While both of you can hate on the "Organic" movement, I would like to point out these criticisms of such:
A) We do not have a model of the human body. We do not have one of the brain. Hell, we don't have a model of the thyroid gland (though I know a professor working on such).
B) As the above stands, our knowledge of bioaccumulation and the effects of many toxins in humans is built out of animal models and first hand experience. Unfortunately, the animal models are quite limited in certain aspects (that's known) and first hand experience comes out of something catastrophic.
C) This makes the prospect of adding previously unknown chemicals, toxins into the food supply rather iffy, knowing that only the real 'obvious' issues will rise up, with the non-critical (but possibly long term damaging) ones usually slipping through the next -- that is, until someone publishes a paper on it (hooray science!).
Of course, there is the concern over how Monsanto does it's genetic engineering and their patent practices:
A) Embedding terminator genes without changing the physical or chemical markers inside client plants is madness -- it allows for cross contamination and pollination without controls, adding in an uncontrollable aspect of GMO crops.
B) Monsanto has a history of suing farmers who have crops cross pollinated by Monsanto's crops (and have the legal power to force it through). This paints a history of litigation over responsible engineering.
You may deride the "sky-is-falling" attitude of the ridiculous folk, but there are real concerns about arbitrarily deploying changes to our food supply for the face-value sake of "progress" and the deeper-value sake of "profit", especially from entities whose legal muscle is substantially larger than their engineering brains.
This is from a systems-level approach of error propagation factored in with history of Monsanto.
A) We do not have a model of the human body. We do not have one of the brain. Hell, we don't have a model of the thyroid gland (though I know a professor working on such).
B) As the above stands, our knowledge of bioaccumulation and the effects of many toxins in humans is built out of animal models and first hand experience. Unfortunately, the animal models are quite limited in certain aspects (that's known) and first hand experience comes out of something catastrophic.
C) This makes the prospect of adding previously unknown chemicals, toxins into the food supply rather iffy, knowing that only the real 'obvious' issues will rise up, with the non-critical (but possibly long term damaging) ones usually slipping through the next -- that is, until someone publishes a paper on it (hooray science!).
Of course, there is the concern over how Monsanto does it's genetic engineering and their patent practices:
A) Embedding terminator genes without changing the physical or chemical markers inside client plants is madness -- it allows for cross contamination and pollination without controls, adding in an uncontrollable aspect of GMO crops.
B) Monsanto has a history of suing farmers who have crops cross pollinated by Monsanto's crops (and have the legal power to force it through). This paints a history of litigation over responsible engineering.
You may deride the "sky-is-falling" attitude of the ridiculous folk, but there are real concerns about arbitrarily deploying changes to our food supply for the face-value sake of "progress" and the deeper-value sake of "profit", especially from entities whose legal muscle is substantially larger than their engineering brains.
This is from a systems-level approach of error propagation factored in with history of Monsanto.
Slave to the Patriarchy no more
