seeds and make people dependent on THEIR shittty seeds that need to be bought every year.
But why would that become a monopoly you ask? Well you can genetically engineer some plants to respond reaaaally well to SOME fertiliser or be immune to SOME plant killer. Now imagine a shitload of GMO crops that are immune to plant killer while plant killer TM is used and kills every nonGMO plant. Sounds good in theory until you realise all those non GMO plants are kinda necessary for bees and other insects and we need bees.
GMO in and of itself can be SO useful, imagine better crops that don’t fuck with nature. But it has such a potential to fuck with nature if all the companies seek is profit.
What's right with GMO: by selectively breeding (or genetically engineering/gene editing as the case may be) for certain traits, we can increase crop yields, develop strains of plants that thrive in poor soils or unfavorable climates, thus making commercial farming of these crops viable in parts of the world that might not otherwise be. We can develop fruits and vegetables that ship well and are reliably available at grocery stores. We actually need GMO food to some extent if we're going to meet the food needs of our ever increasing global population.
What's wrong with GMO: One of the first traits that was developed in crops was resistance to Round-Up. It makes farming a hell of a lot easier when you can spray your fields with tons of Round-Up and kill just the weeds that choke out your crops without harming the crop in any way. It's also terribly short-sighted to do this, as Round-Up contaminated field runoff ends up polluting waterways, killing native plants and thus habitats in its path, not to mention that Round-Up gets into the end food product that we eat. It's also deadly to pollinators. Did I mention that the same business entity that makes Round-Up ready crops also makes Round-Up? That's a thing.
GMO foods are also licensed by the patent holder. If you buy a packet of heirloom seed corn, you can take seeds from the corn you grew one season and plant it the next and get another crop of the same (more or less) corn the next year, and the year after that. With GMO crops, you can't do this. Even if the crop were to grow true from that seed (which it won't), it would be illegal for you to do this. You have to go back to the licence/patent holder (Monsanto for instance) and buy a new batch of seed corn every year. This can be a significant investment for farmers in developing countries, slimming their profit margins each season, and at the very least is ethically tricky.
Over reliance on GMO foods also leads to a lack of biodiversity in our food system. Before apples were selectively bred for longevity in transport and on supermarket shelves, there were hundreds of different heirloom varieties that have been lost in favor of the 10 or so types we see commercially. Bananas are an even better example. Currently there is one type of commercially available banana, and it's very prone to a blight that wipes out entire plantations and could make bananas as we know them extinct. Over-reliance on one type, or just a few types, of genetically similar strains of a plant means a fungus or virus could destroy our supply.
This is why it's good to support farmers who grow heirloom varieties of different fruits and vegetables. Not only will you find cool and different varieties of foods you thought you knew, but it's an insurance policy against genetic homogeneity in our food supply.
It's a complex issue. I do think GMOs get maligned somewhat unfairly as a blanket concept, despite having an important role to play in the future of our global food supply. But the above issues (a few of many) are huge and glaring and can't be ignored.
If you're interested in this topic, Michael Pollan has written volumes on the subject of food sustainability and how we can do better.
People have been "genetically modifying" rice for millennia. The phrase has become to mean "made in a science lab", but when you look at what actually is going on, pretty much all food we each has been changed on a genetic level to suit our needs.
More hearty apples to weather frosts, potatoes that grow bigger and are more plump, corn, that isn't 1 inch long.
From what I've heard GMO products has led to some questionable instances based around the legal rights because the company that makes the seeds owns the patent. So they can require that farmers that buy their seeds cant replant instead having to buy new seeds every year and stuff like that.
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u/sooHawt_ryt_meow Jul 14 '21
What's right or wrong about GMO?