GMOs in Germany

[Tiberius]

But it's a safer bet that most foods found in nature (and that we have been eating for hundreads or thousands of years) are probably fine. Especially those that have already been established to be healthy. I can understand someone wanting to stay away from artificial foods to be on the safe side, just in case.

This can go both ways though. Using a non-food related example, for an estimated 2,000 years we thought that "bleeding" a person could remove disease.

The problem with the whole "natural foods" culture is it can often lead to dangers precisely because the artificial methods we use to treat food have made them safe to eat when they would otherwise not be. For example, pasteurization of cow milk effectively kills deadly bacteria (and it's literally just heating milk to high temperatures and rapidly cooling it again) and makes it safe for human consumption, but there are still people who drink raw milk because for some reason they think the fact that it hasn't been treated makes it "better" for you in some way.

[Alex K]

Erm, most emphatically. You see, the most vocal people here are really led by emotions - they are anti-science because they are motivated by an irrational desire to want things to be "natural" above all else, and would rather eat some dubious supplement if it is marketed as natural than some benign well-understood substance that was created artificially.

The only organic stuff I buy is meats/animal products bc I feel like the animals are treated more humanely that way. I generally never really cared about anything else being organic and never minded gmo's and such.

But recently (bc of what happened to my kid) I've been a bit paranoid about anything that could potentially cause some sort of spontaneous genetic mutation in the next baby. I haven't made the leap to going "all natural", but I've been more mindful about that type of thing recently.

There are just so many things we still don't know. For example I'm sure when smoking first became popular, they had no idea it was harmful to the smoker, much less harmful to an unborn baby.

That's precisely our attitude as well, we buy organic whenever we feel that the animals involved in the production likely have better living conditions.

As far as genetic mutations is concerned, is there any evidence at all that non-organic or GMO food is more likely to cause them? I could even imagine that it is the other qay around.

[Catholic_Lady]

The only organic stuff I buy is meats/animal products bc I feel like the animals are treated more humanely that way. I generally never really cared about anything else being organic and never minded gmo's and such.

But recently (bc of what happened to my kid) I've been a bit paranoid about anything that could potentially cause some sort of spontaneous genetic mutation in the next baby. I haven't made the leap to going "all natural", but I've been more mindful about that type of thing recently.

There are just so many things we still don't know. For example I'm sure when smoking first became popular, they had no idea it was harmful to the smoker, much less harmful to an unborn baby.

That's precisely our attitude as well, we buy organic whenever we feel that the animals involved in the production likely have better living conditions.

As far as genetic mutations is concerned, is there any evidence at all that non-organic or GMO food is more likely to cause them? I could even imagine that it is the other qay around.

Yeah, its a good thing to do I think.

I mean, I've seen some stuff out there claiming that GMO's and preservatives and insecticides may cause birth defects. Just random stuff on google. I don't think it's anything that has been solidly proven though, just speculation and some testing I think. But as I said, just because we haven't yet discovered that these things are really harmful, doesn't mean they aren't. Normally I wouldn't give it a second thought, but I'm just in a bit of a paranoid/better-safe-than-sorry stage right now.

---

But it's a safer bet that most foods found in nature (and that we have been eating for hundreads or thousands of years) are probably fine. Especially those that have already been established to be healthy. I can understand someone wanting to stay away from artificial foods to be on the safe side, just in case.

This can go both ways though. Using a non-food related example, for an estimated 2,000 years we thought that "bleeding" a person could remove disease.

The problem with the whole "natural foods" culture is it can often lead to dangers precisely because the artificial methods we use to treat food have made them safe to eat when they would otherwise not be. For example, pasteurization of cow milk effectively kills deadly bacteria (and it's literally just heating milk to high temperatures and rapidly cooling it again) and makes it safe for human consumption, but there are still people who drink raw milk because for some reason they think the fact that it hasn't been treated makes it "better" for you in some way.

Well, the whole thing with being scared of milk just because it's been heated and then cooled is a bit extreme. I don't see how that's different from cooking meats and vegetables.

[The Grand Nudger]

GMOs get a bap rap because they combine three things people the world over find cause to roundly reject and demonize.  Science, legal positioning, and checkered multinational corporations. None of those thing beings the crops themselves...you might notice...because there's simply nothing objectionable about them whatsoever.

We cannot and will not survive another century on the sorts of hybridization that we've employed up to the present.  Corn, for example, had a static yield...for as long as we kept data, between 20 and 30 bu/acre until the 30's.  Since then, we've increased the yield until it peaked a few years back, at 160some odd bu/acre (think about that for a minute....and remember that biology has limits).  The last portion of that climb was directly attributable to gmos.  Corn has been slipping since 2010, due to changing weather patterns and creeping climate zones.  

It's not getting easier to grow, it's getting harder...and that's -with- gmo corn as leverage.  We already fail to feed ourselves, and our aversion to more productive and profitable methods and crops only exacerbates this problem...which is bordering on sinister...since the same fearmongering shit people use to block gmo introductions directly deprives someone, somewhere, of life sustaining nourishment..... with most of those so derived, being children.  Fully one sixth of humanity does not have enough food, 24k die -every day- as a result of malnourishment. Fun fact, our food problem is the leading cause of human death globally. Most people instinctly believe it would be war or disease or somesuch. Nope. Just hungry. "Third world problem" though..yeah? Nope again. The hungry masses are our neighbors 1/8th of americans. With all of our wealth..and the fact that we're a global breadbasket, that's only marginally above the global stats.

IMO, right now, there is no other, more pressing concern.....no more important job than food production. We need to stop shoving the smart ones off the farm...and people who cannot help but obstruct these necessary improvements should try being hungry for a day or two in their pampered little lives.

[brewer]

Can we feed the people emo's?

[The Grand Nudger]

As an addendum to the above, to demonstrate the irony I see in our century long habit of sending smart people off the farm.....imagine if we'd done the same with civil engineering....and today found ourselves bitching about the traffic?