GMO foods a good thing or bad?

So is corn a grain or not

And as I asked in post #19 is corn a natural feed for cattle?

 

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You wouldn't believe me if I told you - so why bother.

At the very least, you could look up the definition of "grain" on your own. How hard is that?

 

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Because I asked the question and you come up with an excuse why not to answer, I don't care what you think I believe just answer the question

I did look it up, and as I said corn is considered a crop or veg

 

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And I suppose you don't even realize that the word "crop" includes grains? That's pretty sad!

OK, lazy, look at this :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize

 

Fine but this the third time I've asked from post#19

Is corn a natural feed for cattle?

 

Though technically a grain, maize kernels are used in cooking as a starch.

Sugar-rich varieties called sweet corn are usually grown for human consumption, while field corn varieties are used for animal feed and as chemical feedstocks.

From wikipedia

 

Hopefully, you're sharp enough to realize that "natural food" for anything is rather ambiguous.

But in this particular case it's clear: Wild varieties of corn/maze grow many places in the world, primarily Central and South America. Whenever cattle, sheep, goats and other grazing animals find it they will readily eat (and enjoy) it.

And they'd been doing so for LONG before your "needed" antibiotics were ever thought of!

And I'm betting that you still don't believe that grass seed is a grain - ESPECIALLY since you didn't even know CORN was a grain!!!

 

Not really, natural is what they normally feed on

Yet we know that cattle can't break down starch or corn properly

 

Oh, really??? How about some PROOF (of yet another VERY stupid claim)! Seriously - I cannot believe that you are actually as ignorant as you appear.

 

http://solomon1eng103.blogspot.ca/2010/06/corn-fed-cows-are-killers-killing-us.html

 

This is irrelevant to the thread, but in passing: there are no wild varieties of maize. It's closest relative and presumed original breed stock, teosinte, is found in Mexico and nearby, where there were until the mid 1500s no domesticated grazing animals.

Beef cattle fed kernel corn (rather than field forage or silage) are found primarily in feedlots in the US, where they are routinely dosed with antibiotics and often growth hormones etc as well.

This is imprudent from a human health and diet point of view, but not directly because of GMOs.

 

Phooey! That's just another of your (typical for you!!) scare-mongering sites!

 

Could someone please explain the difference in impact on the consumer of GMO vs old school hybridization? I'm not sure I understand the distinction...

 

On the off chance that you aren't Foxing, against my better judgment:

There is no one difference. It is possible to directly imitate standard hybridization, and other familiar breeding techniques, with GM techniques, and in such a case (I don't know of any, but it is possible) there would be little if any difference to anyone. That is one of the potential great benefits of GM tech - it can speed up and improve standard breeding. Breeding disease resistance in trees, for example - to help with Chestnut blight, or Dutch elm, or Butternut canker, say - could be done in a couple of decades.

But that is not what is being done. What is being done is the insertion of completely alien genetic code into genomes it could not have been bred into and in which we have no experience of its behavior or the behavior of anything similar, using techniques that increase the mobility (even between phyla) and randomize the location, role, etc of the code, accompanied by auxiliary code of a variety of roles (such as antibiotic resistance used as a marker - no kidding, that is not a joke), with the goal of maximizing profit for the creators of this engineered organism (taking advantage of their other or related industrial capabilities, for example).

And what the eventual impacts will be, from all this a generation from now, nobody knows. Some things are obvious: certain benign and long familiar pesticides almost certainly will be ruined by creation of resistance, for example. The corporations involved will acquire greater dominance of everyone's food supply. But whether, say, the sequestration of herbicide in soy products will turn out to have caused a long term poisoning of a large percentage of America's schoolchildren, the way adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline for greater horsepower with lower octane and thus greater corporate profits for Big Oil did, is anyone's guess.

 

As no one here seems to have noted it, I was curious what the community thought about the FDA's declaring genetically modified salmon to be safe for the environment and consumers, bringing it one (perhaps two) steps cloaser to store shelves in the U.S.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/21/us-usa-fish-gmo-idUSBRE8BK16O20121221


It seems to me like the system works. The evidence for the safety of this fish was very strong, and the FDA simply followed the science.

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/21/us-usa-fish-gmo-idUSBRE8BK16O20121221

The problem is , is that the FDA relies on the science given to them by the very companies that do the science

The FDA has no labs in which to test the veracity of the companies claims , which hence is a problem

Who's science is the question

 

it's in between for me. I do think that they should be labeled like most everything else but most of the research I've seen points to there's basically nothing harmful about them, although I can see this spiralling out of control. one thing I don't like is companies owning all of the rights to a type of food.

 

You need not be concerned about that last statement because no one does. Rice, for example, which is the THE widest-grown grain in the world has over 40,000 varieties. And though the numbers aren't as large, it's much the same for other grains as well. I'm aware that's NOT what the scare-mongers like our member "river" want you to believe - but it's the truth. Look it up for yourself and don't trust the cranks at all.

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The FDA has no relevant ecological expertise, and the ecological safety of such an organism cannot be demonstrated on time scale that short anyway. So that part of the reassurance is obviously more or less bogus.

As far as the safety for human consumption, the type of modification involved probably poses little risk there. But that assessment is uncertain - time will tell, if attention is paid.

The economic effects, and other societal consequences, appear to have been left uninvestigated.

Whether the result is an example of a working system depends on what one wants one's system to do.

More than 90% of the US soybean crop, and well over half the world crop, is planted in fewer than 20 cultivars (Maybe a half dozen of them realistically genetically distinct to begin with, then essentially all of them fitted with very similar GM code) from essentially two corporations: Monsanto and Pioneer.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/adoption-of-genetically-engineered-crops-in-the-us.aspx

 

The worst thing about GMOs IMO isn't their lack of safety.... I hope some crop will kill everyone that eats them so they might be banished forever.

The worst thing is how they gradually and irreversibly are changing/going to change foods from what humans and their ancestors have co-evolved with for millions of years.

The idea that this semi-random changing of fundamental parts of genes in a plant won't have any detrimental effect on the organisms co-evolved to consume it is bonkers and shows a complete ignorance of and lack of understanding of evolution.