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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>Regulations have eased since then, especially around gene editing, which tinkers with an animal’s own DNA rather than adding to it from another species, as is the case with the salmon and many GMO crops.

And people wonder why EU ( and UK ) doesn't allow much US agriculture import.

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Much of that is reasonable concern, but at least some of it is silly superstition. For instance, Germany doesn't permit the irradiation of most foods except dried herbs and spices. Irradiation is a perfectly safe way of increasing the safety and shelf life of food. Despite this, regulations on which foods if any this is permitted for vary greatly from country to country, influenced by how weirded out the uneducated public feels about it.

I wish more people understood how much of what they consume is radiated at some point…

The alternative to radiation is mixing less poop into your meat etc.?

You understand that the majority of "food science" is designed to allow increasingly lazier and sloppier food handling and allowing it to still be palatable/not kill too many people right?

Don't fall into the "lower cost" idea either, being lazier and sloppier means higher corporate profits and not lower consumer prices (for worse food).

Compare the grass fed/ranged (produced on farms 1/10th the size of the US equivalent) BigMac in Germany versus the one you get anywhere in the US, which do you think is healthier and tastier? They are basically the same price to the consumer mysteriously...

This is the ignorance I was talking about. There are many reasons to irradiate food besides substandard handling. For instance, potatoes can be irradiated to inhibit sprouting, increasing how long you can store them. And imported fruits can be irradiated to prevent the spread of insects and other pests (without needing to use far riskier pesticides.)

You proved my point actually.

Neither of those things is actually useful as an eater of food?

You want less fresh food and from sketchier sources yet you think those are virtues?

They are useful to people who buy food (who hasn't had some potatoes sprout in a cabinet?), and to society generally. Insects are a fact of fruit, to call that "sketchy" is just ignorant.

Sprouted potatoes is a sing its time to get some new ones... you want to eat horded 6 month old potatoes glhf

I don't eat fumigated strawberries so replacing fumigated strawberries with irradiated strawberries is... not useful?

This is a case where the science evolved to justify a pre-decided narrative. This was absolutely necessary for an unsustainable food industry in an overly financialised nation(guess which). Don't waste your breath arguing logically. Just try your level best to ensure it doesn't occur in your local food economy, for the near future. Eventually, the GMO folks will reap.

If the potatoes last longer without going bad, then there's no reason to replace them prematurely. You have a predicted narrative that any preservation method you aren't comfortable is intrinsically bad because it lowers food quality, but I can guarantee you there are countless other forms of food preservation you have no problem with.

It comes down to superstition.

> influenced by how weirded out the uneducated public feels about it.

So it's one of those "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" things?

What sort of regulation do you think should apply to germ line editing to inactivate a particular gene?

Like is a blanket ban the only reasonable approach?

This seems to be a small edit to a single receptor to keep pigs from getting a particular disease by not allowing the virus to enter their cells. It's hard to see how helping pigs stay healthy could have a negative impact on human health, but a lot of people are against eating things that are 'unnatural' in any sense.

Because CRISPR isn’t nearly that precise or exact, it always has unforeseen random fall off effects. Also, who says that particular receptor ONLY prevents entry of a specific virus? It surely has other purposes that aren’t understood.

Biology is always messy, but most impacts of off-target changes would be for the pig. When I look at references like this, it's hard to see what there is going to somehow affect humans:

https://molecularsciences.org/content/the-challenges-of-cris...

I've yet to see anyone give anything but unknowns as their answer for why it's bad, or what might happen. Nobody seems to have any specific pathway for bad things to happen in mind.

Are the pigs healthy? I think the sibling comment got to the heart of this a lot more directly.

There's an economic reward for keeping the pigs healthy enough to be harvested while spending the least amount of money on their environment. If this lowers the threshold for "healthy enough", or allows them to survive in an even worse, cheaper to maintain environment, that could introduce or exacerbate human health risks even if this change itself cannot.

There is also the animal welfare element, that has resonance to a lot of people. I am by no means a vegetarian, do not in principle object to killing animals for food. But the sheer scale of animal suffering in our food system gives me pause. I am reluctant to accept innovations that would allow us to increase the degree of suffering in exchange for an increase in output or decrease in price.

Healthy animals and industrial meat production are at two opposing ends of the same spectrum. You can have one but not both.

You absolutely can have both. The threshold to pass for at least "decently healthy" isn't that high and prices aren't that much higher than "normal" industrial farming.

Agreed. I grew up on a farm and spent some time in confinement hog buildings in the 80s, when that meant a few hundred hogs in one building. That setup would look roomy and quaint compared to how it's done today.

Livestock are resilient and adaptable, and can be miserable and unhealthy while being healthy enough to be profitable. Corporate farm organizations like to claim that farmers have an incentive to keep their animals healthy, but that doesn't mean the incentive is to keep them in tip-top condition. The best ratio of profit/cost might be juuuust above "almost dead." Just as human employers tend to look at the low-cost end of the scale when judging employee cost versus employee happiness/productivity, livestock farmers tend to look to the low-cost end of the scale to improve that profit/cost ratio.

I eat meat, some of which I raise and butcher myself, and I'm not generally a big fan of regulations. But I'd be fine with some tighter rules on animal welfare. What's done to cattle in kosher slaughterhouses looks like unnecessary torture to me, for instance. But if consumers want to eat animals that had a reasonably healthy and pleasant existence and a humane end, it should probably be on them to identify farms and butchers that provide that and buy from them. They do exist, but they're small because most people don't care about what they don't see. I'm definitely not excited about any technology which helps to further hide it from them.

>> It's hard to see how helping pigs stay healthy could have a negative impact on human health, <<

Really? You don't see a logical flaw in your reasoning there?

None of those pigs are “healthy”. If we didn’t pump them full of antibiotics they would never see the slaughterhouse.

In this case "healthy" refers to keeping them from getting a specific virus, and the genetic changes are so we don't have to fill them with antibiotics.

> It's hard to see how helping pigs stay healthy could have a negative impact on human health

I think that view underscores the differences in approach and beliefs in the US and Europe (not that both views aren't represented on both sides of the Atlantic, just distributed differently). The Europeans frequently have the view: Prove to us that this is not dangerous. Otherwise we prefer not taking the chance that you might be wrong. The US version in our eyes is frequently: "You can't prove it's not safe".

In this case you could risk introducing even worse diseases, who have previous been kept in check by the competition from the viruses you're now eliminating.

European consumers seem to not want factory farms that produce such low quality food that it needs to be CRISPRed (as is the case with this story) just to be kept alive long enough.

I also am in that camp, I don't want to eat pork raised in unsanitary conditions and then sold to me at top dollar (because lying/obscuring about sourcing).

Then you should want regulations about how the pigs are raised, not banning the use of CRISPR.

As an EATER of food what is the benefit of CRISPR/GMO?

There answer after a good 40 minutes of searching is... nothing.

It's a technology 100% in service of being lazier/sloppier for industrial scale food production and in service of IP restricting the food supply in favor of shareholder X or Y.

"but we can make tasteless US tomatoes on even more inappropriate cropland!"

...

Great for my stock portfolio to screw over developing countries but useless for me as a first world eater of food.

No proof of existence of a benefit.

Uh. Healthier animals.

This specific approval is for a gene therapy to prevent PRRSV infection - a major porcine virus and one that regularly infects pigs in the EU.

It has nothing to do with mistreatment of animals or factory farming.

poor husbandry is the primary objection to US food products

the chicken has to be chlorinated because it has literally been produced covered in faeces

this would seem to be enable it to become even worse

So don't import US food products if it scares you. That's a separate issue from whether to allow CIRPRed livestock.

Again, this disease regularly affects pigs in Europe and causes immense animal suffering.

> So don't import US food products if it scares you.

this is exactly the position of the EU, UK governments

and is one of the few policies that is universally supported by their populations

The EU and UK both import food from the US.

Some US food products are banned for concerns about safety, but they're hardly unique - the US also bans some food products from the EU and UK that are considered unsafe in the US.

None of that has to do with whether or not countries should allow CRIPRed livestock to be raised domestically.

no GM crops, no milk with growth hormone (nearly all of it), no beef with growth hormone (nearly all of it), no chlorinated chicken (nearly all of it), no washed eggs (nearly all of them)

and now pork will end up on that list too

> None of that has to do with whether or not countries should allow CRIPRed livestock to be raised domestically.

I couldn't care less if US'ians want to eat shit (here, literally)

> Then you should want regulations about how the pigs are raised

We have those. EU animals have "five freedoms".

> Like is a blanket ban the only reasonable approach?

From my pov as a fellow EU citizen a blanket ban for this kind of creepy stuff is the only viable option. Let the Americans become Frankesteins for all I care, it’s their choice, all in the name of “science”.

In the name of keeping up unsustainable lifestyles because one could not fathom to eat anything but abused animals. It’s part of the culture.

Banning something because you find it creepy? Unhinged

To the extent they don't import, it's much more about protecting their own farm economy. Denmark for example has a lot of large pig farms, they don't want US pork competing with that.

> And people wonder why EU ( and UK ) doesn't allow much US agriculture import.

I mean, this is completely false. 8% of all EU agriculture imports is from USA and has grown year over year for decades.

> U.S. agricultural exports to the European Union reached a record $12.8 billion in 2024, a 1-percent increase from 2023

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

While this 8% are limited to "sorts of" and may not include "CRISPRed" or "chlorine-bleached".

Just a thought from me, as European, in case someone asks for the thinking behind strict import EU rules:

We just don't want to eat things that we believe may cause (abstract) harm, and, sorts of liability of the state and society to care for you and (God beware) your kids if some adverse effects are pinpointed to food/imports or misregulation. I think it's ok like that.

Was just commenting on the blanket claim that EU "doesn't allow" much ag import from the US, which is plainly wrong.

It isn't plainly wrong as if they would allow much, then the share would be higher, as it is the case now for example Brazil (~9pc) or UK (>20pc).

If one think further, the share of export/import to/from non-eu countries is (rounded) 9pc of total EU's agriculture expenses. So, EU do not import much from US and others because they do not want certain techniques and methods and have their inner market and production anyway. Like it's the case with chlorine chickens and washed eggs. So, they don't allow such things to be sold to customers, which is infact not allowing import.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

I guess you can claim that the 3rd-largest agriculture import source is "not much" if it is making you feel better about something. But I think that even the EU bureaucrats themselves would recognize that it is a very significant amount and continues to grow.

Third largest is not much, if it accounts 8pc of 8pc imported, and 92pc are produced within EU itself. Do you say it's much?

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