FDA Approves First CRISPR Cows for Beef
modernfarmer.com
modernfarmer.com
Most people associate these genome modification tools as inherently bad because the first generation of them were tied to herbicide and pesticide resistance. Whether you agree with those applications or not, its clear those tools worked and were extremely powerful. I would personally argue they work too well and the 2nd and 3rd order effects are doing the most damage. But these tools exist in regulatory frameworks that are archaic and rigid and when billions of dollars are on the line companies figure out ways to play in between the lines.
An optimistic person might want these tools to be used to increase taste profiles, shelf-life, nutritional content, range of adaptation, etc. A pessimist probably sees this as a faster way to add more herbicide or pesticide traits to enable those chemicals to be applied.
I'm very bullish on genome editing tech. Lots of these comments are applying 1990s thinking to a 2030 and beyond tech. Akin to 1950s 'futuristic' predictions showing flying cars.
Norman Borlaug helped rid us of Wheat rust, which took a more 'natural' approach to gene editing.
The banana has been a mutant for decades now.
Yes, GMO is a new technique to modify food sources away from "naturally occurring processes" - but again things like lemons and broccoli are also not naturally occurring in nature.
Humans already eat a wide variety of foods as part of their daily diet that have no natural occurrence (lemons, broccoli, many different kinds of meat) - they were specifically bred that way. Some people have concerns about GMO in the same angle - that since for example these cattle are bred to endure climate change and they have no 'naturally occurring' example, there might be something inherently unsafe about them.
Yes, GMO is a new technique, but there is an intelligible way to connect the dots between the GMO and what humans have been doing with our food supply for thousands of years.
The term GMO has functionally lost all meaning to me as anyone can load up a straw man defining it how they need it to be defined at that point in time. Borlaug was a great plant breeder, but some of his inventions ushered in those tricky 2nd and 3rd order effects that I alluded to earlier. Namely, the response of (wheat) crops to synthetic fertilizer and how much synthetic fertilizer is both an economic boom and and environmental quagmire. Interesting debates no doubt
Genetic engineering is a distinctive and new technique for modifying the genomes of organisms, and the results of genetic engineering are referred to as GMOs.
The rhetorical flourish of decompiling the acronym and pretending it is descriptive rather than nominal does no one any favors. It's disingenuous, and doesn't alleviate someone's distrust of genetic engineering, because they know perfectly well that you know what they meant and are deflecting the conversation.
Just because other people are ignorant or arrogant, doesn't mean we should cater to their ignorance or arrogance. But it does mean we should make it easier to differentiate the key differences by not re-using the same acronym over and over again.
Instead of calling the 'new methods' GMO's, we should be calling them something else, instead of confusing the dummies. The new techniques folk like you are using should get a whole new acronym to go with it... Not just labelled GMO, yet again.
It just confuses the dummies. And we live in democracies mostly, so you should be concerned about that.
You didn’t take the actual definition. Look at the GMO wiki, and the first sentence defines the term in such a way to restrict it to organisms created with more modern techniques. When having conversations with people it’s important to have a shared vocabulary with people. Having a different vocabulary creates miscommunications. It can be especially hard to assume best intent of people are using a non-standard definition because it is a technique purposefully done around scientific and academic jargon to achieve political ends.
Should I conclude that you're a liar, or very bad at reading your hastily summoned sources.
If by "Anyone" you mean "US Americans", then you are probably referring to that vitamin A added GMO "golden banana" that is field tested there. But in that case there would be no need to say "technically in some fashion or another". (EDIT: i must have misinterpreted a single source, there is a lack of secondary sources confirming any large scale availability of this banana in the USA. Sorry! The field test is in Uganda not America)
The banana we are used to (Cavendish, ~99% world export market share) is not a GMO, because that term has a definition and a meaning, no matter how much people try to conflate "selective breeding" and "genetically modified organism".
What you are doing is called "muddying the water" and in general it is not helpful in serious debate, except when you aim for winning an argument, instead of reaching consent or discovering a deeper truth. I am not saying it is invalid to make a comparison between selective breeding and gene editing, highlighting the similarities. Doing that is perfectly fine. What is not ok, in my opinion, is trying to attempt to redefine and twist the words used by the other side of an argument to describe their position such that they can not express their position anymore. Note that sometimes word definitions are vague and reaching a common understanding can look similar to this pattern, but in this case the "technically in some fashion or another" gives the intention away.
But there are real issues: novel introductions make it harder to define how we talk about food safety in general, since almost all of it is based on both a very poor science (nutrition science is a dumpster fire) and long-term use by humans (GRAS) where previous generations were test subjects. The industry around this basically ignores these issues and pretends they don't exist and they label anyone raising issues as "anti-science."
Put another way: industries _usually_ don't end up untrusted because people are crazy, they _usually_ earned it, and GMO big ag has earned it in spades.
It's not just the original go to market being terminator seeds and submarining in patents, or to enable soaking fields with RoundUp, it's also that when people talk about GMOs, they're often talking about transgenic GMOs, things like Flavr Savr and the generally borderline-gaslighting issue around the industry and FDA pretending that labeling food with actual information would be bad (which has come up over and over, not just with GMOs).
There's also the disingenuous approach to pretending that modern genetic engineering is "just" accelerated breeding, which frankly isn't true and mostly relies on the fact that modern breeding uses mutagens to accelerate a process which makes coming up with a useful definition of GRAS quite difficult.
Basically the industry's argument was "GMO is no worse/different than what we've been doing for thirty years that you didn't know about, so it's fine" which, shocking, has kind of fallen flat because it is an outright lie.
Gaslighting is an overused term, but the industry's"it's just selective breeding!" argument is really pretty phony, and that's ignoring transgenic GMOs.
Before I get labeled "anti-science", I'm actually pro GMO, pro-GMO food and so on. But only in a functional regulatory environment, which we do not have at the moment.
It's unfortunate people don't have complete information and make the assumption of glyphosate/whatever or nothing when that reality never really ever existed.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eating-less-red-m...
Furthermore, water usage, water table pollution, and greenhouses gasses from animal husbandry are a significant chunk of the pie when it comes to climate change.
I don’t care about the emotions of animals at all, and never will. I purposely show my daughter videos of how to slaughter farm animals to try to make sure she has a full understanding of what’s happening so she doesn’t one day realize what “pork” or “beef” means and becomes vegan. Her favorite food by far is steak.
I’m all for others reducing their consumption as hopefully that’ll drop prices so I can eat more meat and feed my children more meat. Which is the only actual end result people who advocate cutting meat consumption will ever achieve.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but humans are animals mate
You realize that to an extent, the reason why meat is cheap is because of economy of scale and government subsidies, both of which depend on significant/majority of the population to be meat eaters to exist?
This comes across as proudly sociopathic. The line between the human animal and any other is arbitrary and blurry and about to get much more so. I think it’s healthy to understand your own body and recognize the importance meat has in your diet, and if that comes at the cost of the suffering of animals, that might be a price you’re willing to pay. But to lump all animal suffering together as ignorable is really a red flag for an empathy deficit that is worth examining.
Eggs are actually great if you have your own flock of chickens. They work almost for free in keeping grass down without requiring fossil fuels or complex machinery. They are almost perfect in handling food waste, and they can reduce harmful insects and weed without using any herbicide or pesticide. For insects they are likely less cruel than poison, and do not spread the poison to bees or birds. They also fertilizer the garden in a very natural way. A fairly small flock can easily maintain the need of eggs for a small family, often producing so much that you want to give it away to friends and relatives.
A bit of an anecdotal but when the natural gas prices went up after Russian invasion of Ukraine, one food product that got hit hard was fresh tomatoes. Farming them during off-season is very energy intensive and so require a lot of electricity, which in most countries mean a lot of fossil fuel. Even if you use renewables, that is energy that would otherwise go to to displace fossil fuel. It is indirect, but fresh tomatoes is right now connected with fossil fuel and war. Meat is also effected, but analysts seem to argue that people can easier switch over to farm more animal feed than they can fix the energy dependence on Russian fossil fuels. People could stop eating fresh vegetables when its off season...
Tried it (by my own suggestion) as a supportive boyfriend for a week. Absolutely not. The food tastes awful and is so unfulfilling as well. Every single bit of it. Nice boutique vegan restaurants, homemade vegan, following highly rated recipes online, “you can’t even tell it’s vegan!!” alternatives from the store.
All of it absolutely gross and of questionable nutritional value, both overall and to men’s health especially but also women. I finally discovered, for example, the source of my then-girlfriend’s bouts of faintness and nausea: her vegan diet. Supplementing with vitamins improved things overnight. But something feels very, very wrong about that.
There’s also the type of person that tends to be vegan. I’m sorry but when the scene is filled with people who believe veganism, male feminism, effeminate traits, inherent weakness due to diet, and voting for Bernie is a personality trait, I don’t walk… I run.
I don't think this is common practice. My dairy knowledge is somewhat dated, but they they're usually kept in large corrals (possibly crowded) with many other cows.
You may be thinking of the stanchions they're put into for milking, but they're only put in those during the actual milking process, which only takes a few minutes with modern milking machinery.
Usually they're fed something tasty while being milked... makes it easier to get them to go into the dairy barn.
I suppose in a climate that permits them to be outside all year it's a different story.
Commercial meat is really bad for the environment, but you don’t have to eat that.
Animals are evolved to make the most of vegetables that humans can’t eat. There are sustainable sources that we can use to eat beef, pork, chicken, lamb, etc.
I try and do my best by eating local sources that I know are well produced. I don’t hunt, but would one day like to.
https://www.sacredcow.info/ Is a decent source of info on this.
Animals can process inarable land and turn it into nutrients. I can have a cow graze on land that can’t grow edible food for humans and turn it into edible food. That’s efficient.
What biases are you talking about?
[0] https://sapienjournal.org/people-who-eat-meat-experience-low...
Sure, we can ALWAYS find a source that supports whatever claim we want to make. But let’s look at the general scientific consensus.
The overwhelming majority of research indicates that veganism is perfectly healthy. That’s what I linked! Your single journalistic summary of summary about non-causal associations between meat eating and depression don’t undo the general scientific consensus.
In a nutshell, obesity and sugars are the killer regardless if they are vegetarian calories or animal calories. Second comes minerals that effect blood pressure, and third its peoples need for vitamins. A healthy diet is one that avoid health risks.
Fiber rich food and fish is linked with lower weight gain.
Sugar is linked with tooth decay and obesity, especially that white stuff that get produced by plants.
A diet need to balance vitamins and minerals based on how active the individual is.
No alcohol, no drugs, no tobacco, no coffee, no added sugar or fructose to water. If its an stimulant then there is risk for harm.
A healthy diet should be diversified and balanced.
You mentioned that there are associations between fish and lower weight gain, but that’s sort of irrelevant because I’m not making the claim that you can’t be healthy while eating animals (though many doctors do!)
I agree that all those things are important. So optimize for them and avoid eating animals.
If we were to rank the world worst food product in terms of causing health problems for humans, sugarcane and sugar beet would list at the top. Animal products is in comparison fairly healthy. After sugar the next would likely be corn, as in high-fructose corn syrup. Much of the worlds insulin resistance and obesity is directly caused by those two vegetarian grown products!
If we look to historical diets that killed the largest number of people, outside the context of sugar, it would be diets where people only ate potatoes, rice or corn. Those diets has a risk of missing essential vitamins and during wars there were major epidemics from unvaried diet that focused on those vegetarian options. People who ate meat during those periods was generally more healthy as their diet was more varied and balanced.
If one want to optimize for health, optimize for a diversified and balanced diet that addresses risk associated with weight gain and insulin resistance. Cut out candy, beer, sugar drinks, potato chips, cereals, cheese puffs (corn coated with cheese powder), wine, and so on. All vegan food (except for the coat on the corn), all food that is terrible for health.
No discussion that uses statistics to prove a point should exclude the use of the same statistics. Vegan diet is associated with better health. A vegan diet is also associated with being female, high education, young, never married, normal and underweight BMI, and without any chronic conditions. How much is cause and effect is a bit more complex.
You seem to think that I’m claiming that veganism is optimal for health. I’m not.
Why not just give a shit about the suffering of others though?…
So what?
Not that any actual evidence or true rational argument has been provided by such parties in this comment chain. Appealing to emotion and agressively stating what you want to be true are simply not conductive to a productive argument.
I’m sure there are some quiet vegans, and it’s possible that I just don’t know people well enough to know whether they are vegan. I’ve met dozens of vegans over he years and friends with many. As I’m friends with them, I’m aware of their health issues or lack of health issues.
That means that not only do you claim to have a better understanding of nutrition than those organizations and the thousands of nutritionists and scientists they represent, but you are able to determine your correctness by merely talking to the vegans you’ve met.
That means you’re able to also trivially determine if someone’s health issues are caused directly by veganism, rather than merely present in a vegan.
That is a level of delusion and arrogance I genuinely cannot comprehend.
> As I’m friends with them, I’m aware of their health issues or lack of health issues.
Of course I come in contact with lots of random people who are vegan but I certainly don’t know them well enough to understand their health.
I am also aware of the health of my non-vegan friends as well.
There are a lot of things that are "unnecessary for human life", such as using electricity.
Making electricity harms the environment, causing suffering.
Therefore, you should stop using your computer.
Right?
The arguments are exactly the same, despite your attempt to spin it.
The original argument was that a) eating meat is not necessary to human life, b) eating meat harms animals, c) therefore, you should stop eating meat.
My recasting of your argument is a) using electricity is not necessary to human life, b) using electricity harms animals, c) therefore, you should stop using electricity.
What is the difference between these arguments? Be specific.
And I don't really care if you "call me out". I don't bully. Sorry.
P.S. I'm not your "mate".
And once you've answered - how would you feel about hyper advanced aliens coming to our corner of the universe and being horrified of all the pain and misery on earth, with a finger on a button that'll painlessly stop us from existing.
The huge difference between your hypothetical and reality is that the aliens are actively committing genocide and im merely a proponent of not forcefully impregnating more animals to get them pregnant so I can profit off them.
If human beings were kept in conditions like those we find animals and at the same scale, and the aliens came and were horrified then I’d beg them to press the button that stops humans from being raped and impregnated at mass scale solely for the babies to be processed.
The question is, for me, pretty important, because it moves the bulk of the focus from "don' eat meat" to "dramatically improve farming conditions".
Rabbits are pound for pound the most efficient meat to raise.
I dont like GMO / Genome-edited cattle / food or crops. Even if it could theoretically occur through a natural breeding process. You can cross breed all you want. GMO is not cross breed as many on HN somehow believes last time we had this discussions. You can do Data Science and other controlled environment in providing better yield as in EUR ( Or specifically the Dutch ). And we may soon have Cattle labeled as GMO / Genome-Edit Free as selling point, as US likes to do with Antibiotic Free and Growth Hormones free labels. Part of the reason why EU has never been keen on US Beef import.
To add some other context, US Beef export rank third in export volume and first or second in export revenue.
I'm no fan of GMO products either, but the whole point is that it gets you there faster , and in a more predictable way, than doing cross-breeding. Economics at work.
A lot of food I buy has labels saying GMO-free on it. Although maybe that's just to distinguish from GMO plants currently.
Source? A search turns up:
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/09/21/new-allowances-in...
I think it’s important to distinguish that objection from health scares, technophobia and such: imagine if the public’s objections were targeted at the real problems instead, how much more productive it would be!
Not surprisingly, I've learned about this concept from the Russian government.
If you are going to use your credentials to explain why you do not have a problem with GMOs, but then put in a blanket "Everything is fine" vibe... that doesn't do justice to the problems.
In my opinion, health-wise and biochemically its fine
The patent situation, market capture, and change in biodiversity are issues secondary to the issues most are generally worried about when consuming and purchasing GMO foods and could be fixed with changes in law/regulation rather than having to do with whatever proteins the organism is expressing
Seriously though, biochemists seem to have more authority on this subject than a farmer. Some farmers study and are knowledgeable about genes and chemistry and whatnot. But without further information, just being a farmer doesn’t give you much more insight on the safety of GMO.
Or are you approving the chemicals that are sprayed on GMOs because they can survive them?
I think being opposed to the spraying of fields by whatever herbicide or pesticide is a legitimate position, but it's a distinct problem. Yes, I realize that they often come together, but that is not necessarily the case.
You can easily have a GMO that has nothing to do with pesticide or herbicide resistance, in fact there are plenty of those, and they unfortunately all get lumped into the same category in public discourse.
And even in the worst case, where a GMO's purpose is to be used alongside a herbicide such as glyphosate... It's not clear that the alternative is any better. In fact most other categories of herbicides are way more hazardous (note that I am not a herbicide expert, but I do know a thing or two about them). I don't want to defend any bad companies, and I don't know what the solution is, but one thing I know for sure: feeding everyone is actually super complicated.
Unfortunately, regulation of this sort of thing, at least in Canada and the US, is a complete joke and a confusing mess that doesn't serve anyone's best interests.
Putting cattle remains in cattle feed was fine until CJD was discovered, mass producing CFCs was fine until the chemisty of the ozone damage was understood. More chemists assured leaded petrol was fine and the few who complained were attacked... this list is huge. Its totally fine to mass produce plastics still. So to assure the generally well informed about the safety and wisdom of a technological proposition - you would need to be able to carry more detail than just adding 'I am a related professional - this is fine'
What evidence do you have that our understanding of CRISPR and genetic modification today is on par of our understanding of CFCs and CJD in the 20th century?
It's like saying that we shouldn't release any new drugs because of the thalidomide catastrophe.
My argument was not like saying "we should never do anything like this because of past grave accidents in comparable novel products and practices" It was to be measured and wary of bare professional and institutional assurances.
Regarding the characteristics of plants and animals that we should feed to our children and mass rear in our environment - I am of the mind that the characteristics should be as well evidenced by the long history of life as we can afford.
Which is totally fine, but unfortunately that position is neither informed by any specific evidence, nor informed by a principled understanding of the technology in question (which is where deferral to expertise can come in handy).
You should note that there's a difference between an appeal to authority fallacy, and deferral to expertise, and while the former is fatal to any logical argument, the latter is an entirely appropriate and useful heuristic: https://thelogicofscience.com/2015/03/20/the-rules-of-logic-...
What determines the safety of any commercial application of technology is regulation. No technology is safe - don't lose contact with fundamental facts in the coarse of trying to maximize your argumentation and technological expertise.
CRISPR-Cas9 (the method used here) was first successfully used seven years ago. According to the article, the meat may go to market in two years pending a safety review. So that's nine years from lab to table. How soon is too soon? What makes you think doing it now would be premature as opposed to ten years from now?
> It was to be measured and wary of bare professional and institutional assurances.
From where would you like to get assurances? Do you have to conduct the study yourself?
> Regarding the characteristics of plants and animals that we should feed to our children and mass rear in our environment - I am of the mind that the characteristics should be as well evidenced by the long history of life as we can afford.
That's all well and good till climate change reduces arable land and we have to extract as much as we can from the remainder.
So yeah, for what it's worth, zero potential conflict of interest whatsoever.
OTOH I can plausibility imagine engineering to improve marbling for instance.
> and be unhealthy for the cows
Todays cows are already really unhealthy because of feedlots.
The fact is that humans have been breeding plants and animals to increase efficiency and palatability for thousands of years, and GMO is the next technological step.
GMO, with its large increase in potential interventions, is quite revolutionary.
Personally I'm reasonably confident that any significant adverse health effect would have been found by experiments by now, so Bayesian reasoning tells me any unknowns that are still unknown are probably negligible.
Cross breeding occurs slowly and is a long-used process. The long-used means there is ample evidence suggesting cross-breeding results in safe food.
The fact that cross breeding happens slowly gives any safety issues a long time to reveal themselves before it becomes wide-spread. Thus it makes sense that cross-breeding yields fewer unkown issues by the time its widespread. Essentially, early warning are built in, even for latent issues.
As an aside, I admire the HN crowd reasoning capacity, but it always amazes me that almost no one is upfront and say we as a society love the taste of beef and are willing to risk environmental and possibly health issues for it. It would be a much more productive discussion if we were honest about it instead of discussing whether we need bigger cows.
These principles then provide the wise sounding argument that our Motivated Reasoning brain center needed.
2. The benefits are clear: GMO foods are more cost effective, hence why farmers choose them over conventional
That's fine. You're free to buy the conventional version if that's the case. However, market pressures will likely bring down the price, which mean some of the profit/savings are passed onto you.
Basically, if you’re fine with your kids ingesting higher levels of pesticides, then go for it!
Your position is a major environmental disaster.
We might both agree that pesticide usage alone should have a negative coefficient on whatever global fitness function we consider, but that a usage of zero pesticide is still sub-optimal.
Dust from harvest causes allergies, but don't blame it on chemicals. Well other than everything is a chemical.
I imagine it has something to do with erosion, but I'd like to know more, and you seem to have a position on the topic.
For the soil itself, it brings up subsoil which has microorganisms that work better in low air enviornment (because that is what they are from) and move the near surface microorganisms down below where they don't get the air they need. It also breaks up organic matter making them break down faster (into CO2 if there is O2 available, and the turning just added a bunch). Also all those broken roots no longer hold the soil in place. so the soil will erode much faster.
Erosion is part of it, but even if the soil wouldn't erode the loss of organic matter is still a big deal.
Because trusting a company (like Monsanto for instance) to play nice with their patents as it relates to our food supply is a non-starter.
Monsanto is infamous for contaminating non-GMO crops on neighbour farms then suing the neighbour for growing the GMO variety, and for "drift" of their special herbicide which happens to destroy neighbour farm crops - for which the only solution is, you guessed it, buy Monsanto GMO varieties to grow instead of the non-GMO varieties you wanted to grow.
1. in the context of this discussion (ie. GMO cows) this is basically a non-issue. GMO sperm isn't going to "drift" from one pasture to another.
2. Can you substantiate that claim? The Wikipedia article lists a bunch of cases where the farmers were intentionally trying to breed monsanto seeds, which is different than the narrative you presented, which imply farmers being sued for accidental contamination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#As_plaint...
There used to be range wars over "strange breeds" much less gene-edited breeds where I grew up, where the cows still largely wander federal land and get rounded up seasonally.
On the second claim, it's briefly described in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#Dicamba). The second claim isn't about GMO spreading directly, but rather about how you may have no choice but to grow the GMO variety (and pay for it, and lose revenue if you were growing something more profitable) when in the neighbourhood of other farms growing it, which has a similar practical effect on individual farmers regarding "you’re still free to go back to non-GMO varieties".
Lengthier article here (https://investigatemidwest.org/2020/12/04/buy-it-or-else-ins...) "‘Buy it or else’: Inside Monsanto and BASF’s moves to force dicamba on farmers" [...] [...] "His neighbors who spray dicamba are frustrated with him, he said. There’s an easy solution to avoid damage, they tell him: Buy Monsanto’s seeds" [...] "As the damage has continued, he said, more and more of his clients are “feeling bullied into” buying the dicamba-tolerant crops. Others tell him, they have to spray dicamba or else they can’t control the weeds."
>Lengthier article here (https://investigatemidwest.org/2020/12/04/buy-it-or-else-ins...) "‘Buy it or else’: Inside Monsanto and BASF’s moves to force dicamba on farmers" [...] [...] "His neighbors who spray dicamba are frustrated with him, he said. There’s an easy solution to avoid damage, they tell him: Buy Monsanto’s seeds" [...] "As the damage has continued, he said, more and more of his clients are “feeling bullied into” buying the dicamba-tolerant crops. Others tell him, they have to spray dicamba or else they can’t control the weeds."
I agree that this situation is bad and monsanto was in the wrong. However, I don't agree with the characterization of this as a GMO problem. The problem as I see it is that one party (the farmer spraying dicamba) is harming another party (the farmer that's not using monsanto seeds). In other words, a tort. This is something that the legal system protects against, and the article mentions that the injured farmer has won a lawsuit, so it seems like everything's working as intended. Blaming it on GMO doesn't really make sense. If GMOs weren't involved, and the pesticides merely poisoned the drinking water, that wouldn't magically make the situation okay.
As far as I'm aware this angle is FUD.
If we want to apply the same standard to pesticides I'm not sure any high ground exists. That said, whatever effect they have on mortality appears to be miniscule given the trends over the last century.
If we consider this in the context of GMO it sure seems like FUD to me.
It seems to take generations for health problems with novel products that humans ingest to materialize.
We have millennia of experience with cross breeding, animal husbandry, etc.
Why trust these salesmen of genetically modified organisms, the same gentlemen who gleefully introduce pesticides into the environment, when we know that traditional hybrid crops and selectively-bred livestock provide ample nourishment?
Is optimizing for per-acre yields at the risk hazard the environment and human health worthwhile?
If the alternative is “everyone eats, but food is a little more expensive”, that’s OK. If the alternative is “billions live with insufficient food and 100s of millions die”, then I think the balance of the risk equation shifts.
That does not mean it is a good idea to trade long term damage for short term yields. But yields are still important.
This is illogical. The only places that experience excessive population growth are those that haven't developed their basic agricultural sectors and rely on labor intensive subsistence farming which means having children who work on your farm is not a drag on your household. The reason why those people do subsistence farming is actually quite ironic, because they cannot afford to run commercial farms as those would have to compete with hyper optimized western farms so instead every poor nation is forced to sell its raw resources and cash crops and then buy food from developed countries.
You can't sustain a population on vanilla but since western and asian countries cannot compete on e.g. coffee or vanilla production in Madagascar that nation can use the proceeds to import rice. The problem isn't an inability to grow rice, after all, people do subsistence farming and live off it their entire life.
It's muscular hyperplasia obtained from inbreeding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Blue
They did the same thing in Piedmont, Italy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmontese_cattle
We're also exporting the technology and knowledge of breeding pigs.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/30/danish-b...
A marvel of engineering.
I only hope this crisper age will allow for amazing animals. I’m hoping they can breed cows with cheese inside their muscles.
More like thousands of years.
Also, before humans were selectively breeding, animals were “unconsciously breeding” e.g. fruits by eating the tastiest ones and thereby spreading their seeds.
My granddad was a farmer (he was born around 1920). Back then, animals were still treated fairly well, and the animals themselves were also still natural. The real industrialization of livestock came after that, when he was already retired.
Having raised and killed animals all of his life, he actually wasn't too fond of how animals were raised and treated after that. For sure he regarded all specifically bred animals as unnatural.
Do you want chickens that can't stand on their own legs? Olden days: no, currently: yes.
Do you want cows so fat that they can't naturally give birth to calves? Olden days: no, currently: yes.
How do you breed animals? Oldens days: put the male together with the female. Currenly, jerk of the male and inject the semen in the female.
It's all industrialized. And what selective breeding has to do with how animals are treated? Everything. Unless you claim chickens too fat for their legs, cows too fat to give birth, etc, has no impact on their well being.
My grandfather was a farmer, and at his old age he bought such a chicken. He was amazed and astounded that within a few weeks it became so big it couldn't stand on its feet anymore.
He didn't buy such a chicken again.
For me, that statement invokes thoughts of "counterfeit cattle". By that logic, there's no harm to the consumer when someone sells a knock-off purse or watch, as long as it functions the same as the original. Taken a step further, there's no harm in stealing from someone if the victim doesn't know they've been robbed.
I'm not against using advances in technology to feed more people. I believe the suffering of a hungry human outweighs the suffering of that human's potential next meal. I don't think it's wrong or immoral for a lion to eat an antelope.
But I do believe honesty and openness are important. I want consumers to be able to make educated decisions on what they consume. It should be easy for someone who can afford an all-organic diet to purchase products that are in fact organic.
We are indeed very adaptive! It’s simply a case of us adapting our behaviour to mitigate the consequences, rather than just adapting to live with them.
We seem to be becoming increasingly reliant upon technology which is increasingly untested to solve problems that are increasingly a result of this adaptivity. It’s a vicious cycle in which humans identify a problem but lack the necessary perspective to identify and solve the root cause of the problem so we end up with inadequate solutions that mostly prolong and exacerbate the original problem rather than actually solving it. Adaptivity aside, I just don’t think humans are at a point in which we possess the necessary perspective for us to safely engage in large scale commercial genetic modification of life without it backfiring on us in some horribly spectacular way.
"Lawmakers Eats CRISPR Beef to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2055) (modernfarmer.com)"
Instead of factoring in the costs of our actions, engineer ways to lower price and feed more demand -> and thus creating more methane, forest destruction, emissions from feed, huge waste of water, and all the gas shipping it a continent away.
If people won't reduce their beef consumption, maybe we can crispr out some methane (seems not possible just based on chemistry but who knows?). Or maybe just let the real price with externalities lower consumption.
If the inefficient cow/bacteria processing step is skipped, the whole production pipeline is greatly more climate-friendly.
The food doesn't turn to methane without the bacteria.
https://jasbsci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40104-01...
This paper[1] suggests it would cost about ~20 cents per lb of beef
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I wonder if that means it would actually be possible, more likely I would guess to modify the corn or whatever gross food we feed most cows.
However! I agree that the who-owns-the-genes question is interesting.
They are probably doing this because the hair are a nuisance when they process the skins?
This is exciting for the obvious reasons of helping make meat production more sustainable and making meat more affordable. It's also incredible that we have this technology and we're putting to uses with obviously prosocial benefits.
I'm worried that we will reject climate change mitigations because of tradition or religious views. I hope we can change culturally to make it possible to survive for the next century.
But it seems you have absolutely no remorse of what happens to those animals that end up on your plate. Or you do and try to cover it up by playing the tough guy.
I try to cut back on meat as much as I can. I also enjoy some ribs, but I don't eat meat every day. And when I do, I try to stick with fish or poultry.
I suggest you watch some slaughterhouse videos, so you know what those animals have to go through to end up as tasty meat on your plate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTenibfTutI . Please watch it all up until the end.
If you still have no remorse, you are for sure a psychopath.
However, the reason farm animals are so cheap is because they are conscious, autonomous meat machines that you can order around easily.
* You do enter into another question here about whether brain dead or deeply disabled people are ethical to be eaten. Most people would say no.
Cannibalism isn’t widely seen as distasteful because of the suffering involved, but because you're eating people.
Maybe a better question would be around eating dog, dolphin or to a lesser extent, horse meat.
Closer to home: donating them to research/organ donation before they formally die.
as long as you take vitamins B12, D and some iron, you should be fine.
but having been meat eaters for 2.4 million years will be hard to shake off.
if anything eating beef will increase in the future as more and more people rise to the “middle class”. we should probably take this into consideration and it’s implications, no matter how you feel about the subject.
I'll note that personally I don't shame people for eating meat - that's just not a nice way to live and leads to immense resentment. I do think people are making the wrong choice here though.
Not true for everyone. I have a specific health issue and to ingest the necessary daily intake of proteins solely through non-meat source would mean ingesting a lot more carbs that I can handle for a day.
Also explain how would CRISPR increase the suffering of animals?
Corn fed factory meat doesn't taste at all the same as grass fed organic free-range.
I'd rather pay quadruple for a piece of meat and only eat it once a week than the crap we get for cheap every day.
Please let's stop being so naive.
I wonder if the average consumer will be as disgusted and turned off by the idea of eating genetically modfied meat as I am.
And yet people seem to be interested in lab-produced meat alternatives that use synthetic blood-like formula to make it taste like actual meat?
quite the contrary. i think this should be celebrated as a great achievement and will happily eat it if it’s delicious :P
To me that sounds like being turned off by it containing dihydrogen monoxide. That is kind of a shame because the "patented life" angle is a real, serious problem worth attention but bundling it with shallow/trivial criticism like "turned off" (it literally tastes the same) makes it easy to dismiss.
Of course there are issues with mere humans editing creatures, and true, coarse-grained crispr editing could result in unintended consequences.
But our ethics committees see nothing wrong with this. And as my morality depends on what ethics are commonly said to be ethical, this is a decision I am delighted to accept. And think of all the invalid children this will help!
Sure, I'm not clear on what has been edited here. Nor do I understand the legal implications of the editing, where a corporation is now considered to be a patent holder in a living cereus.
And I'm not sure what the future holds for people, even though I have read talk that dna was changed by vaccines (not just rna). Surely, corporations wouldn't argue that they have a legal interest in people, and that their interests need to be accounted for?
No, this is great news. Onwards and upwards into the brave new world! And special thanks to the FDA who have bravely represented the best interests of humanity, refusing to kowtow to corporate interests. I only sleep as well as I do thanks to my wonderful government and its 3-letter agencies! Good job.
Everyone loves talking about how their genetic engineering technique is the best and that at worst it is only as bad as selective breeding yet they completely dismiss the fact that you cannot apply selective breeding on a lot of these GMOs.
What's the concern here? That violating the reproductive rights of livestock is bad?
1) Earth gets warmer because we do shit like raise cattle
2) Cattle might die
3) Bio-engineer cattle that can live on warmer earth
4) ???
5) Get fucked
> They were bred with climate change in mind
So they’ve found a way to have happy cows that burp less methane?
No? Shorter hair so their methane burb greenhouse doesn’t feel so hot? Oh. This probably just boils down to profits after all.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is...
So I guess you have the answer
We've had discussions about abortion for ages, yet here the FDA okays a human intervention just like that?
Whether this is allowed to do to animals is not determined by the FDA. I am not sure what law does cover this.
That's a fact.
The same old rant that we hear for like 100 years now "when we reach 1 billion people everyone will starve", "peak oil is just around the corner (back in the 70s)", and all this kind of bullshit.
Resources are plentiful as long as you are ingenious when it comes to harvesting them.
IMO, given the scale of everything in the USA, it’s more luck than anything else that the world is getting sufficiently cheap renewables and batteries on the right schedule to avoid peak oil actually harming civilisation in general and the USA catastrophically — the principle is a valid one, and in a hypothetical alternative world where global reserves had been half what they were, American rural areas would have had a much harder time than European equivalents adapting to electric power and long distance transport in the 70s.
Why are we breeding cattle which has modified genes for not sweating ?
You say resources are plentiful but apploud (?) modified cattle so they don't sweat, so they don't pollute and so we all can keep eating meat. You really don't see a flaw in that ?
Of course we are too many people. Denying that is really naive.
If you’re primary concern is the welfare of humans (not saying it should be) rather than wildlife and natural ecosystems there almost no evidence which would suggest that an increase in global population results in a lower QoL for an average person.
If we all lived like hunters and gatherers, the population limit would be a mere few tens of millions.
Conversely, if we imagine arbitrary technology, the maximum population that can live simultaneously and sustainably on this world is somewhere in the trillions.
Technology such as the stuff you’re trying to use as evidence there’s too many of us, is in fact the technology that allows there to be more of us.
Our use of technology is using increasing amounts of our planets resources (e.g. land), and is often questionably ethical (exploiting the other creatures we share our planet with). At which point you have to ask the question: is an expanded human population worth that cost?
But we don’t have trillions of people yet, and the difficulty of supporting the current population sustainably is more one of organisation than technological inability — much closer to irrigating and enclosing in greenhouses Nevada, Utah, and Arizona [0] than it is to colonising Mars. (I’m told greenhouses are way more productive than open air farms, just not cost effective in most cases; the example given by proponents is the Netherlands).
> is an expanded human population worth that cost?
To whom? I’m vegetarian and pushing myself in the direction of veganism, partly because of ethics. Ethics are however are relative, and many humans only care about other humans. Heck, given that the nature of the rich inner world often called “self-awareness” or “consciousness” is not yet sufficiently well defined to even be testable, such people may even be correct. I’m not even sure at what threshold to stop caring myself — lobster brains aren’t very complex, and bivalves (despite being animals) don’t even have brains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bivalvia#Nervous_system
[0] for illustration purposes only; this is almost certainly a suboptimal set of locations.
https://borgenproject.org/how-many-people-are-starving-aroun...
It's true isn't it?
Resources are also plentiful until they're not. The idea that people have been saying that resources are running out for a long time is not evidence that they are infinite.
You'd have to be quite ingenious to maintain the fossil fuel supply indefinitely through your harvesting tactics, unless the tactic you use is to slow to a stop.
What are you proposing, exactly? It sounds like "address the real problem" here means you are suggesting killing people off. That definitely doesn't seem like a good answer.
China tried the one child policy, and it didn't turn out very well. The second order effects were pretty awful, and will be felt for generations.
What would you suggest the path forward to less population is?
Of course I don't suggest killing people, why would you even suggest such a thing ?
I suggest people start to educate themselves and eachother. Instead of having kids, adopt. Instead of eating meat 5 days a week, eat it twice. Start using a bike and not a car.
But people don't think about the consequences for the next generations, and "we are empowered to have our own kids etc". People really don't give a fuck about the state of the world as long as they can get what they believe they are entitled to through life. And that's a problem.
Start accepting that and start accepting the how exploit what we have dear and have been given as being part of the world.
We are way too many people for all of us to live decent life's.
hi. you would be surprised to find out this is a myth that started in the 70s. it has been disproven time after time, decade after decade. and still people fall for it :)
Worldwide (which is more relevant here), the absolute poorest of the poor, the people that would look up enviously to the accumulated wealth of a rough-sleeping westerner with a shopping trolley, are getting richer.
I'm sure there is a compromise between vegetarianism and being a full on carnivore. e.g. a global middle class that doesn't suck.
I expect thorough cooking to prevent this sort of thing, but some people do eat raw flesh deliberately.
Do you believe that “natural” is tautologically equivalent to “good”?