The Pros and Cons of Genetically Engineered Food

I support genetically altered foods, now I can go and buy oranges which are ALWAYS so sweet, who needs an F-ing candy bar!?

I just don't support Genetically Engineered Genetic Engineers, thats when things really go wrong.

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Silence kmguru! Take your "argument" to the artificial intelligence section of sciforums! Besides, you're making me hungry for genetically altered fruits!

To be honest, I wouldn't like a genetically altered hair color changing woman. A man would have to be more shallow than the Sahara Desert! It wouldn't be fun.

 

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The only reason oranges are not always sweet is because
1) they probably traveled a few thousand miles
2) they were probably genetically engineered the old fashioned way to LOOK good so you buy them. The actual experience in life is less and less important. But how life looks is ever more important.

Get with the program.

 

All genetic engineering is not created equal.

The kind that simply speeds up plant or animal breeding, producing crosses in one generation that would take many years of ordinary breeding and backcrossing etc, seems beneficial and to be encouraged.

The ones that introduce alien DNA from different species, even different orders of being, perhaps one day even artificial, are time bombs.

Most of the profitable stuff is in that second category. We have all over the planet engineered soybeans, for example, with the chemical means of handling certain herbicides. We have corn that expresses certain pesticides in all parts of the plant. We may wake up in a few years and find a weed grass that no bug can eat and herbicide can't kill, while doctors are treating a wave of serious reproductive organ abnormalities in the second generation of women who ate corn syrup from the engineered plants.

Or not. Who knows ? For sure, the corporations making these things do not care, and must be carefully watched.

The only certainty in their use is that something unexpected will happen. The systems being manipulated are so complex, on so many different levels of time and space, that prediction is impossible.

Biological systems exponentially amplify changes. And such amplifications often cannot be reversed.

GMO corn may or may not be implicated in colony collapse disorder among honeybees, for example. If it turns out that it is, it's probably too late - and the corn certainly wasn't worth it.

 

I thought of that when I read about the Monarch butterflies.

 

Most people do not understand NBT. Best not to be alarmists and do some research. We have come along way since Twinkies.

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v21/n10/full/nbt1003-1152.html

 

Best not to be reckless until after the research is done, either.

If a bunch of serious insect pests develop immunity to BT due to its ubiquity in their environment in GM plants, so the organic veggie growers can't use it and suffer great losses as has been predicted, how about holding the purveyors of that particular genetic modification liable for damages to the organic food consumer as well as the organic farmer ?

 

I already eat some GM food probably without knowing it while eating some man made food (biscuits...)

But I can recognize by taste a real apple (one from the wild aplle tree near my house) and a apple bought in the supermarket.

The modern man is interested in the image, not in the tatse, we are becoming more and more visual (and sound). we loose our otehr sense and we are able to eat now junk food that we were not able to eat before.

personnaly I think I have still thsi capacity to be digusted with some junk food, or at least feeling like tasteless food, that I only enjoy by my stomach. and even often later I feel like I did not finally eat anything.

GM will not change the taste for the good, sugar is not taste, if yoiu have the luck to have near your home some organic or even better wild fruit, you will know what I am talking.

GM is made for the image and the money. do not be fool, please.

some have think about the future with the Svalbard Global Seed Vault but when you look at who, you will probably find it funny:
http://www.croptrust.org/documents/web/Funding%20Status%2024-04-08.pdf


Monsanto is also participatinh ironically according to http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7529


And you know, biology teach us that we developed our taste and smell in order that it matches the qualities of the fruit so smelled.

What about visual?
similarly, even if the apple sold in the market are beautiful, it was not our way to detect a good fruit in the past, simply because often there was other animals such as insect that was eating teh fruit, distorting the fruit visually.
when we eat we use our smell and our taste to detect good food.

GM is maybe the future, but that won't be good for our body. of course we will probably survive but I think, we will always look back at our past as a life healtier. Look at coach potatoes, nobody want to looks like them

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ronan,

GM is not going to change the taste unless intended to, I seriously doubt that in a blind taste test you could tell the diffrence, Besides have you never had NATURAL Fruits? Natural berries are too small for humans (meant for bird) natural corn is practically a sliver of a fruit, and natural almonds: I recommend you eat a handful of those if you can get passed the extremely bitter taste you should die quickly from the natural cyanide... oh wait it natural cyanide so it must be good for you and wonderful tasting right?

 

I agree that many fruits in nature completely escaped from human, they are dangerous.
But please note that everything is natural, everything evolves cooperatively, we naturally select what is good for us.
We are part of nature and our fruit selection and GM fabrication are all natural.

the point is that now, we are selecting fruits by the visual because we pick up them in the supermarket not in nature
at some point in history after living with fruits and vegetable we got some good fruit, now fruits are degrading and the taste is changing. Please try out some old apple , compare them to this big tasteless apples.

On the blind test, of course I would be positive, com on, did you never make the difference between two races of apple?


So taste and smell was for a long a good indicator of healthy food, it is still today. with GM we can hope that the visual aspect will match healthy food but we are not here yet. It will takes time and money. Why doing that while we can already have good aples that have been selected by humanity for so long time.
productivity?
I want to smile here because finaly productivity is the reverse of healthy:
energy is constant, you can only transform it, a fundamental law.
so productivity means quantity but less quality
moreover this quantity generate a waste.

 

So, along this line of thinking, would systematic rape as carried out in the Balkans wars be natural.

 

Once we skipped around sex, at least on the level of sex cells, we cut around a natural restraining process in nature. We do not have the ability to predict what these new organisms will do out in the world or even in our digestive tracks (over time especially). We have not handled very well the introduction of one species to new ecosystems. Ecosytems have gotten used to the variety of species within it and tends to adjust slowly to the changes in natural selection and very rare changes via mutation. Now we have developed methods to create, essentially, mutations at a very, very rapid rate. it is a crap shoot. If you are a scientist adn want to play russian roulette in your little sealed bubble fine. But these guys are playing RR with all of us.

 

in this line of though, everything that happens is natural.

of course there are other definition of natural but they all imply morality. And I am capable of only judging my own acts. I try to do my best with myself, That's it.

Of course, like everybody I have my political and moral view that I ll put forward. But the best to attack this scientific people regarding the GMO is to fight on their logic.

I am against GMO also for moral reason but moral reason are never powerful because they stay personal. Sometime I still use them if they seems to be universal, like rapes

 

I agree

 

I have a old organic apple tree, the fruits are small and sour! You think people did not select fruits for taste as well as appearance? Energy is constant but not efficiency of conversion, the average efficiency of land plant photosynthesis is only .5% if we could increase that to 1% we could produce twice as much food without sacrificing quality, waste can be converted to fuel. Already work is being done to insert more efficient photosynthesis pathways in land plants and to engineer crops like corn to be self degrading (with inserted cellulase genes that activated after the plant dies) so that the corn stock can be converted to fuel while the corn kernels are still used for food.

 

You do not have a good one, bad luck

In many place I tested apple that have of course as I said be selectioned by humans but that have been grown organicaly, and that have so much taste that I have never found in any other place.

appearance was a new thing for fruit, at least the perfect shape and size of the current fruit

appearance played a role for not chosing the fruit with disease but the smell and the taste was better indicator in the past.

no conversion is always full, the heat, the nutrient in the earth...

what you call waste is not waste, it goe sin the atmosphere making us able to have oxygen, also the plant do not use all earth nutrient in order to keep for othe rgeneration.

if you want to add nutrient you have to take from somewhere else anyway... that is the law of nature man

 

I have a gut feeling that it is wrong to do this also. This is not the only reason I am against it, but it is part of it. One problem is that the industries that are carrying this out are managing to frame the debate as Prove it will be a problem. Which, of course, is very hard to do. On the other hand, the risks are enormous and the bruden of proof should be in their hands.

 

Forgive my ignorance but how are apples grow both organically and non-organically and what does that have to do with gene being inserted into them, can a GM apple tree not be grown organically"?

So?

What and organic plants to extract nutrients, does organic farming not use fertilizers like manure to return that nutrient value. We could use perennial engineered to produce foods like seasonals and these plants would need full orders of a magnitude less fertilizers. Plants will always give off oxygen that is the result of the process, a plant at 1% photosynthetic efficiency verse .5% will produce twice as much oxygen (and absorp twice as much CO2) per unit of time! But as is conventional agriculture both organic or non-organic is grossly wasteful of energy, the left over stocks of the plants retain more energy then the fruiting bodies, we just plow them over, burn them on the field or put them in landfills, we could convert them into fuel and mineral fertilizer.

 

All depends on your definition on organic

smell + taste were thus matching quality (quality for the body health) while visual appearance was a secondary indicator.
smell and taste was the good clue for the quality, humans lived with that. Both plants and humans cooperatively evolved to this state where smell+taste = quality.

now, visual are taking the most importance, companies focus on the outer appearance, not at all on smell and taste.
but the quality does not follow. it will take a lot of time and energy to make it follow.

why doing that by GM while we have already all the good fruit in nature. That true that we did a lot of dammage but they are still some seed bank that kept the old good fruit.

first there are never waste in nature, please remember this law: conversation of energy.
second if the plants are not what you call efficient it is simply because they live in an environment where they have to take not too much, they live in a balanced ecosystem. They have survived until now and gave us good food

please be confident with what nature as given us after so long time living with it.