Why do you think natural things are prima facie good ?
Edit: The risk is reduced significantly after we’ve eaten something for a few generations. The problem is if we test something new on the global population before a local tribe tries it on themselves for a few generations.
We’re treating no evidence of harm as evidence of no harm. And we’re doing it on a global scale.
It doesn’t have to be 50000 years. For example: I trust that drinking cow milk won’t kill me even though it hasn’t been common for long. Can’t say the same for GM food.
Yes, but if you zoom out to categories that broad, GM food still fits within them. GM foods are not any less like foods eaten tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago than anything else we eat.
Meat fed cows and trans fats were products of the same relatively (compared to both the inherent nature and existing regulatory framework requiring proof of safety of novel food element of and faced by GMOs on the former case, and the latter of those in the latter case) uncontrolled evolution of food supply that characterizes the long history of “safe” food against which GMOs are contrasted.
Read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price for more background on this.
Only because populations tended to run closer to their own carrying capacity so that any shock (from variation in the natural environment or human conflict or ...) would put them over and cause malnutrition, not because normal supply was inadequate.
It's only fairly recently that humans other than in the most ideal environments could produce more than a small surplus of food even in good years (of course, that capacity was acheived in part by millenia of engineering for food for yield traits, with a lot of incidental changes induced along the way.)
Even prior to GM foods, humans have been engineering food to change it's traits for longer than civilization, and essentially everything humans eat today is a product of such engineering. GM foods differ systematically from other forms fo engineering only on the degree of precision and control possible (which is far from perfect, but much greater than any other known technique.)
Basically nothing humans eat today has been eaten for hundreds of thousands of years.