What's your opinion of GMO food sources?

[samsonlonghair]

Much like, "GMO," the word, "chemical," often gets misused to sound like something scary on the fringe. Literally everything is made of chemicals (with the possible exception of purified elements such as noble gasses).

Certain pesticides have been proven to be dangerous to us or to the environment. On the other hand, losing an entire season's harvest to boll weevils and aphids isn't exactly good for our health either. As in so many other things, the answer is to find a moderate balance.

[marurun]

You know, this issue is actually pretty important to me. I'm a liberal, and I'm for protecting the environment. But I'm also for feeding people good, healthy food, and many of the objections to GMO are the same objections to vaccinations: paranoid non-science/anti-science. The GMO and VAX issues are two anti-science bugaboos that plague the left, and it frustrates me, being someone who's also on the left. There are those who point to the political right and claim Republicans are anti-science, and on some issues the party is, but there's a bit of throwing stones in glass houses going on until the left's own anti-science nuts are put to bed.

[samsonlonghair]

I'm with you there, Maru.

[ElkinFencer10]

Much like, "GMO," the word, "chemical," often gets misused to sound like something scary on the fringe. Literally everything is made of chemicals (with the possible exception of purified elements such as noble gasses).

Absolutely right. That's why I made sure to specify chemical pesticides.

I'm also with Maru 100%.

[marurun]

I'm also with Maru 100%.

This is Maru, star of the upcoming cat-in-box fighter Maru 100%.

[Forlorn Drifter]

I voted. But considering where I come from on this kind of stuff I hopefully don't need to expound much.

[Erik_Twice]

There is a branch of the anti-GMO people who got there by getting pissed at the admittedly shitty business practices of Monsanto.

I read about the subject and it seems most of the claims made against Monsanto, like the "suing farmers when their plants pollinize other farms" simply have little basis.

They do not seem worse than the average agricultural company. Which is not high praise, but I think it puts things on perspective.


As far as GMO goes, I share the views shared in this thread, particularly the views that it is no different than husbrandry or artificial selection. Bananas are a good example.

[Tanooki]

GMO is a very blanket statement. Before they were using labs to genetically manipulate crops people for hundreds, thousands of years would take certain traits from a pair of plants and attempt to just breed that stuff as well for the best color, flavor, texture, longevity, size, etc. Hell go back far enough carrots didn't even start out orange and bananas are supposed to have seeds.

It makes me laugh when you see people whine how GMO is the death of us all and then they go right on and eat a long established style of GMO food. The stuff is safe and it would shock me if something really did end up screwed up, miraculously missed in a hell of a lot of testing, then came out and people started to drop from some illness or whatever.

GMO makes for ideal food, and finds ways to improve it further. GMO rice among others help to cheaply in large numbers feed poorer nations on the whole helping curb starvation.