DNA-Free Dining Made Easy
randomascii.wordpress.com
randomascii.wordpress.com
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_.
Would you be okay with antibiotic use if they used antibiotics that aren't used in humans?
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.
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 think it's weirder than eating body tissue of other species. But maybe I'm a freak that way, I like my stolen breast milk infested with mold.
Edit: not disagreeing otherwise :-)
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.
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.
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.
http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/r783700311.html
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 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.
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!
Today's XKCD has basically the same argument (http://xkcd.com/1693/).
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.
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
They fail to meet several meanings of organic, the curing agents aren't carbon compounds and are not sourced from biological systems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
With a single swipe of your hand and no reasoning behind it, you ignore the fact that a large portion of society considers it to be important.
Now: "If GMO's are so safe, then why are you afraid of labeling them?"
After labels become required: "If GMOs are so safe, then why do they need warning labels?"
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.
I believe Zika is an RNA virus...
One-line deadpan!
Viruses are RNA, not DNA.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
"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..."
In fact, those survey results are pretty much the point of the article.
That said, DNA can probably make certain foods slimy, which is a texture I'm generally opposed to.