Post by LewisPost by CDBPost by Peter MoylanPost by Harrison HillPost by LewisAs it should be. Unless you are eating exclusively wild game, all the
food you eat is GM.
Why are you ruling out all the food you *don't* eat?
How is "wild game" different to farm bred meat in your
distinction? What about crops and flowers and bees and honey?
You know as well as I do what "GM" means.
What about wheat, to choose an obvious example? The non-GM version,
commonly known as "grass seed", can't be found in the supermarkets
because nobody likes the taste. It took many generations of selective
breeding to produce the variety that we now use for making bread, among
other uses.
People who would like to avoid GM usually use it to mean "genetically
engineered" (putting cucaracha genes into a tomato to make it
unsquashable, for a ficticious example), not selectively bred to
emphasise something that's already there.
It is not like they are putting frog DNA into soybeans. They are simply
taking a shortcut to selective breeding. Sure, they could send 200 years
breeding a strain of rice that carries some amount of Vitamin C,
improving the health of countless destitute people, or they could
engineer it in a lab and improve people's lives right now. (real
example).
As I understand it, that is the kind of thing that has been done in some
cases. I prefer to eat food mostly from plants that have not been
recently modified for commercial purposes, but my principal objection to
GM is to the creation of things like "Roundup-ready" crops. The
immediate effect is that farmers become the captives of Monsanto (frex);
the result a little later on is that all the weeds in the area become
Roundup-ready. On to the next mutation!
We would be doing the destitute a bigger favour if we made more
contraception available. The farmers of India have been attacked by the
corporate conspiracy for saving seed from their own crops; suicides have
risen dramatically among them, as they are driven to despair by debt.
Canadian farmers have been successfully sued for theft by Monsanto
because wind-pollination has given some of their crops mutated genes
from nearby fields. There are plenty of reasons to oppose GM besides
the ick factor.
Post by LewisI know which one *I* am in favor of.
Post by CDBThe claim has been made by gluten-avoiders, though, that the trouble
started when selective breeding for dwarf wheat resulted in a harmful
rearrangement of the amino-acids in its gliadin.
Uh huh. the whole 'gluten-free' craze is about as scientifically sound
as the invisible pink unicorn. Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is a myth.
The way you put that makes it sound as if you have simply taken a
position announced by other people (science good, caution bad) without
looking into the question for yourself.
I have certainly not looked into the question in any detailed way
either, since I don't have the means or background knowledge to do so.
A year or two ago, though, I did try eliminating gluten from my diet for
a couple of weeks. I had heard an interview with the cardiologist who
started the trend by publishing a book recommending it, for the reason I
indicated above.
He claimed that there were benefits I found attractive (weight loss, a
clearer head, a reduction in cravings for sugar), and avoiding wheat for
a week or two is easy enough; so I tried it.
I found it difficult to tell if my thinking had become clearer, and two
weeks isn't long enough to claim weight-loss, but I found that I had had
a very noticeable drop in my need for sweets, a lifelong problem for me;
so I kept on with it. Since then, I have lost weight slowly but
steadily, at a rate of about a pound per month -- I can't guarantee that
some of that may not come from my thwarted preference for the taste of
wheat bread over that of spelt.
I do not recommend the change to anyone on the basis of my experience,
but I plan to stick with my moderate approach to the diet, because it
seems to have done me good. I do recommend looking into these things
for oneself, at least if there is no obvious danger involved.
Post by LewisPost by CDBI like things that people have been using for a few centuries, because
we're pretty sure we know what they can do to us.
Another fantasy. There's *nothing* we plant that has been around a few
centuries. Hell, "heirloom" tomatoes are the sort of tomatoes that were
common 50-75 years ago. There are new strains of everything every few
years as people breed them and improve them and cross-pollinate them.
Mmm, heirloom tomatoes.