GMO's: yay or nay?

[soft kitty]

GMOs are great and the people that oppose them are a morons who know nothing about nothing.

People fear what they don't understand. It's just fear and ignorance, that's it.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Norman Borlaug was the greatest hero in human history.

 

[Plaguemine]

The only problem I have with GMO foods is tomatoes that look so good, then you go to eat it and it tastes like water =/

Also of grapes are pumped full of water too and food is bread to look good and huge.

I just don't like motified false advertisement...

 

[Hollywood Hulk Hogan]

For the sake of this discussion, I'd prefer to exclude "selective breeding" as a form of genetic modification. That's an ancient and not particularly contentious mode of crop modification. I would add that those are eligible for "USDA organic" status but so are mutagenic crops which are basically produced by blasting seeds with radiation and keeping whatever mutations happen to work out and I would personally argue that those are genetically modified. But it's all A-OK and totally organic so long as you aren't targeting exactly which genes you intend to modify, right?

Yeah, I don't get that either. Not knowing what the result is going to be sounds a hell of a lot more dangerous than knowing the exact gene you are modifying and what you are modifying it to

 

[Watermelanin]

Yeah, I don't get that either. Not knowing what the result is going to be sounds a hell of a lot more dangerous than knowing the exact gene you are modifying and what you are modifying it to

This is especially important to note because there have been non-GMO, selectively bred, crops that were pulled from market because they produced toxins. One was a breed of celery that caused farmers to develop phytophotodermatitis, and another was a breed of potato that produced a neurotoxin at levels deemed not safe for human consumption.

 

[The best and greatest]

Norman Borlaug was the greatest hero in human history.

He was a subject for one of my speeches in the public speaking course I once took. Fascinating man and criminally unknown among the great scientists of the 20th century.

 

[The best and greatest]

This is especially important to note because there have been non-GMO, selectively bred, crops that were pulled from market because they produced toxins. One was a breed of celery that caused farmers to develop phytophotodermatitis, and another was a breed of potato that produced a neurotoxin at levels deemed not safe for human consumption.

GMO crops are pretty strictly tested and regulated aren't they?

 

[Watermelanin]

GMO crops are pretty strictly tested and regulated aren't they?

Well... yes and no. Here's a pretty good summary:
USDA is in control of agriculture as a whole: labeling, how much of a given pesticide is allowed, what you can feed livestock, etc.
FDA doesn't mandate that you submit a food product for testing, but they can pull your product at any time so biotech companies voluntarily submit their shit for review to avoid paying damages. If they declare the product as "substantially equivalent" (no measurable change in nutrition and no toxins beyond what is found in already marketed varieties of the crop), it's pretty much just "rubber-stamp-approved, gtfo my office." If there is a measurable difference, animal and human trials may be called for.
EPA is in control of pesticides. So if your crop produces its own pesticide or you invent a new pesticide to go alongside a crop made to resist it, the EPA must evaluate that pesticide.

One funny story about this delegation of responsibilities is in what's known as the dicamba debacle.
Basically, FDA approved a crop designed to resist an already banned pesticide (because the pesticide it was made to be paired with is not the FDA's problem). The EPA was still in the process of evaluating a new formulation of said pesticide by the time the crop made it to market (because the crop designed to be paired with the pesticide is not the EPA's problem). So farmers were buying the dicamba resistant soy before the new formulation of dicamba was on the market and then using the illegal formulation with the stuff. This turned into a shitshow of epic proportions where, really, nobody was the good guy. One guy even got shot and killed because of this bullshit.