How come when it comes to the environment/global warming, the predominant approach is "we believe in science", but when it comes to organic foods, GMOs, and vaccines the "science is questionable"?
Because the science is usually funded by Monsanto. And they hire paid shills to keyword search the internet and argue nonstop about it, so their deliberate and aggressive propaganda has made me much more suspicious to whatever they are trying to sell, rightly or wrongly. And... it seems like more and more often we're seeing studies that show some of the main components of their products are harmful or not anymore effective than traditional methods.
The problem with this is it's essentially a conspiracy theory.
To be sure, internet shills exist. But it's punting, and intellectually lazy, to simply dismiss arguments as, "This guy is arguing X; clearly he's a paid shill."
And Monsanto overdoes it with their shilling on Reddit to the point where it is so much in your fact that it hurts. I guess they do it in house instead of contracting? They aren't very good at it.
It's not a theory if it is actually happening. Same thing with gun control and a few other topics. I worked for a public affairs company where I saw mining companies do his first hand. This is more and more common.
On the other hand, I've been accused of it three or four times, and, no, nobody's ever paid me for posting things on the internet. So it's also definitely an accusation flung around in cases where it is not justified.
Well, I guess now I've been accused of it four or five times. However, I claim most strenuously and in the strongest terms that zolthrowaway did not pay me to post this. I claim it to be so with downright suspicious strength and vigorousness, in fact. Believe me.
The majority of anti-GMO people I know don't debate the science, they generally want to ban them for two reasons:
1. Overuse of pesticides leads to tolerance which leads to an escalation which is some of what you see in this article.
2. One or two large corporations controling the vast majority of food production for the US. Gains in farming are awesome, but they shouldn't be at the expense of autonomy of the farmers who bring us the food.
I'll add context to #2: according to this source (http://fortune.com/2014/06/26/monsanto-gmo-crops/), about 80% of US corn and 90% of US soybeans are grown with patented seed traits from one single company -- Monsanto.
The science behind GMOs are fine. The situation with GMOs being patentable IP, and the monopolization of the market that has resulted from this, to me is rather worrying.
If a company spends millions upon millions in R&D to come up with something that makes their customers dramatically more productive, I think it's fitting that they should be able to patent it and reap the rewards of their investment. That's how we encourage that kind of innovation - with the potential for massive windfalls. It works.
I do have a bit of wariness in the back of my mind about the long-term ramifications of setting the precedent that companies can own genetic patterns. I don't think anybody knows quite what the knock-on effects of that might be in twenty or thirty years... but I also don't know how we can protect and encourage this kind of innovation without granting those exclusive rights.
Genetic modifications are useful for more than pesticide resistance. We could have better, riper tomatoes in stores if the Flavr Savr hadn't been attacked by alarmists. Instead we get ethylene treated junk.
"The Flavr Savr turned out to disappoint researchers ... as the antisensed PG gene had a positive effect on shelf life, but not on the fruit's firmness, so the tomatoes still had to be harvested like any other unmodified vine-ripe tomatoes. An improved flavor, later achieved through traditional breeding of Flavr Savr and better tasting varieties, would also contribute to selling Flavr Savr at a premium price at the supermarket.
...
The failure of the Flavr Savr has been attributed to Calgene's inexperience in the business of growing and shipping tomatoes."
Sounds like Flavr Savrs were just a failure. I don't see anything about alarmists.
The controversy section is very telling. While not directly quoted in the article, I've seen/heard people argue, "It hasn't been proven safe!" Well, yeah? Of course it hasn't. Nothing is ever proven safe, really. It'd be much easier to demonstrate the benefits if, you know, they actually let trials go forward.
Some trials have been started, but people keep protesting and doing stuff like burning the fields.
> Some trials have been started, but people keep protesting and doing stuff like burning the fields.
That's not the reason why Golden Rice has been a failure[1]:
> While activists did destroy one Golden Rice test plot in a 2013 protest, it is unlikely that this action had any significant impact on the approval of Golden Rice.
> “Destroying test plots is a dubious way to express opposition, but this was only one small plot out of many plots in multiple locations over many years,” he said.
Rather:
> As Stone and Glover note in the article, researchers continue to have problems developing beta carotene-enriched strains that yield as well as non-GMO strains already being grown by farmers.
Using Dicamba or Glyphosphate leads to less herbicide use. Because the soybeans or maize has been modified specifically to tolerate dicamba or glyphosphate and that those herbicides kill pretty much anything that is green, they don't have to use a lot of it.
If we didn't have broad spectrum herbicides, farmers would have to use many narrow spectrum herbicides to kill weeds of different varieties. More herbicide, not less.
You don't think overuse of herbicides ALSO leads to resistance among plants? Dicamba is being pushed because Glyphosate is falling off in effectiveness now that weeds have developed resistance.
>If we didn't have broad spectrum herbicides, farmers would have to use many narrow spectrum herbicides to kill weeds of different varieties. More herbicide, not less.
The reverse is true. Narrow application of herbicides to just the weed plants encroaching upon a field results in far less herbicide application then spraying entire fields as a matter of practice.
Because the science is questionable, in the case of GMOs. There really are highly unknowable dangers inherent in GMOs and generally in non-organic food production. For instance, they MIGHT be inherently dangerous on both a health and economic level because:
1. Inducing rapid genetic change (i.e. making GMOs) could alter the nutritional profile of foods in ways that are difficult to test.
2. Similarly, it could reduce the ability of the plants to fight diseases.
3. Combined with 2., producing crops with less and less biodiversity could very conceivably lead to massive crop death due to disease. This is very much a "black swan" scenario and just because it hasn't happened (much) already, doesn't mean it won't. In fact, you need only to look at bananas to see this in action.
4. The benefits of GMOs often require externalities to realise i.e. fertalisers, pesticides, mechanised agriculture.
5. Largely related to 4., the true (mid to long term) economic benefits of GMOs are hard to quantify. In my opinion, this comes down to the production process fundamentally requiring a bunch of energy and oil-derived products to work. These costs are massively subsidised and are largely hidden and unknown.
There are some articles that address these issues. I've read some of them. All the articles I've read, like many scientific articles (outside the likes of maths/physics/chemistry etc.), were unconvincing because they had insufficient data and failed to account for obvious confounding factors in any way. It is also entirely obvious at this point that scientific articles are frequently produced with data that has been heavily manipulated or even fabricated.
I use the term "scientific" here to refer to the style and place of publication, rather than any abstract principle of quality.
The answer is: they don't care about science in either situation, and to think otherwise is probably to kid yourself.
That said, there's basically no mechanism by which GMOs would be dangerous to human health if the final product does not contain anything unexpected under test.
None of the topics you listed have equivalent conclusive evidence to eachother. For example, the evidence to support the safety of contemporary versions of common vaccines is overwhelming; but when it comes to "organic foods", it depends entirely on the exact specifics of any individual product, from the shape and surface area of the plant, washing practices, specific tendency to absorb or repel specific chemicals (naturally or artificially present) which may not have even been applied to the land for decades (for example, arsenic-based pesticides from old cotton crops leeching into rice crops), the qualities of the soil.
Science isn't a belief, it's a method, and not all conclusions are equally conclusive.
"That said, there's basically no mechanism by which GMOs would be dangerous to human health if the final product does not contain anything unexpected under test."
There's a handful of times where my opinion on something has been flipped by a single argument that fits into a single paragraph or even sentence, and my opinion on GMOs is one of them. Nassim Taleb argues that while any given GMO product may be in fact entirely safe, that as you consider the whole line of GMOs that will be created over the next decades at an accelerating pace, the odds that at least one of them turn out to be catastrophically bad enough to entirely erase the benefits of everything else done with them goes up quite distressingly.
This makes sense of the idea that A: all current GMO foods are actually quite safe but B: it may still be a bad idea in the long run. Given that things will be GMO'd on an increasing curve as it becomes easier and easier, we've seen only a very small fraction of what will ultimately be done with the technology.
Given that humans created a poisonous potato before genetic modification, it should perhaps be considered that our society seems to have already accepted this risk.
Traditional agriculture has also produced a number of things that are non-obviously poisonous that have slowly killed lots of people over time. HFCS, tobacco, etc.
I think the key takeaway is that these aren't new or different risks. You could say the same thing about iPhone apps, pharmaceuticals, or traditionally bred plants: as you consider the whole lines of $ITEMS that will be created over the next decades at an accelerating pace, the odds that at least one of them turn out to be catastrophically bad enough to entirely erase the benefits of everything else done with them goes up quite distressingly.
Thalidomide happened. But it doesn't justify abandoning pharmaceuticals entirely. There just might be some wisdom in that.
I'm not sure it's safe to assume that it's all the same people. I for one believe we need to strongly act on climate change. I also believed that GMOs can be a great blessing. However, I also believe that Monsanto has awful business practices and they are giving GMOs a terrible name.
I'm one of those people you're trying to strawman.
I don't disagree with the science as it regards the safety of GMO crops. I'm sure that I could eat concentrated amounts of whatever protein the added/modified DNA codes for without ever noticing.
I, and many other people, are lightly uneasy about the general trend of over-engineering our food supply. The trend points at fewer and fewer varieties of each species being farmed. That results in monocultures and all the inherent risks, such as susceptibility to pests etc. Both selective breeding as well as gene editing also optimise for only those traits with immediate commercial reward: The one or two varieties of Apples you'd end up will be huge, extremely colourful, and have 18 month shelf life. Already we've seen that the market doesn't usually care about taste, and there's a recent paper showing a widespread loss in nutritional value over the last decades.
In regards to nutrition, it has been shown again and again that there's more to it that the day's science has firmly established. The discovery of the major categories (protein/fat/carbohydrates) was immediately used to optimise diets in, for example, the newly industrialised cities, or the military. The result was a widespread decline in health among these populations, with fun new pathologies such as beriberi or scurvy.
Those mistakes were corrected with the discovery of Vitamins (beriberi: B1 deficiency, scurvy: C deficiency), and, once again, science thought it knew enough to reduce nutrition to its parts, and create healthy foods from scratch. Only they continue to fail, because the are myriads of molecules working in a complex network with gut bacteria etc that all have effects on your health. And the only winning strategy has always been: variety.
Note that none of this is really controversial within nutritional science today. But what scientists say is good for you is not always the same as other scientists' new crops. One is human physiology, the other is crop science.
I'm also hesitant to embrace such technology because it turns an industry traditionally organised around small, family-owned businesses into the purvey of three or four incredibly large multinationals and their patent portfolio. And while I think today's democracies have established a working regulatory regime for these behemoth, there are just to many stories about rather shady conduct by such companies in countries with weak governments and institutions.
I also question the need for further increases in ag yields. Much of the discussion is infused by the fear of exponential population growth that was all the rage in the 80s (Club of Rome etc.), but we're actually seeing a gradual flattening of growth, and aren't too far of from "peak humanity". Hunger is no longer the #1 problem of humanity, and where it still exists, it is caused not by a lack of production, but by organisational deficiencies (see North Korea vs South Korea, or Venezuela today vs Venezuela 1995).
>Already we've seen that the market doesn't usually care about taste, and there's a recent paper showing a widespread loss in nutritional value over the last decades.
Citation showing this has anything to do with GMOs?
Sorry, what I mean is does OP have citations for anything? For being someone who claims to support science, he/she didn't provide any links backing up the big pile of claims.
The vast majority of people I meet who are heavy proponents of organic food and heavy opponents of GMOs don't even go this far. It troubles me how much money is thrown in the trash over this assumption. Interestingly, I also find that these people aren't talking about climate change. However, I suspect that experiences may vary because the GMO/organic people in my life are vegans.
Interestingly, parmesan cheese is traditionally made using rennet from the stomach lining of calves, so it's not vegetarian, but thanks to GMOs, most parmesan cheese in the US is vegetarian-friendly since the rennet can be produced in a lab without killing calves [1]. There are also plenty of startups using genetic engineering to make vegan/vegetarian alternative meats. So while there's certainly a lot of overlap between vegans and anti-GMO people, it seems like it's probably counterproductive to dismiss GMOs entirely if you actually care about animal welfare.
There's no such thing as US parmesan. Parmesan has PDO/DOP status and can only be made by wizened old men who've never travelled further than 12 miles from their picturesque place of birth in italy.
You can make "parmesan style hard cheese" but it's not the same. Grana padano is not parmesan, and that's PDO/DOP too
Correct, we make cheddar and Colby cheese and both need rennet. I can't think of any hard cheese that doesn't need rennet, in fact. Also, the rennet we use is bacterially produced, no calves were killed to make it.
Interestingly, most cheeses that don't use rennet are soft, but some of the hardest of all cheeses are the Mongolian cheeses Bayaslag and aaruul. Both are rock hard, but use acid to coagulate the proteins instead of rennet. They are often consumed after soaking in tea, or are sucked on, not chewed. Their shelf life is apparently over years long.
Just found that earlier today after doing some research inspired by this thread.
