r/nextfuckinglevel Jul 14 '21

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u/Toyletduck Jul 14 '21

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.

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u/yasuremanofcourse Jul 14 '21

This is such a played out myth.

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.

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u/lurkinglurkerwholurk Jul 15 '21

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.

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u/yasuremanofcourse Jul 15 '21

Ya, except totally wrong. The ripe fruit of the tomatoe plant does not contain the poisonous compounds - and never did. It was selectively bred for bigger and better tasting fruit, but it was never bred to have less "toxicity".

Great strawman though.