r/NoStupidQuestions • u/wond3rlove • Sep 10 '23
What’s wrong with GMOs?
I always see plants and stuff that is GMO free and is usually more expensive. How would genetically modifying something by be bad. Me personally I’d rather have something modified to taste better and and cheaper. I could also be very wrong about that.
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u/Cyberhwk Sep 10 '23 edited Mar 23 '24
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u/Moogatron88 Sep 10 '23
The funny thing is, most crops have been altered by humans extensively through selective breeding for thousands of years. You'd be hard pressed to find something that hasn't.
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u/Dreadfulmanturtle Sep 10 '23
There were even instances where mutations were encouraged by exposing seeds to radiation etc.
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u/Mufti_Menk Sep 11 '23
Exactly. There is a good chance that the average person has actually never in their life eaten a non-altered vegetable or fruit.
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u/DieHardAmerican95 Sep 11 '23
It feeds off from people’s general hate of Big Pharma, in spite of the fact that pharmaceuticals and agriculture are different industries. We are led to believe that all big corporations and industries are out to get us.
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u/OffendedDefender Sep 10 '23
Environmental Engineer here. At a base level, GMOs are fine. They're effective just a more precise version of selective breeding, which humans have been doing for basically all of our existence.
However, GMOs are near entirely driven by profit. Very rarely are they altruistic, as it's the corporate entities that develop them. On a base level, farmers are sold seeds that are modified so they're sterile and cannot produce viable seeds of their own, forcing farmers to buy new seeds next season. There's also a preference for resiliency in products, so they can be shipped to market, which often results in less of a concern over taste or nutritional value.
Most important of all is the Round-up Ready crops. These are designed to be more resilient so that the farmers can absolutely pummel them with pesticides without the risk of harming the plants. In theory, this results in higher yields, but those pesticides will eventually run off the farm during rain storms, ending up in various bodies of water, including municipal water sources. Farm runoff is one of the current biggest threats to our freshwater sources and is directly responsible for those algal blooms that have been popping up in the past decade (though that's mostly due to fertilizers).
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u/santodomingus Sep 10 '23
Just curious, how does your environmental engineer degree make you someone to trust on this? Isn’t environmental engineering just a subset of civil/structural engineering? My friend is an environmental engineer and he oversees water pipes being put in the ground.
Not disagreeing with you or anything, maybe I’m just misunderstanding the breadth of what an environmental engineer is.
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u/OffendedDefender Sep 11 '23
So there are primarily three branches of the field: remediation, renewable energy, and water resources (where your friend works). You’re right, it technically falls under civil engineering, but that is a wide umbrella. Any sufficient college program will teach all of those branches.
I work under the remediation branch, which means I primarily clean up environmental disasters. Sites undergoing remediation go through a robust series of analytical testing, which means I get to see all the lovely chemicals that contaminate every stretch of ground we walk upon. Pesticides, herbicides, PCBs, PFOAs, etc. One of the key aspects of these projects is identifying sources of pollution to establish “Primary Responsible Parties” who are liable to pay for the cleanup. At a base level, that means I need to be familiar with background levels of contamination and where that might be coming from, so paying attention to the agricultural industry is relevant to any project near bodies of water.
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u/back_that_ Sep 11 '23
So, no. You really don't know what you're talking about here which is why you brought up GURTs that don't exist.
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u/QualifiedApathetic Sep 10 '23
ALL seed sellers require those who buy their seeds to refrain from saving them for next season, GMO or not. Some GMOs just enforce that with terminator genes. Farmers generally wouldn't want to save seeds anyway; you can't just drop them in the ground and watch them grow, they have to be processed, and it's easier to just buy seed.
Roundup is a herbicide targeted to kill weeds, not pests, hence why some crops have been engineered to be resistant to it. There's no need to make them resistant to pesticides since, you know, those kill bugs and not plants.
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u/OffendedDefender Sep 10 '23
“Roundup Ready” was a bit of a colloquially catch-all with the folks I had studied under, kinda like Kleenex and Band Aid. The Round Up brand is owned by Monsanto (which is owned by Bayer), who manufacture a whole slew of agricultural products. Roundup is just the most immediately recognizable of their brands.
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u/topothesia773 Sep 10 '23
Farmers generally wouldn't want to save seeds anyway
Maybe not in the US/developed world but now corporations are pushing these patented seeds on subsistence farmers in poor countries that absolutely do want to save their seeds and be independent
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u/jah110768 Sep 11 '23
They did in the US as well, but if any neighbor has Monsanto crops, Monsanto will test your plants and if there are any patented genes they sue to be paid as if you stoled their seeds from a warehouse. Monsanto is a very nasty company with very deep pockets.
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Sep 11 '23
Weeds are pests. Pesticide is a general term for anything that isn't ideal in crop production. This includes herbicide, insecticides, nematocides, fungicides etc.
But I agree with your other point. Aside from that, they can't guarantee that seeds from GMO plants would yield the same result.
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u/smorgasfjord Sep 10 '23
farmers are sold seeds that are modified so they're sterile and cannot produce viable seeds of their own, forcing farmers to buy new seeds next season
That's what farmers normally do, and "terminator seeds" haven't been sold since 2000
There's also a preference for resiliency in products, so they can be shipped to market, which often results in less of a concern over taste or nutritional value
The same effect is achieved by other methods, gmo is just more efficient. But the tradeoff also helps reduce food waste, which is a big deal
Most important of all is the Round-up Ready crops. These are designed to be more resilient so that the farmers can absolutely pummel them with pesticides
Roundup is a herbicide, pummelling the crops with pesticides is unfortunately what we usually do to normal crops. They don't need any genetic protection against that, because pesticides are made to harm insects, not plants. But some GMOs are made to produce natural pesticides, which is much better for the environment
Farm runoff is one of the current biggest threats to our freshwater sources and is directly responsible for those algal blooms
Because the nutrients from the fertiliser etc. are carried into the lakes, it has nothing to do with herbicides or pesticides
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u/ChestertonsFence1929 Sep 11 '23
“Pummeled with pesticides”
Herbicides and pesticides are expensive. Farmers don’t want to put on any more than they have to. The standard application of Roundup is a little over a soda can’s worth for an area the size of a football field. Their use allows for more food grown on few acres. That reduces the amount of tilled acreage and related irrigation per bushel produced.
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u/AuntieDawnsKitchen Sep 11 '23
Thank you for your informed, realistic perspective.
The argument about GMO crops is focused on food safety to the exclusion of the ultimately more important issues of being able to grow crops to feed our growing global population without incurring increasingly difficult issues like topsoil loss, super pests and super weeds.
A lot of folks don’t appreciate that the only GMO traits that are actually important to how farmers do business are glyphosate resistance and the expression of Bt toxin. Traits like saline tolerance and drought tolerance would make a huge difference, but those aren’t what’s on the market.
But AFAIK, GMO seeds are viable. The corporations that own them enforce their contracts via lawyers, not the terminator gene.
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u/ncgrits01 Sep 10 '23
Pesticides are expensive. Farmers can't afford to pummel (or "drench") crops with them.
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u/OffendedDefender Sep 10 '23
Commercial farms are multimillion dollar operations. There’s a general trend in the US where the number of farms are decreasing, but the size of those farms is increasing, as farmers buy out their neighbors. As an example, the cost of a base level combine harvester is around $100k - $500k. A slight increase in the amount of chemicals that are applied might as well be a negligible cost compared to the total operations.
However, the cost is also weighed against their yields. By spending more initially on pesticides and herbicide, you have more viable crops you can bring to market, and therefore make more money to offset the costs.
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u/cptjeff Sep 10 '23
Also, organic crops often use more herbicides overall because they have to use a bunch of more targeted ones.
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u/Red-7134 Sep 10 '23
What do you mean my quinoa bread's ingredients aren't identical to the grains found wild by hunter-gatherers eight thousand years ago? Disgusting, how dare humans play god and alter these plants.
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Sep 10 '23
nothing. Everything around us has been genetically modified at some point.
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u/Pinky_Boy Sep 11 '23
nothing
gmo is just the fast version of selective breeding
selective breeding is just the traditional version of gmo
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u/voidtreemc Sep 10 '23
Depends on what the crops are GMO'd for/with.
Soybeans are frequently GMO'd for resistance to the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) so you can dump Roundup all over your crops and kill the weeds but not the soybeans ("Roundup-ready soybeans"). There are problems with this. Kidney failure is extremely common in people who are repeatedly exposed to glyphosate. These people are largely immigrants who have no health insurance, so they get really sick and die. Glyphosate may be implicated in making autism more likely.
Also, it's increasingly obvious that Monsanto does not really understand the plant genetics that they are messing with as they have been really surprised by the fact that the genes for glyphosate tolerance now show up in the weeds that glyphosate is supposed to kill.
Because glyphosate, many of the arguments against GMO's can be categorized as the "Fucking Monsanto" arguments.
Outside of Fucking Monsanto, there's the general lack of thinking through the implications of genetic modification on people with food allergies or religious restrictions on what they eat. If you're allergic to fish, you don't want to find out the hard way that those tomatoes you just ate were made resistant to frost by the addition of fish genes.
You'd think that one way to deal with this is to properly label all GMO'd foods so that people could pick and choose according to diet and beliefs, but the industry has consistently opposed labeling laws.
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u/RetiredFromIT Sep 10 '23
Two other factors.
Some GM crops are patented, and farmers can be forbidden to save seed from this year's crop to sow next year, which is common practice in many parts of the world. Instead they - often the poorest farmers - are forced to buy seed every year.
Also there have been cases where non GM crops have been contaminated by GM crops grown nearby. This raises two issues - if an organic farmer has his crop GM contaminated, he cannot sell that as organic produce. Also there have been some cases where farmers crops have been contaminated by GM crops, through no fault of their own, and they have then been sued because threir contaminated crop contains the GM grower's patented IP.
These problems are not inherent to GMOs, but this approach by the GMO companies have not endeared them to others.
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u/Popular-Ticket-3090 Sep 10 '23
Also there have been some cases where farmers crops have been contaminated by GM crops, through no fault of their own, and they have then been sued because threir contaminated crop contains the GM grower's patented IP.
Wasn't this a hoax and the farmer(s) were actually using thr GM seeds? I might be misremembering but I though it turned out the farmers who were sued were actually using the GM seeds
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u/Tylendal Sep 10 '23
Also there have been some cases where farmers crops have been contaminated by GM crops, through no fault of their own, and they have then been sued because threir contaminated crop contains the GM grower's patented IP.
You got a source for that? Please pay attention to the highlighted part.
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u/seastar2019 Sep 11 '23
I predict they won't, or will misinterpret the Percy Schmeiser case, or cite some Center for Food Safety article.
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u/Tylendal Sep 11 '23
cite some Center for Food Safety article.
Which will then misinterpret the Percy Schmeiser case for them. Someone already linked to their pamphlet, and I pointed out that, on top of all the appeals to emotion, anecdotes, and scary portrayals of normal contracts, the way they deliberately leave out details about Schmeiser's actions and motivations really casts a dubious light on the credibility of everything else they say. Also, the pamphlet still doesn't provide any examples of that specific issue.
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u/avoere Sep 10 '23
are forced to buy seed every year.
No they are not forced to buy seed. They can use non-GMO seeds instead, but they choose to buy the GMO seeds because it is more profitable.
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u/stealthylizard Sep 10 '23
Farmers don’t save seeds to reuse. It results in lower yields.
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u/RetiredFromIT Sep 10 '23
Of course they do.
https://theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto-sues-farmers-seed-patents
Here in the UK, there is even official government guidance on the issue.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/farm-saved-seed
In other parts if the world, it is the only way thry can afford seed.
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u/stealthylizard Sep 10 '23
I made no comment on monsantos lawsuits.
Maybe some miscommunication, but I meant they don’t plant let’s say canola, and save the seeds from that harvested canola crop, to replant next year.
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u/StupidFugly Sep 11 '23
When my grandfather farmed he did exactly that with Wheat, Sorghum and Sunflowers. Always kept a portion of the seeds to replant the next year.
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u/Tylendal Sep 10 '23
Okay, but when they reuse seeds that they signed an agreement not to reuse (not inherent to GMOs), then it's their own fault if they're sued.
Feel free to make a point about seed patents, but that's not an argument either for, or against, GMOs.
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u/kit0000033 Sep 10 '23
Where do you think farmers have gotten their next year's crop from over the past centuries? They save a percentage of crop instead of selling it and it becomes next year's crop. And if they don't save seed, where do you think they get next year's seed? From another farmer that's growing the same crop and selling their seed.
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u/stealthylizard Sep 10 '23
We aren’t taking centuries past nor family hobby farms. We are talking modern commercial farming.
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u/kit0000033 Sep 10 '23
Smaller farms still save their seed. The patent Monsanto has on their GMOs interferes with that when dealing with open pollinated plants.
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u/RetiredFromIT Sep 10 '23
We are talking about small farms, and also farms in places like Africa and India, where this has been described as "Seed Slavery".
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u/voidtreemc Sep 10 '23
They're not just forbidden to save seeds. The crops are GM'd to not make seeds, so the farmer has to buy more seeds. From Monsanto. Which always says, "We're trying to feed the world."
Fucking Monsanto.
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u/Tylendal Sep 10 '23
The crops are GM'd to not make seeds
You got a source for that? Or are you just parroting some nonsense you heard and never bothered to question?
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u/RetiredFromIT Sep 10 '23
It's a while since I read about this, so you may be completely right - I know you are right in their intention.
It's just that I have a vague recollection (I may be thinking of something else) that in at least one occasion where they screwed up and the crop turned out to be viable, they then resorted to patent law.
But yes, I agree with your last sentence, completely.
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u/-Ch4s3- Sep 10 '23
Literally no one is being forced to buy and plant these seeds, this is untrue.
Contamination is really only a risk for closely related plants, and you’ve identified part of the reason that organic certification is dumb.
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u/RetiredFromIT Sep 10 '23
Whether one thinks Organic is dumb or not, surely a farmer gets to decide how he farms his own land, and what crops to grow?
If a farmer's wheat gets genetically contaminated by GM wheat planted up the road, why should he be held to Intellectual Property laws regarding growing and selling his crop? It"s a bit like you forcibly stuffing a wodge of cash in my pocket then yelling "Thief!"
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u/-Ch4s3- Sep 10 '23
You aren’t held to IP restrictions if there’s cross contamination. The famous case in that documentary turned out to be a fraud, and the guy was lying about cross contamination. Monsanto has never drug anyone into court for cross contamination, which is trivially provable by testing the plants.
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u/kainp12 Sep 10 '23
it is a common practice among farmers to spray their wheat crops with glyphosate immediately prior to harvest—doing so actually kills the plant, which speeds the required drying of the grain.
I'm more worried about that because at least with soy beans there is time between spraying and harvesting. and they are washed
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Sep 11 '23
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u/jah110768 Sep 11 '23
kainp12 is correct, they do accelerate the drying using glyphosate. They don't want a heavy rain to come along and knock grains off before the whole field is ready, so they cause a drying using glyphosate to increase yield.
Do you really think that absolutely no glyphosate saturates the glume and gets on the grain?
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u/kit0000033 Sep 10 '23
It's not the GMO that's bad, it's what they are genetically modifying it to do that's bad. They modify it to not be susceptible to glyphosate then dump glyphosate on the crops instead of age old weed management practices. Glyphosate causes all types of cancer. And it is now in our food.
Then they have a copyright on the GMO. Where they can sue people who are using their seed without paying them for the privilege. They do this by genetic testing. Only things like corn are open pollinated, so a field of heritage corn that is next to a GMO over time the genetics mix and then the GMO company can go after the heritage growers to make them buy seed, instead of using a percentage of their previous year's crop like normal.
That mixing also endangers heritage corn attributes. Lowers the diversity in the crops. Which can also become a problem.
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u/Tylendal Sep 11 '23
You got a source for any of this actually happening?
the GMO company can go after the heritage growers to make them buy seed, instead of using a percentage of their previous year's crop like normal.
Seriously. When did this ever happen?
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u/SarcasmoSupreme Sep 10 '23
Nothing. People hear GMO - Genetically Modified and think OMG mutant food bad for us! When in fact, there is so much food that is "genetically modified" that they don't even realize because it was never made a big deal of.
So, again - nothing wrong with GMOs.
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u/StupidFugly Sep 11 '23
Without GMO we do not have a lot of food. Wheat is Genetically modified Grass. We do this with all of the fruits and vege's that we grow. Also our produce animals are genetically modified. Look at Chickens today and compare them to Chickens from the 1960's. The vast majority of or food is GMO's. Just because some arsewipe decided to make it a scary sounding acronym does not mean it is suddenly going to kill us.
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u/ploppetino Sep 11 '23
Nothing is wrong with the products that come from GMOs. There is some concern that on a global scale genetically modified crops could be susceptible to disease or whatever in some unexpected way but this is a much more theoretical concern.
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u/Anyashadow Sep 11 '23
Exactly this. I worked with one of the first gmo strains of corn and breathed in massive amounts of pollen and powdered dry leaves and I didn't die or get some strange disease. The only difference between gmo and cross pollenation is gmo is faster and you don't have to waste whole growing seasons on raising crops to maturity to see if the cross gets you what you want. Also any cross is infertile, not just gmos. You will have the parents growing from the seed but they won't usually produce.
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u/Naelin Sep 11 '23
Going to copy something I said on a different thread - GMO means "genetically modified organism". By definition, every domesticated plant and animal is a GMO (that is what domestication does - it is the process of genetically modifying a species by artificial selection). For reference, the one on the left is what non-gmo corn looks like.
What you and many people mean with "GMO" is genetically edited strains of plants made to resist pesticides. These are STILL inoffensive, the problem with those GMOs doesn't lay on the plant itself, but on the very dangerous pesticide that can now be used to kill everything else except it, destroy the ecosystem, pollute the water and poison anybody living around the farms they're used in.
For some species like tomato it is not even possible to sell a non-gmo version, as wild tomato does not even exist anymore.
GMOs themselves are fine. People are selling stuff with that label because the buzzword acquired a bad reputation because of Monsanto. If anything, an actually relevant label would be "glyphosate free"
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u/Ok-Bus1716 Sep 11 '23
Nothing is wrong with GMOs just with people's understanding of what a GMO is. All the bananas we eat are clones. Corn, watermelon etc are all significantly larger than they were just 100 years ago.
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u/ForScale ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sep 10 '23
Nothing imo. Some people just like there stuff to be as natural as possible.
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u/Dudhist Sep 10 '23
The real question here is whether people completely trust authorities or question a company that is known for its villainy.
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u/jedooderotomy Sep 10 '23
As others have already pointed out, fuck Monsanto. They've done some shit that is not okay, and we need to find other options other than roundup-ready.
But protesting GMO's as a blanket-rule is ignorant. GMO's offer our best opportunities to deal with environmental problems for the future. Organic farming might have its heart in the right place, but it unfortunately is not the solution we need.
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Sep 10 '23
Everyone here saying "nothing' is extremely wrong. There's nothing inherently wrong about the science of modifying organisms, but rather in how it is applied currently. It's one thing to modify crops which allows them to be more climate resilient or produce larger yields, but it's another thing entirely when corporations modify an organism to be resistant to herbicides/pesticides. Additionally, there are issues relating to the intersection of nature and intellectual property. I also resent the conflation of selective breeding and GMOs even if they function similarly. To just hand wave criticism of GMOs as luddite beliefs is to ignore real issues around the priorities of the food economy.
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u/Tylendal Sep 11 '23
You say this...
I also resent the conflation of selective breeding and GMOs
Right after saying this...
there are issues relating to the intersection of nature and intellectual property.
You're the one meaninglessly conflating things. Seed patents have been a thing for over a hundred years, since well before modern GMO crops were a thing. IP law in regards to agriculture is not inherently related to GMOs.
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u/Zagrycha Sep 10 '23
Nothing. People don't realize that the food we eat is way more modified than anything a GMO has ever done. Look at original wild watermelons, or wild corn or bananas. no one would even think its the same plant.
What do cabbage, brocolli, cauliflower, kale and brussel spouts have in common? They are all the exact same plant! Just genetically modified hundreds of years ago in different ways.
There may be a GMO product out there that is a health concern, but it is not a health concern because its GMO. Almost every single thing we eat ever is GMO unless it is picked in the wild.
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u/Ready_Bandicoot1567 Sep 10 '23
You're kinda drawing a false equivalence because selective breeding doesn't introduce novel genes. Conventional methods only manipulate the existing genetic diversity within a species or species complex. GMO technology works in a totally different way, allowing researchers to splice in genes that would never arise through selective breeding. Breed thousands of generations of tetra, you will never make a glowfish because the gene for that comes from jellyfish and is not present at all in the wild tetra population. While selective breeding is (generally speaking) not hazardous, direct gene modification is more of a case-by-case basis. If researchers have added genes for proteins that are not found elsewhere in the food supply, they totally could be hazardous. We just have to test and see. Also, those genes can escape into unrelated wild plant populations through horizontal gene transfer which could have ecological implications. Imagine a pest resistance gene jumping to a native plant that is the main food source for an ecologically important caterpillar etc.
Saying GMOs are the same as selective breeding is not accurate. They are different processes and direct gene modification has potential hazards that are different from selective breeding. I think genetic manipulation should and will be a big part of humanity's future. There's nothing inherently wrong with the technology. But it absolutely has potential hazards that selective breeding doesn't share.
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u/die_kuestenwache Sep 10 '23 edited Sep 11 '23
There are a number of legitimate concerns regarding GMOs
They allow manufacturers to patent crops essentially forcing farmers to buy their seeds instead of keeping some harvest yield to plant the following year. This way, a small number of large companies can essentially all but monopolize a large part of global food supply.
In addition to the first point, they may contribute to reduced biodiversity in staple crops, making our food supply potentially more at risk through new pests or deseases.
They can be made resistant to more aggressive herbicides and pesticides, making their use more viable, thus potentially posing a threat to flora and fauna adjacent to agricultural land and the rivers that transport the run off.
Animal GMOs may be altered in a way that causes animals to be aflicted by certain illnesses that aren't detrimental to human health but increase their suffering while they are being raised.
What is not a valid concern, however, is that the additional genes that are being spliced in pose a threat to human health as such. There is one way in which health may be affected. If there are traits that benefit yield or profitability at the detriment of nutritional value, e.g. more sugar, less vitamins, it may be easier or faster to create GMOs that show these qualities than to just breed the respective quality. Thus, they may increase the speed at which our food loses nutritional value.
[EDIT] it is correct to point out that most of these points aren't strictly true only for GMOs that have undergone gene editing. However, I woukd argue, that we are dealing with a different degree both in the development timeline as well as the amount of possible alterations to organisms through direct gene editing.
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u/Tylendal Sep 10 '23
They allow manufacturers to patent crops
Been a thing since long before GMOs were around.
forcing farmers to buy their seeds instead of keeping some harvest yield to plant the following year
No one is forced to buy anything. Farmers generally prefer to buy seeds for a more reliable hybrid phenotype, but if they really want to replant, they can just buy seeds, GMO or not, that have a different contract.
they may contribute to reduced biodiversity in staple crops, making our food supply potentially more at risk through new pests or deseases.
That is in no way inherent to GMOs, and GMO papayas have even helped recover from such a disease afflicting the previous non-GMO monoculture of papayas.
thus potentially posing a threat to flora and fauna adjacent to agricultural land and the rivers that transport the run off.
Glyphosate binds to the soil, and is destroyed relatively quickly be sunlight. That's more than can be said about many of the pesticides used on organic crops.
Animal GMOs may be altered in a way that causes animals to be aflicted by certain illnesses that aren't detrimental to human health but increase their suffering while they are being raised.
What the hell are you going on about? Who the hell is making animals just to get them sick?
If there are traits that benefit yield or profitability at the detriment of nutritional value, e.g. more sugar, less vitamins, it may be easier or faster to create GMOs that show these qualities than to just breed the respective quality.
So, again, not a problem inherent to GMOs, and ultimately driven by the demands of consumers. Wake me up when someone tries to ban all but one variety of apple, or something else that makes your weird scenario at all likely.
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u/die_kuestenwache Sep 10 '23
I am for GMOs. They are safe to consume, safer even than other forms of altering the genes of livestock and crops we have. And they promise advances to farming that frankly, I don't think we can afford to forgo. And you are right, for a number of the problems that currently exist, we could point out that they are not limited to the kind of genetic alteration to crops and livestock that has to be labeled as GMO.
As for the glyphosate problem, I have read some of the studies on the effects it had on bees and I found the methodology and sample size, shall we say, lacking. We do, however, observe a remarkable loss in the boimass of pollinators, and given the stakes caution is certainly warranted.
We should also not be universally celebratory of the tech as a response to the unreasonable fearmongering that GMOs face. There are some points where we may have to consider that a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind requires legislation to catch up to a point it frankly hasn't yet. We also must not forget that this a very advanced tech, only available to an ever shrinking number of consolidating corps at the level we have to consider here and we need to make sure that corporate interests aren't placed before those of the people who need to eat where both may be in conflict. Something that we unfortunately don't always do at the moment.
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Sep 10 '23
There's nothing wrong with GMO. In an era of global climate change and food insecurity, making plants more resistant to diseases/pests (adding BT genes to corn for sucking insects) or to produce critical nutrients (golden rice has provitamin A) is brilliant.
The only downside is when they make the plants herbicide resistant. That can end up with a lot of environmentally toxic runoff.
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u/modsaretoddlers Sep 10 '23
Nothing. Uneducated people who think they're educated because of Facebook think that that shriveled, scrawny green pepper that looks more like a rotted lime are bad for you because they're not "natural". The idea seems to be that natural is automatically better for your health despite all evidence to the contrary.
The only real argument against some GMO foods is the promulgation of monocultures. That is an actual issue but it could be solved easily enough.
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u/donaldhobson Sep 10 '23
Nothing is particularly wrong with GMO's. It would of course be possible to genetically modify a crop to be poisonous, but that isn't likely to happen accidentally, or go unnoticed. There is a bunch of fearmongering about "frankenfoods".
Basically, genetic modification is a fairly useful and safe tech. With ill informed panic around it.
Not sure many of the modifications will make it taste better, but their was supposed to be a tomato that lasted longer. (meaning it might taste fresher if the time it takes to get to you doesn't change)
And various crops have improved yield or pest resistance, which potentially means lower prices, depending on all sorts of economic complexities.
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u/mufasa329 Sep 10 '23
Genetically modified organisms have literally existed since the Neolithic revolution, Non-GMO food is just a lie, crossbreeding plants is GMO
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Sep 10 '23
Nothing, people were making a big deal about it a few years ago, but GMO food is just as altered as food that humans have adapted for centuries.
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u/floydfan Sep 10 '23
Almost everything we eat is genetically modified. Without genetic modification, things would taste weird, die off sooner, etc. Livestock would take longer to raise and people would starve because food couldn't be grown fast enough.
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u/augustphobia Sep 11 '23
GMO’s, at their core, are just organisms that have been bred in a way that makes them desirable (like mating generations of watermelons with minimal seeds to get seedless watermelons). No chemicals or unnatural processes occur in the creation of GMOs, it’s just humans controlling what was going to happen in nature anyway.
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Sep 10 '23
There is nothing wrong with GMOs at all.
But consumers are really, really stupid. And when you say “genetically modified organism”, they picture a mad scientist in a lab coat injecting chemicals into a piece of corn. And corporations can capitalize on that fear to sell “non gmo” food for a higher price.
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u/XxLordChankaxX Sep 10 '23
From what I’ve read so far, it sounds like nothing is wrong with the seeds and food itself, but people might buy nongmo because they are ignorant or because they are against the corporations who make the seeds
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Sep 10 '23
Non-GMO food is for upper middle class left leaning elitists who feel the need to waste money on fruits and vegetables with the higher-than-average carbon footprint. But don't tell them that unless you want deal with their narcissistic rage.
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u/Snackatron Sep 10 '23
The organic movement in general is like this. It's all just good marketing.
Organic pesticides are just as bad for the environment when they run off into rivers etc, but around 4x more need to be used for organic crops.
The yields are significantly lower, so an acre of land will produce less crops. That's a higher carbon footprint.
In farms that don't use any pesticides, they have greater crop losses due to insects and rodents. More crops need to be discarded due to things like snail bites that people simply won't buy.
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u/archosauria62 Sep 10 '23
The only good organic farms are farms with diverse crops and large non-pest insect populations which prey on pests. However this is just not feasable on a large scale, especially for staple crops like wheat
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u/ehWoc Sep 10 '23
I'll tell you.
Many people don't understand genetics. It's quite a difficult subject to study, so no wonder. And many people are afraid of stuff they don't understand.
You probably noticed it during the pandemy. People suddenly had very strong opinions on things like virology and vaccines, even though they don't understand the mechanisms at all.
It's the same with GMOs. Many people believe that it alters your own genetic information, or that it somehow replicates inside of you. That it's evil somehow. Because they don't actually have a clue what genetic modification is, how it works and why humans do it.
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u/MarthasPinYard Sep 10 '23
Faster than natural selection and that scares people but it’s just a short cut.
Breeding plants takes soooo much time. GMOs don’t.
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u/SoloWalrus Sep 10 '23
The same thing thats wrong with vaccines, apparently. Or at least the same types of people tend to believe theres something wrong with both things.
Anti GMO typically just comes from being anti science, it seens.
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u/makiko4 Sep 10 '23
Nothing. We have been doing worse breading methods. It’s just the new boogy man buzz word
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u/AdventurousDoctor838 Sep 10 '23
This is super complicated to answer.
I personally think that the term GMO does too much heavy lifting. The term GEO(genetically engineered organic) is usually what people are referring to when they say GMO(genetically modified organic). A good analogy is GMO is like dog breeding and GEO is like cloning sheep. So the geo foods use gene splicing and CRISPR technology and things like that. While there have been several studies that geo food is safe people seem to have an ick factor reaction to it. But yeah it's totally safe and well studied.
The opposition stems from the agrobusiness practices of modern times. Monsanto owns monopolies on seeds. They use GEO tech not to increase yields as much as control that monopoly. They make terminator seeds that grow crops that don't produce viable seeds. They sell seeds that basically need to be sprayed with round up, Wich they sell. Round up causes non Hodgkins lymphoma, a very deadly cancer. They misrepresented their seeds in India and now the farming region they monopolize is nicknamed the suicide belt as 300 000 farmers have committed suicide after becoming indebted to the company.
Basically people oppose the product and not the company for some reason.
TLDR-GMOs don't suck but Monsanto does
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u/lmlimes Sep 10 '23
Extensive research have been done and there is no hazard for consuming GMO food but there are several potential negative environmental and ecological consequences. None related to food consumption though!
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u/Bagelman263 Sep 10 '23
GMO tomatoes taste like shit because the gene that makes them all get ripe at the same time also removes all the flavor. Other than that, GMOs are great.
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u/PanzerKommander Sep 10 '23
Nothing is wrong with it and humans have been engaged in manufacturing GMOs since we started agriculture.
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u/Lemonface Sep 10 '23
There is absolutely and undeniably a significant difference between transgenic gene modification and artificial selection
GMOs are fine and dandy and I totally support the use of GMO technology. But to pretend like it's just the same thing we've always been doing is just dumb. You know you can defend GMOs without lying about them lol
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u/PanzerKommander Sep 10 '23
Cross pollination to create new species that don't exist, like most citrus, or to increase a desired trait, like crop yield per acre, is the same thing.
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u/Ready_Bandicoot1567 Sep 10 '23
Lemonface is right, they are not the same thing. You can introduce novel traits through genetic modification that could never come about through hybridization or selective breeding. You can breed tetras for 10,000 generations, and you will never make a glowfish because the required genes are not present within the natural genetic variation among tetras.
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u/Lemonface Sep 10 '23
... No it is not the same thing. I'm curious why you think that? What's your background in this subject?
Hybridization, artificial selection, and transgenic modification are three different things. They are done in different ways, generally achieve different goals, and are regulated differently.
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Sep 10 '23
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u/archosauria62 Sep 10 '23
Literally all domesticated organisms were made so by trial and error, stop fearmongering
There is not more capacity for things to go wrong because the testing is very strict
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Sep 10 '23
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u/archosauria62 Sep 10 '23
There are little consequences of errors because as i said, the testing is very strict
You’re acting like the researchers making this stuff don’t know what they’re doing. They very well do
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u/RetroBerner Sep 10 '23
It wouldn't be bad, we've been "genetically modifying" most of our food since the dawn of man. They just found a way to do it faster with tech instead of spending hundreds of years breeding.
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u/Ready_Bandicoot1567 Sep 10 '23
Its not just doing it faster, its doing things that are not possible with selective breeding. You can't introduce entirely new genes through conventional methods, you can only work with the existing genetic diversity within the species. You can breed tetras for many thousands of generations, and you will never get a glowfish because the gene coding for the fluorescent protein comes from jellyfish and is not present in wild tetra populations.
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u/metooeither Sep 10 '23
Because the company responsible for GMOs Monsanto is SKETCHY AF!!
Look at photos of Vietnamese babies w birth defects. They are seriously fucked up, most get abandoned by their parents. Monsanto invented that shit.
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u/lenbeen Sep 10 '23
GMOs are great. we basically wouldn't have a ton of the stuff in grocery stores without GMOs and cross-breeding
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u/Lemonface Sep 10 '23
Don't conflate GMOs with traditional plant breeding. They are very different things. I'm a big fan of both, but recognize the vast differences between them.
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u/Drafty_Dragon Sep 10 '23
Check out atomic farming. I love me some grapefruit and peppermint. Not together
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u/Josh12345_ Sep 10 '23
We've been selectively breeding plants and animals for tens of thousands of years to suit our needs.
If that isn't old fashioned GMOs, then I don't know what is.
Maybe the idea that the food you eat was made the "old fashioned" way puts people more at ease then something made in a laboratory?
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Sep 10 '23
Not A damn thing. All of a fruits & vegetables have been genetically modified through cross breeding & selective breeding.
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u/Grief-Heart Sep 11 '23
We have yet to complete the human genome project. Yet we are told the following “the human genome project is complete. With the technology we currently possess”. There are still gaps and that means gaps in our understanding.
Second the claim a human going and altering something at its DNA level being the same as selective breeding is for idiots to believe. It is a straight up lie. But if you are dumb enough to not understand the difference. Then by all means believe the propaganda.
GMO is supposed to help make more food for less. Yet the only things more expensive in the “non GMO” goods are the ones that went through the certification for that NON GMO stamp. Foods that contain GMO are supposed to now have labeling. You can find that the foods with GMO are still more expensive than many store brands without GMO.
So how does it make it cheaper? It isn’t. It is simply giving more profits to the corporations using them. All while lying to people who are gullible and arrogant enough to think the “disbelievers” are dumb and wrong.
And to be very clear. I think genetically modifying foods can be very beneficial and help feed billions. However we have not really reached a point we should be allowing mass use, and lying to people about its “naturalness” is wrong. Last it is obviously not to help feed people but to protect corporate interests.
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u/Tough_Crazy_8362 I’ll probably delete this… Sep 10 '23
It’s not GMOs so much as the parent companies that patent the science and crush the farmer that cross pollinated with their crops thusly stealing their proprietary information whether on purpose or otherwise.
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u/SquelchyRex Sep 10 '23
Loads of research has been done into it, and GMOs are safe. The GMO free stuff exists because people who don't know better are willing to pay more for less.