The Veggie Thread...for news items regarding ALL aspects of food production.

[KichigaiNeko]

WTF is happening to you guys?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/15...64951.html

A small organic farm in Arlington, Texas, was the target of a massive police action last week that included aerial surveillance, a SWAT raid and a 10-hour search.

Members of the local police raiding party had a search warrant for marijuana plants, which they failed to find at the Garden of Eden farm. But farm owners and residents who live on the property told a Dallas-Ft. Worth NBC station that the real reason for the law enforcement exercise appears to have been code enforcement. The police seized "17 blackberry bushes, 15 okra plants, 14 tomatillo plants ... native grasses and sunflowers," after holding residents inside at gunpoint for at least a half-hour, property owner Shellie Smith said in a statement. The raid lasted about 10 hours, she said.

[NoraBrimstone]

Wtf?

.

[Captain Colostomy]

Texas SWAT team: 1
Horticulturalists: 0

The police chief was probably just picking up plants so his $1.40hr illegal Mexican landscaper could earn his keep.

[KichigaiNeko]

Wallaby Stew. Spoken of in hushed and reverent tones

[KichigaiNeko]

In the shadow of a boisterous debate about the safety of growing crops that have been genetically modified, otherwise known as GMOs, the potential of good old-fashioned crossbreeding has been making quite a stir in the agricultural community. Read more: ow.ly/2zvYWk

[KichigaiNeko]

Scientific American comes out in favor of GMOs, and I agree
By Ashutosh Jogalekar | September 6, 2013 |

In the September 6 issue of Scientific American, the magazine’s editors pen a piece explicitly supporting GMOs and opposing GMO labeling. I applaud the editors for taking an official position on a topic that still sparks intense debate. Both the wording and content of the editorial reflect an adherence to what is called “good scientific practice”; trusting the scientific evidence as far as it takes us, leaving room for uncertainty and making a judgement call based on imperfect but still sound evidence.

The editors start by reminding us that we have been consuming genetically modified foods for 20 years without much trouble, a point worth belaboring only because it keeps getting conveniently ignored in many debates on the topic.

Full article here


I am yet to fully read this and follow the links to verify; but they do seem to have a point

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Some of the comments

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9. Kevbonham
11:36 am 09/7/2013
“From a chemical standpoint I have said before that I would rather trust foreign bits of DNA circulating around in my blood than things like dioxin and chlorofluorocarbons which can wreak demonstrated havoc”

The reality is that those foreign bits of DNA won’t even make it as far as your bloodstream. Nucleic acids are efficiently digested and incorporated as individual nucleotides.

@ Drinker: The obesity epidemic also tracks nicely with internet use and renewable energy. Just because GMOs are food and obesity involves what we eat, that doesn’t mean they’re connected.

In fact, obesity started its upward trend before GMOs were introduced onto the market. A lot of factors contribute to obesity, and there are a lot of policies that exacerbate the problem, but there’s no evidence, nor indeed a theoretical framework that might suggest a possible link between GMO and obesity.

Link to this
10. ikewinski
1:20 pm 09/7/2013
“In spite of this extensive consumption – surely constituting a global laboratory involving billions of daily, repeated, controlled experiments – there is no evidence of distinct harm from GMOs.”

I have to take exception with the adjective “controlled”. In fact, this experiment seems to be exactly the opposite of “controlled”. We don’t know who is eating GMO, how much they are eating of it, when they are eating it, what else they are eating with it, nor do we have a proper control group that is not eating GMO foods.

I understand why no such controlled human trials are happening, and I’m fine with using non-human animals in properly controlled feeding trials.

Link to this
11. curiouswavefunction
2:16 pm 09/7/2013
#9, #10: Good points. The fact that phosphodiester bonds get largely chewed up in the digestive system weakens the argument against direct GMO toxicity even further.

Link to this
12. dslovejoy
2:22 pm 09/7/2013
First, how much money has Monsanto paid to Scientific America?
Second, there is a huge difference between selective breeding and direct genetic manipulation.
Third, 20 years of no ill effects? Really? Take a look at the general health and obesity rates of children 20 years ago and today. Food allergies, asthma, high blood pressure, etc. I will bet you find differences that can be directly or indirectly related to GMO’s.
Many countries have banned GMO’s, and many more have banned American made food products for potential GMO’s and other questionable ingredients.
It is irresponsible for this magazine to endorse GMO’s, and I feel you have lost credibility as a source of information as a result.

Link to this
13. Crocodile Chuck
6:51 pm 09/7/2013
The original justification for GMO was that ‘missing’ nutrients could be incorporated into food, reducing the extent of malnutrition.

What actually happened: the genes inserted into grains were to increase resistance to herbicide exposure.

Of course, what we are now seeing is resistance to these herbicides (which just happen to be sold by the same companies marketing the GMO strains themselves) as they are used in higher and higher concentrations.

The ‘advantages’ of GMO have flowed overwhelmingly to the producers, who have changed the laws, from making it illegal to even make explicit the presence of GMO grain in food labels for consumers, to prosecuting farmers who try to reserve seed from one crop for the next one.

This post is sloppy and replete with straw men, e.g., people don’t eat cars, and ‘foreign bits of DNA’ don’t circulate in your blood (hat tip Kevbonham above). This is so far beneath the usual standards of this blog as to be shocking.

Finally, per dslovejoy’s comment, how much IS Monsanto paying Scientific American for this blanket endorsement?

We look forward to the answer to this obvious query in an update.

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Still on the topic of GMO

Tryptophan contamination[edit source | editbeta]
In the late 1980s Showa Denko decided to change the method it used to produce tryptophan, from fermentation to the genetic engineering of bacteria. Bacteria were engineered to express certain enzymes at much higher levels than normal, and to express other enzymes not normally present in the original bacteria. In 1989 an outbreak of Eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome causing the death of 37 people and permanently disabling 1500 more was attributed to the use of Tryptophan. Some epidemiological studies[1][2][3] traced the outbreak to L-tryptophan supplied by Showa Denko.[4] It was further hypothesized that one or more trace impurities produced during the manufacture of tryptophan may have been responsible for the EMS outbreak.[5][6] The fact that the Showa Denko facility used genetically engineered bacteria to produce L-tryptophan gave rise to speculation that genetic engineering was responsible for such impurities.[7] However, the methodology used in the initial epidemiological studies has been criticized.[8][9] An alternative explanation for the 1989 EMS outbreak is that large doses of tryptophan produce metabolites which inhibit the normal degradation of histamine and excess histamine in turn has been proposed to cause EMS.[10] Once the link between EMS and Showa Denkos tryptophan had been established, chemical analyses of the tryptophan was performed by researchers at the Mayo Clinic, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Japanese National Institute of Hygienic Sciences to determine if any contaminants were associated with EMS.[11] Showa Denko reportedly destroyed the GM bacterial stocks after the EMS cases began to emerge.[12]
References

Wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showa_Denko

Tryptophan debacle
Google link https://www.google.com.au/search?q=Trypt...e&ie=UTF-8

[Violet]

I knew this day would come!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbw4nsNpqzA

[KichigaiNeko]

[bladevalant546]

I think the main hang up with the GMO debate is skewed perception of what GMOs are. It has become "on purpose" over simplified in order to distract from obvious detrimental GMOs. Common and often used as anti-GMO debunking material are the GMOs concerning disease resistance modifications and genetic modifications to make plants grow better in various environments. These are very positive GMOs that also include nutritional enhanced food also. However, these are often used to distract from the obvious GMOs that are harmful, such as modified seeds with pesticides or herbicides with in them. Those are been proven to have detrimental environmental affects, and one derivative of them been shown to help cause Hive Abandonment Syndrome in bees (with other factors coming to play.). To examine the GMO ethnicity we need more independent scientific studies without Monsanto backed studies or activist backed ones. Sadly those are hard to find.

[KichigaiNeko]

http://grist.org/news/abandoned-russian-...very-year/

Abandoned Russian farmland soaks up 50 million tons of carbon every year


When the USSR collapsed, the communal farming systems that helped feed the union’s citizens collapsed with it. Farmers abandoned 1 million acres of farmland and headed into the cities in search of work.

New research by European scientists has revealed the staggering climate benefits of that sweeping change in land use. According to the study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, wild vegetation growing on former USSR farming lands has sucked up approximately 50 million tons of carbon every year since 1990.

New Scientist reports that’s equivalent to 10 percent of Russia’s yearly fossil fuel carbon emissions:

“Everything like this makes a difference,” says Jonathan Sanderman, a soil chemist at CSIRO Land and Water in Australia. “Ten per cent is quite a bit considering most nations are only committed to 5 per cent reduction targets. So by doing absolutely nothing — by having depressed their economy — they’ve achieved quite a bit.”


He says the abandoned farmland is probably the largest human-made carbon sink, but notes it came at the cost of enormous social and economic hardship.

Modelling the effect into the future, [study co-author Irina] Kurganova estimates that, since the land has remained uncultivated, another 261 million tonnes will be sequestered over the next 30 years. At this point, the landscape will reach equilibrium, with the same amount of carbon escaping into the atmosphere as is being taken up.

The finding is a stark reminder of how Earth does a bang-up job of soaking up carbon if we leave more of it undeveloped and un-farmed.

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I think I have posted the news article elsewhere but here is the ranting of my favourite rational Irreverent duck

The Greens are really starting to give me the shits. Their latest press release waffles on about the definition of "free-range" and their support of a model that limits density to 1500 birds per hectare, in place of the current 20,000 maximum. Two things....

1) where will people get money for eggs in your utopian world where population is permitted to grow unchecked, once your pie-in-the-sky opposition to economies of scale drives the price up to $40 per dozen, and where will we get the additional land required to implement the low-density model....nick it from dairy farmers maybe....clear some national parks perhaps?

2) If free range and organic are so goddamn important, how can you justify the hypocrisy inherent in your opposition to hunting? It is the ultimate in organic, free-range harvest, and the vast majority of hunters will use a far greater percentage of the prey than anyone who hunts in a supermarket. Hell, I once shot a deer less than a minute after it'd had a shag. Free and deliriously happy one moment, dead the next...only the deer didn't get to appreciate the dead bit....cause it was dead! Hope I go that way!

Piss on about animal welfare as much as you like. Until you back it up with population control policy, and figure out how to quadruple people's incomes without raising the cost of living so that economies of scale need no longer be a consideration, you're just a bunch of emoting, self-indulgent time-wasters....as the Australian public is beginning to appreciate.

I just can't add much more.