"Everything the anti-GMO movement has been doing in recent years has been a coordinated effort to increase the availability of crops to feed organic livestock. Some of the biggest names in the organic movement came together four years ago to create a plan. This plan is being carried out as a direct attack on conventional farmers and affordable food. "
So may I tell you a story. It might resonate with people who might otherwise not invest in the GMO discussion.
I was once super big into anti-GMO. Way anti Monsanto. I have lost my patience for it and find myself apathetic or purposefully noninvested in it now.
And the reason for that is that anti-GMO has become a wasteland of pseudoscience and paranoia that can not control its own activist body, and can not manage a message that doesn't just pile on every bullshit claim by every paranoid chemically illiterate chicken little that wants to throw on claims about anything and everything that GMO's do to you according to some stupid self-published article somewhere. Monsanto has become a magical company capable of manifesting the greatest possible fears of paranoid people everywhere. Why fear what a bad company actually does when you can invent more and more ridiculous fictional claims about it. Why be afraid of just actually dangerous chemicals when everything from soy to HCFS to fluoride becomes the absolute worst possible pure cancer death in the world.
I gave up. The anti-GMO movement is the #1 reason why GMO experimentation will continue as relentlessly as it is, because claims against GMO can't stay consistent or credible.
Oh, and also people get really tired of feeling like they have to buy eight dollar organic GMO free pesticide free locovore free range cageless tomatoes to feel that they are fighting BIG FOOD and BIG CROPS and BIG GMO and BIG SCIENCE.
That is the end of my rant, thank you.
Posted by GaalDornick (Member # 8880) on :
Where can I buy free range cageless tomatoes?
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Whole Foods, I think.
Posted by Parkour (Member # 12078) on :
If you aren't timesharing action locovorism to grow them in an intentional community inbetween meetings to confess agriprivilege then you need to educate yourself, GMOist scum.
Posted by GaalDornick (Member # 8880) on :
On a serious note, what are some of the credible claims and criticisms against GMOs and Monsanto? All I've ever been exposed to are the conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.
Posted by steven (Member # 8099) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Whole Foods, I think.
Only I sell truly free-range cageless.
Posted by scifibum (Member # 7625) on :
quote:Originally posted by GaalDornick: On a serious note, what are some of the credible claims and criticisms against GMOs and Monsanto? All I've ever been exposed to are the conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.
They are also responsible for Roundup-resistant weeds which may lead to food production problems or environmental effects like increased topsoil erosion from using deeper and more frequent plowing to control weeds.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
Monsanto's big issues is that
1. It is a big ol' bully of a corporation even by the typical woefully amoral standards of large corporations
2. Everything that Monsanto is doing it is doing under a strictly for-profit incentive and as directed by a group of people who are incentivized primarily to maximize their profit share of the company before retirement, and the way in which it is working to adjust agriculture and the very genetic structure of plants is something which is best not left to that structure or those incentives, but they do an excellent enough job preventing common-sense regulations and policy oversights or anything else that evil ol' gobbarment might do to horn in on their potential supplier controls.
Has this turned GMO crops into horrible organ-lacerating frankenfood nightmares, as deadly as the fabled HFCS and Aspartame? is Big Food ruining our health and our livelihood with evil non-organic crops? No, that's all bull and no comprehensive studies have shown negative health effects to GMO crops and if anything they are helping improve nutrition by lowering the price of food and keeping production more sustainable.
Posted by Stephan (Member # 7549) on :
Just keep in mind that farmers have been purchasing new seed each year long before the first GMO was planted. Replanting traditional hybrid seed decreases the desired traits.
quote: By the time Monsanto got into the seed business, most farmers in the U.S. and Europe were already relying on seed that they bought every year from older seed companies. This is especially true of corn farmers, who've been growing almost exclusively commercial hybrids for more than half a century. (If you re-plant seeds from hybrids, you get a mixture of inferior varieties.) But even soybean and cotton farmers who don't grow hybrids were moving in that direction.
This shift started with the rise of commercial seed companies, not the advent of genetic engineering. But Monsanto and GMOs certainly accelerated the trend drastically.
The herbicide resistant weed problem is also not the problem the organic movement makes it out to be. According to the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant weeds cases of resistant weeds have actually gone down. http://weedcontrolfreaks.com/2013/05/superweed/
My guess would be because Monsanto encourages the purchasers of their seed to do things like crop rotation to limit it.
Posted by GaalDornick (Member # 8880) on :
Bill Nye presents a reasonable POV on GMOs that I think both sides can get behind: