Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Ustwo
Another issue would be emotional. If genetically modified corn makes some people start civil disobedience, what would meat grown in a lab? My gut tells me they would be for it from the animal emotional stand point, but there is always a chance they are being intellectually honest and would oppose this as this is about as Frankenstein as a food product could get.
|
You know, it's interesting, many of the individual's who protest GMO's don't know much about the true History of all our vegatables and fruits, when i took my college botany class, we studied evidence of how early humans would "engineer" their food, let's take corn as a simple example, by crossing the best tasting of corn with the longest season havesting corn, early humans "engineered" virtually all the food we enjoy in these modern times. For many of the GMO foods today, we are merely following this same pattern.
"Fedoroff studies plants, lately using the techniques of genetic engineering. She’s never crossed a fish with a strawberry, and she agrees that many of the first products of biotechnology, like the "ice-minus" bacteria (engineered with a fish gene to protect strawberries from frost) or the "Flavr-Savr Tomato" (which ripens more slowly and so can sweeten on the vine) have been public relations disasters and commercial flops. She did not mention the fact that genetically modified food is already a mainstay of the American diet: According to the New York Times, 70 percent of all processed foods and soft drinks on our supermarket shelves contain ingredients from genetically modified crops...."
http://www.rps.psu.edu/0109/miracle.html
Now, i'm not talking about the kind of GMO foods that large corporations make that are resistent to 'Round Up' and require farmers to buy hundrends of gallons of herbicides and get rich from it . . . i don't believe that kind of GMO food is beneficial to anyone or the envrioment.
" A grobacterium acts by inserting a plasmid — a small ring of DNA — into the plant cell. To engineer a plant, scientists modify this plasmid. First they take out the genes that produce growth hormones and create food for the bacterium. Then they insert the genes they want the plant to express. Genes, for example, to make corn resistant to the herbicide Round-Up or to produce Bt, a popular insecticide."
http://www.rps.psu.edu/0109/miracle.html
In general, i think GMO's have great promise in helping with the world's nutrition as noted:
"Using this or similar techniques, scientists are working on breeding rice rich in vitamin A, bananas that deliver the hepatitus B vaccine, poplar trees that can clean up mercury pollution, sunflowers that make an oil to replace petroleum. As Gregg Easterbrook wrote in a New York Times editorial, The transgenic crops in the news today are just the first manifestations of a fundamental new idea. Much better versions are coming. "
if we use rational thought instead of the emotional response that 'GMO foods are always bad.' We can chage the way we eat to have a more positive impact not only on the enviroment, but our own health!
Quote:
|
In an ideal world this would be cheap to produce and indistinguishable from an animal product and if it was I'd be all for it.
|
agreed!
Sweetpea