Hacker News Reader

This is so spot on.

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:

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 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!

[1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Shill_gambit

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.

Today's XKCD has basically the same argument (http://xkcd.com/1693/).

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.

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'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.

> 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 :-)

My biggest problem with GMO is the monocultures that it incentivizes.

>I know that using antibiotics to grow meat is irresponsible because it fosters antimicrobial resistance

Would you be okay with antibiotic use if they used antibiotics that aren't used in humans?

I know you're not going to swim in it, so are you ok with me pissing in the baby pool? Piss is harmless when it comes to bodily fluids btw.

What's wrong with herbicides? I can understand why people fear insecticides, but herbicides are pretty harmless.

Harmless for who?

The majority of the human population would be my guess.

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.

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 wonder what inorganic meat looks like.

Ham? Bacon? Almost any cured meat?

They fail to meet several meanings of organic, the curing agents aren't carbon compounds and are not sourced from biological systems.

Can you honestly not differentiate between a chemical and a marketing term, or did you just want to crack a cheap joke?