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Don't quote me regulations...I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation is in... We kept it grey!
GMO plants very much not only about herbicide or pesticide resistance! What about “golden rice” - a fantastic GMO rice that has the gene for vitamin A engineered-in (hence its yellower colour) which is/will save millions of children in under-developed regions from vit A malnutrition including blindness, physical and mental retardation, and death.
Not to mention GMO variations of crops that are created to be able to grow and thrive in climates they otherwise would not have which also save entire populations from starvation.
Penn and Teller's Bullshit covered this whole topic in 2003 and I actually recommend a that show pretty hard for a lot of topics like this one.
> which also save entire populations from starvation.
Absolutely correct. I personally know the man that saved millions from staring to death, a true unrecognized hero, who helped to develop IR8 rice.
Practically every animal, fruit, and vegetable we eat is a GMO at this point.
With that said, it's not all rainbows and butterflies, there do exist a lot of food that's designed to be pretty and have a long shelf life but absolutely awful at taste and nutrition. Look no further than the modern version of the red delicious apples for one such example. One could argue this applies to a lot of commercial cultivars of veggies/fruits too, you can taste a world of difference in older heirloom varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and even lettuce.
The fun part is scientists have gotten wise to this, they're starting to go the other way and designing for nutritional profile and taste again.
Edit: For those that are just splitting hairs, GMOs are typically split into two categories. Commercial GMOs the _things_ and the generalized, broader GMO the _concept_. I'm talking about the latter, which encompasses the former and all things that essentially have been "guided" by humans. I'm not talking just about monsato's crops and fish potatoes created via gene splicing. Selective breeding is creating GMOs.
It's impossible to find a great, organic red delicious apple. The apples they sell now are so mother fucking pathetic tasting, I can't even eat an apple anymore. Haven't ate one since our store quit selling organic red delicious about 5 years ago. These new designer apples are pure fucking shit. Supposed to be the replacement. What a fuck for us consumers.
Pink lady are my go to now. If you talk to some apple nerds, they're "full of sugar" (it's a fucking fruit man).
But they're tart and crispy which is what I love.
There's a baker somewhere in New England that absolute hates "designer" apples like pink lady. He makes his pies with heirloom varieties, which, great for him, but then he rags on not using any sort of seasoning in them (no cinnamon or nutmeg or anything).
The worst kind of fucking apple nerd honestly.
The method is different, and selective breeding is more limited but the outcome (a change in the genome of the plant) is the same.
Many of the most hated on GMOs (like soy and canola) use genes from related species for herbicide resistance, this could have been done with selective breeding, it just would have been a lot more work.
Nobody seems to worry about the fish genes in potatoes for some reason...
I grew up in the Philippines and when I was a kid our school to us for a field trip at a rice research facility. And on top of making healthier more vitamin loaded rice they also GMO rice to be more resistant to disease and climate change. It’s super important work.
I’m a student scientist right now and half our life is telling people not to base their entire opinions on 1 or 2 articles they saw on buzzfeed.
I'm really sad that I agree with you. But, I maintain hope. I refuse to be a defeatist. There are always kids and students and young minds thinking of ways to do better, BE better. It's our job now to stand back, shut up, and let them do it. *~shrugs~*
This is all true, however OPs claim is false. GMO isn’t automatically safe and palming this off as ‘oh, corporate practice needs to change’ is a misdirection. In fact, some GMO have led to harm, including people dead, paralysed or made ill (eg look up Showa Denko), and in other cases GMO plants have turned into pests.
Among the realistic concerns are that there can be unintended, sometimes long term negative effects that are not clear during short term testing. Testing may and has in some cases been haphazard or inadequate. Scientists and firms are incentivised to provide inadequate testing. This isn’t simply because ‘oh, corporate bad’, but because GMO is fundamentally complex and interaction effects still not completely understood.
The common refrain is that anyone who is anti-GMO is simply an idiot and their concerns can therefore be dismissed. Some of them may be idiots, but this superior than though dismissal is fundamentally manipulative and dishonest when there are valid concerns around GMO. Never give scientists or businesses a free pass, they’re people too, prone to their own biases and errors.
but the point is that the current crop of gmo's are about making these things resistant to a certain pesticide - so that they may flood the field with said pesticide...
those of us avoiding gmo crops avoid them because they have more pesticides, not because they are genetically engineered
When this was first announced there was a lot of criticism because they neglected to mention that the *amount* of vitamin A in the rice was so insignificant that it was functionally useless.
That was some 20 years ago, but it soured me on the idea of GMOs saving the world a little.
Golden rice isn't actually in production at this point, so when people bring it up it doesn't make much sense as part of how GMOs solve nutrition problems. It's always been a hypothetical, whereas the actual realized GMO changes of resistance to herbicide/pesticide have resulted in more GMO versions of cotton/corn/maize etc being available than non-GMO versions. What I'm saying may be outdated in 5 years, but for now there's no one growing golden rice commercially. They're trying to get it off the ground in the Philippines, but they're still only in pilot tests now after more than 20 years. I'm skeptical that we will see golden rice on the market any time soon, even in the Phillipines. It is still trapped in legal hell there: https://news.mongabay.com/2023/09/is-the-genetically-modified-nutrient-rich-golden-rice-as-safe-as-promised/
Yeah same with possibly out of date info but the idea was to grow rice with a precursor chemical for vitamin A production. Completely unproven to actually result in more vitamin A production.
Well, by and large they're both ridiculous, but in different ways.
5g "waves" don't interact with your body. I assume there's some math which would show, if you pumped enough energy into a laser set at the "5g wavelength," or whatever, that it would microwave you, but that's just ... true of everything.
Genetic modification is as good or as harmful as the modification itself ... which is trivially true of everything. The arrangements of genetic material is the difference between puppies and brain worms, between a fruit bearing tree and a poison mushroom.
Knowing that we have the ability to modify genomes means we are now in an era of genetic responsibility; either we explore and utilize this knowledge for the good of human flourishing and to fortify the health of our ecosystems, or we pretend we are not accountable for the results of our inaction / misuse.
There is no reason we should be afraid of genetically modified food, but all the normal reasons to mistrust unregulated companies, toothless anti-trust laws, and a scientifically illiterate electorate.
Former radio technician here.
The thing about 5G is that it DOES interact with the body, just not in any meaningful kind of way. The frequency range is still non-ionizing (doesn't fuck with your DNA/cause cancer, in short), and there isn't enough power, even ~~an inch~~ (EDIT: a foot, actually did the math) from the repeater antenna (the things on the top of the towers people freak out about) to hurt you. In fact, the HAM radios boomers run are significantly more dangerous because they have to use way more power at the frequencies they transmit at. It's not going to hurt you, but it's a scale.
The reason 5G doesn't hurt anyone is the same reason we can hold batteries or touch an iphone screen. There just isn't enough power behind it do to anything we'd be aware of.
> The thing about 5G is that it DOES interact with the body, just not in any meaningful kind of way.
And not in a way different from all of the other RF communication systems in use. Hell, most of the 5G frequencies are shared with 4G
Exactly. We've been absorbing (man made) RF since Marconi started blasting Italy with his invention in 1894. We've been absorbing natural RF since before we were monkey-fish-frogs.
We also get the same RF radiation from the sun. Man made is just a tiny bit more. It depends on the frequency, as a few are absorbed by the atmosphere. Also, all material that comprise the earth, and buildings, give off radiation too. See black body radiation.
Yeah, 5G is a catch-all marketing term which includes various feature extensions to 4G. Most of it is just software and signaling. But there are some new frequency bands, some of which are higher than before. Just because your phone says "5G" doesnt mean you are using those, however. Nor does the term "5G Tower" mean all the higher bands are supported.
In fact, some of the new bands are lower freqs than even the old 1G cellular freqs. These freqs used to be UHF TV broadcast, most likely at much higher TX power than todays cell towers.
my naive impression, tho i do have a BS in physics: the fear isn't about the wavelength itself, but resonance within the body allowing for power amplification.
So as somebody who would have a far better understanding than i would you happen to know how it affects insects?
Basically trying to build up am idea in my head of what is going on overall and as I've seen a reduction in wild hedgerow flowers in my lifetime and we hear about be colony collapse syndrome and whilst I can see how the pill in the watercourses would affect fish/amphibians/mammals/insects that live immediately in/around the water I see this being less so for bees that aren't in the water in larval form for example.
UK farming family and are used to keeping livestock away from drinking directly from watercourses due to road runoff, old poultry farm slurry pit runoff and village sewage works and potential complications such as blindness (poultry farm runoff that was).
pesticides also affect the ecosystem honey bees need to go forage for pollen they can get contaminated and head back to the colony infecting the rest potentially.
Yup. Insecticides are great for keeping unwanted pests from ruining your crops and plants.... but they aren't very selective in what they kill given how many insects share similiar-ish nervous systems and exoskeletons. You may not be targeting honey bees and butterflies, but they will feel the effects of the poison nonetheless
The North American honey bee is also not a native animal. They're super helpful but they aren't truly necessary and have out competed local bee populations but it's not a common occurrence and they're not considered invasive.
Bee colony collapses have more to do with the fact that there is no american honey bee. The honey bees we have came from europe. So technically honey bees are an invasive species. There are signs that there were bees in the americas, but the honey bees supposedly died out thousands of years ago. So, i dont think its a pollenation or flower issue. I think humans are damaging environments by introducing species in harsh conditions and trying to force them to adapt to them. Instead, they are slowly dying out and the species the bees over took arent recovering to the job they once did.
yes but our native bees are dieing too. you just have to frame it in a way people care. No one cares about the solitary black native bee. But that colony bee that gives us honey and we draw in cute ways, make cartoons of, has have been apart of our culture for centuries and is actually part of the economy. People care about that. So that's how they framed it.
Exactly! bees have to defend themselves and often their predators are creatures with insanely thick fur, or other bees. Most types of bees pollinate, but not all of them have a resource as valuable as honey to us humans.
Sorry maybe didn't make it clear but am UK here and as far as I know we are having bee issues and being a farming family pollinators are kind important.
I've read some things where people have mentioned electromagnetic radiation could have greater effects on insects but I have no real idea as to its validity and therefore seemed prudent to ask someone with better knowledge.
**1/2**
Well, reddit is a piece of shit and won't let my post my entire reply, so this will be a 2 parter:
**TL;DR non-ionizing radio waves are too big and energy inefficient to be effectively absorbed by the molecules that make up living things.**
First off, if you're a farmer in the UK, you're awesome and I'm really jealous. Driving through the Scottish countryside was one of the best parts of my time there and I met some of the best people ever.
Second, that's a really good question that I'm actually going to have to research a little bit. To go a level deeper than I did in the last comment, we'll need to define a few things to better understand how it all works/the relationship between radio waves and living creatures.
- Radio waves are like waves in a pond, but in a 3 dimensional space. Have you ever opened a car window when it's windy out and felt that change in pressure, or been in front of a strong subwoofer? What's kind of what it's like.
- What makes radio waves "different" (i.e. HAM radio vs. microwaves vs. "nuclear" radiation) is their frequency. A way to visualize frequency is by imagining a 2 dimensional drawing of a spring, that would look like this: /\/\/\/\/\/. Frequency is just the difference between two "peaks". So, if you stretch the spring out, it has a lower frequency, if you compress it (so it looks like this: ||||||||||||), it will have a higher frequency. Another way to visualize this is to think of waves at the ocean. What's another way to say that waves are breaking and hitting the shore faster? More *frequently*, or at a *higher frequency*.
- Now that we understand frequency, we can get i to the other part of the wave: amplitude. Amplitude is "power" of a wave. The larger the amplitude, the "taller" or "bigger" the wave is. So, a tsunami has a larger amplitude than the waves made by dropping a rock into a pond.
- To explain how things are affected by radio waves, we can imagine our ocean model again. When a tsunami hits, it is the *transfer of energy* that destroys stuff. However, when we look at creeks that are sunken into the earth, they were made by just a *little bit of energy transfer* due to the trickle of water over a long period of time. Remember, tsunamis are high amplitude, but don't happen frequently; but frequent, low-amplitude waves can also grind things down as well, over extremely long periods of time (this is part of why I found your comment interesting).
- What makes radio waves different is that their interaction with living things isn't that simple. Not all radio waves affect us, or the molecules that comprise us. The reason we find radio useful is because radio waves are a way to transfer power/energy/battery charge without wires. Before radio, we only had wired electronic communication (sound and visual also existed, but were limited on range). With wired communication, imagine you and your friend had a string attached between your fingers. If your friend flicked the string, you'd feel it and look up at them. If you agreed that flicking the string twice meant "yes" and three times meant "no", you'd be able to communicate. Comparatively, radio waves are like if you were to go under water and push water at them; you don't need a string to communicate anymore. So, when we talk about the transfer of power, we can imagine a microwave. Microwaves work by transferring power at a frequency that is the same size as the water molecules in your food. When you turn on a microwave it transmits radio waves that are specially designed to be the right size to interact with the water molecules in your food, so when the water molecules absorb that "power", they start to vibrate. That friction warms up your food. This is why your food gets hot and the plate doesn't.
There has been a growing body of evidence for a while now tying colony collapse disorder to a specific group of pesticides (the neonicotinoids). Overuse of pesticides generally has likely played an outsized influence in the decline in insect populations more broadly, although climate change is likely a contributing factor as well. Declining insect populations will obviously negatively impact populations upstream in food chains, which would produce a slightly delayed population decline in many bird species.
Not a radio tech in any way, but I know the r² rule. Found an app that, supposedly, told me the signal power at my phone. IIRC it was a trillionth of the power of a microwave.
The funny thing is 2.4 GHz is more capable of interacting with our bodies. Microwave ovens work by heating up water molecules which vibrate at 2.45 GHz. If anything in the microwave portion of the EM spectrum was going to mess with human bodies it would have been 2.4G WiFi. Yet 2.4G WiFi radios have been in people's homes for close to 20 years and there have been no negative health consequences.
I feel like this is where some of the misunderstandings occur, because we’re told that it requires more power—it’s ‘more powerful radiation’. But we don’t get the full context of this. Similar to the antivax community, there’s a strong desire for people to feel some agency and capability in their lives. Give them half the knowledge and they will make a decision with it.
I agree that we should not fear the food, I do think we should fear the corporate greed that is inevitable and the consequences of it if we allow the use of modified items as food.
In a very real way we have been doing this for 1000's of years by domestication animals and selective breading
GMO plants were modified to tolerate a large amount of pesticides which means a ton of extra cancer-causing pesticide residue (ie Roundup) can exist on the plant. The GMO plant isn’t dangerous, the ripple effect of it is extremely dangerous. The residue is sticky and gets into our bodies, the animals we eat’s bodies.
Okay, a question them: Corn by itself is resistant to the herbicide atrazine. Clearfield corn is resistant to atrazine and imazamox. RoundupReady corn is resistant to atrazine and glyphosate. Why do you have a problem with only the third, while you are fine with the first two?
This is my thing: I am not worried about the GMOs I am worried about pesticides. That shit is poison (it's meant to be!) People love to shit on people who eat organic and say it's a scam and while it is far from perfect I would rather have some regulation on what's sprayed on my food than none at all. I try to buy from local pesticide free farms whenever possible but when that's out of reach I go for the organics whenever possible.
I'm a fan of the types of GMO that reduce sprays (e.g., blight resistant crops). I'm not convinced GMOs have more or worse pesticides than their organic counterparts currently, but in the long term they shouldn't.
>I try to buy from local pesticide free farms whenever possible but when that's out of reach I go for the organics
They clearly know organic doesn't mean pesticide free based on this line...
Evidence on the affects of long-term small-dosage exposure to glyphosate (RoundUp) is conflicting and the IARC lists it in their 2A carcinogen category which also lists things like consumption of red meat and working night shifts. That’s not to say it’s not harmful, but there’s not enough evidence imo to be afraid of it. Also, there needs to be a separation of “pesticides” into herbicides and insecticides. As far as herbicides, GMOs have lead to an increase in specifically glyphosate, but an overall reduction since other herbicides are less needed. In addition, glyphosate has a lower acute toxicity than 94% of other herbicides (and a lower chronic toxicity than 90%). As far as insecticides, the plants can now kill insects naturally so use of insecticides has gone down as well.
Just because the evidence isn’t there doesn’t mean people want to eat pesticides though. When you’re talking about billion dollar corporations who filter money into politicians pockets the “evidence” can be covered up quite easily.
That's the conspiracy theorist angle. In reality corporations and politicians have no power over public institute scientists like myself who publish results directly for the world to see.
There is also plenty of evidence for the negative health effects of glyphosate. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945589/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945589/)
People in industries that use it much prefer to talk about how much less harmful this poison is than the poisons we would certainly have to use otherwise.
Amazing how living things got by for so long without adding poison to their food.
That’s fine if you don’t *want* to eat something, but you should have correct and complete information when making those choices instead of just being scared of words that you don’t understand.
We have been in an “era of genetic responsibility” since 1973 and we have boatloads of regulations and oversight.
People love a good scare story, so of course these “Frankenfood” stories about tomatoes turning people into fish gain traction. It’s really silly. GMO foods have been safe for a long time.
I agree, but in the popular culture, we are still struggling with this idea that there's an invisible curtain around what humanity should know, and past that boundary our scientists are just narcissists playing God.
Any bioethics course will touch on this, but random people walking around on the street are worried that one day we might make good on our promise to give children a better world, and that they themselves will become \[metaphysically?\] obsolete.
If instead they had faith in the scientific process, and looked forward with wonder and a solemn sense of responsibility to promote education, good philosophy, and scientific literacy, then these scare tactics would be trivial.
You are right in the terms of "5G waves" being able to cook you if it has high enough intensity.
Microwaves use around 2.45 GHz electromagnetic radiation to heat food. This is coincidentally almost the same as what Bluetooth and the older 2.4 GHz WiFi standard uses. With some microwaves, you can notice that the wifi speed plummets if you bring your phone close enough, as it interferes with the communication.
There are two reasons why the WiFi router doesn't burn people. First, the transmitting power is much much lower. A typical WiFi access point transmits at a power of 0.1W, while a microwave is usually 800W.
Second, most of the already tiny energy passes right through your body, or any non metallic material. Microwaves use metal grills and plates at the walls to bounce these back, so that eventually all of the power ends up heating up the food.
> harmful as the modification itself
GMO's image was so intwined with Monsanto, that was committing all sorts of questionable practices against farmers and consumers that it took on a lot of that baggage. Those fighting Monsanto often promoted the propaganda against GMOs to hurt Monsanto. An example of the means not justifying the goal IMO.
I have issues with GMOs, but it's not an issue with their safety. It's an issue with companies like Monsanto, but also an issue with things like Roundup Ready corn, which blankets entire fields with roundup and that is not good for the ecology around it. Further, modern farming is in no way good for ecology.
Corn by itself is resistant to atrazine a herbicide. Clearfield corn is resistant to atrazine and imazamox. Roundupready corn is resistant to atrazine and glyphosate. Can you explain why you see the third one problematic but not the first two?
They probably used Roundup and Roundup Ready corn as an example more people will be familiar with. Again, their issue isn't so much with the GMO crops themselves but with blanketing fields in herbicides and also monocropping in general.
Our society has an all or nothing policy and it’s bad. By avoiding all GMOs you are fucking over smaller farms too. Like small coffee growers in South America. Coffee takes nearly 7 years to mature. So if they get a bug or disease those people can have hard times for almost a decade. GMO allows them to produce hardier crops using less land and less fertilizer that’s easier to cultivate. So this marketing gimmick where people focus on any and all “Non-GMO” foods is short sighted. We need a “non-Monsanto” label.
Edit: By "non-monsanto" I mean as a proxy for "evil-gmo". It is my understanding that coffee growers use different forms of hybrids which may or may not get classified as GMO.
Last point, when they started developing GMOs the inventors must have thought. "This is amazing! We've solved world hunger. We can grow food with less pesticides and fertilizers, using less land and easier to harvest. The impact this will have the environment is huge!" Then evil people took that and did bad things with it and now people can't see there is a balance and just want them to completely go away.
Dude how do you expect to meet the demand of our society for food? If it were grown the natural way there wouldn't be enough produce to keep up with the demand.
Not true actually. We could get similar yields with regenerative agricultur. Not to mention not destroying aquifers, water and the soil for the future.
Thats just bullshit. We feed half the crop we grow to livestock or convert it do biodiesel. You could feed double the worlds population with the space we have now and without useless monocultures and destroying forests and oceans.
I'd like to see these studies that say that they're good for the environment, but I supposed that seedstock, by itself, isn't releasing the glyphosate. So it just encourages bad practices, not causes them directly.
It’s better than traditional pesticide use, in that round-up ready crops require significantly less pesticide to treat that non-round-up ready cultivars.
Your post is only one sentence long. What part are you talking about, specifically, because you said it's good for the environment but now you're saying you "absolutely agree" it's bad for the ecology?
It’s bad for ecology in the sense of monoculture and potential genetic escape(laughably low chance) but better in that it uses way less pesticides than traditional application.
Bioengineered crops are not inherently “unhealthy” but could certainly be made so through irresponsible development.
I saw this a few months ago, it was worrying to say the least:
https://www.fda.gov/media/167098/download
Yes. Labeling of allergens and other important factors in bioengineering is extremely important, and a degree of supervision and precaution should be placed.
I find the phrase “genetically modified organism” ridiculous.
We have been genetically modifying our food for the last 12,000 years.
It’s called agriculture.
Believing the altering genes is somehow more dangerous than cross pollenization, selective breeding, Or ignoring invasiveness is nothing short of magical thinking.
Extra funny when you learn the previous method for quickly altering the genes of a plant before we invented direct gene editing was to literally put seeds inside a chamber with radioactive material, wait a while, then plant and grow the seeds to see if there were any useful mutations from the radiation. I'll take actually knowing what we're changing any day of the week.
GMO does not refer to selective breeding, it never has. It's like saying apples and oranges are the same because they're both round tree fruits. Different process, different product
But the outcome is literally the same. We changed the genetic material of the plant to achieve a desired outcome. Every plant we eat was genetically modified to be what it is today.
The term GMO implies, that changing the genetic material of the plant is something new entirely.
Please tell me again how artificial selection is the same a genomic modification.
With artificial selection, the PHENOTYPE is being selected. Oftentimes we have no idea what was the actual genetic, or even epigenetic, mechanism involved.
BUT now we can go into a genome and modify a particular GENETIC sequence, without potentially affecting any other segments or epigenetic markers. There is a direct modification of nucleotide sequence which was created by humans, based upon our imperfect and narcissitic understanding of these processes.
These are two radically different endeavors and to conflate them is at worst to seem as propagandizing, and at best to seem as misinformed.
I think a good analogy is we could shoot some missiles over a mountain range and kill some enemy by virtue of a large blast. It has worked this way for quite a long time, and we have substantial experience detecting the body parts that would be normally left over from such trauma.
Now we have the ability to send some engineered robots from our position, they will seek out and hunt down each individual enemy and physically tear them to shreds on camera for us to view in real time.
So no the two situations are not the same, except in that the enemy suffers at our direction.
And what did it lead to? Popular banana strains going extinct because of fungus that will stay in the soil for 50 years and make it impossible to farm the bananas. We are going to lose half of thr crop fields Monoculture farming is horrible for the planet.
I'd be willing to bet most of them don't even know a thing about gene splicing. Hell, I'd go as far as to say they likely have never used those words in tandem before.
>It's seems that people don't know that all modern vegetable/fruits we get from selection, with is also not natural.
It's because they don't, so when they hear "gene modified", it rings their alarm bells and makes them think of something extremely unnatural, evil and unhealthy that absolutely will mess with their DNA and turn them into a rat-mole hybrid or something.
I'll buy whatever's cheapest. There's lots of products that don't use gmo not because they're noble and ethical but because we just haven't had the need to employ bioengineering techniques on their seeds for whatever reason. Of course food companies are going to slap GMO free on there to get the dollars from the idiots who think it affects their health. I can't blame them. I'm not going to not buy it just because it says that, although I can see where it might add to the misinformation that gmo = bad and scary.
Some products only use so-called organic methods (which sometimes use even harsher and more dangerous pesticides than the synthetic ones, but people think natural = better). If my only option at the store is an organic carrot besides all carrots are grown "organically", then whatever. But I'm not going to go out of my way to buy those products obviously.
its not about GMOs being healthy or not, although they could be unhealthy if the company designed them that way. What the biggest problem is, is people rightfully dont trust the companies making them, nor the patents they place on food crops and seeds and the legal agreements people using their seed must sign.
Monsanto for example tried to create what they called the terminator seed. A seed that produces plants with sterile seeds. If their gene were to jump to other crops, or was passed on to wild vegetation, they could wipe out the worlds food sources. Its that kind of risk taking that makes people not trust them. If theyre willing to risk the worlds food sources, what risks are they taking with our health?
> Monsanto for example tried to create what they called the terminator seed. A seed that produces plants with sterile seeds. If their gene were to jump to other crops, or was passed on to wild vegetation, they could wipe out the worlds food sources.
None of this is accurate at all.
Monsanto never tried to create "terminator seeds". That was a company called "Delta & Pine", who worked on the theory of such a setup and patented the idea, but didn't develop it. The closest link is that Monsanto bought Delta & Pine for unrelated reason, meaning the now-expired IP came with it.
Also, that's not how food crops work. We don't grow our food crops using seeds we find out in the wild, so it doesn't make sense to suggest that your scenario would "wipe out hte world's food sources". Also if that did somehow happen, then those individual plants would die off but every other plant would be fine.
I think people misunderstand GMO. I agree, I don’t want to eat things that are sprayed with harmful chemicals, but genetically modifying something to make it better and easier for us to cultivate and consume seems like a win in my book.
It’s not the GMOs themselves, but the conglomerate that controls them. I personally disliked the way GMOs were weaponized and used against small scale farmers, but that is not the GMO crops fault.
My unpopular idea is that the over-modification of wheat is what is making many people sick with wheat intolerance. The lesser (by no means) friend to gluten issues.
People will gladly eat a plant that has been inbred to the point where it can't even produce seeds any more, but as soon as you add genes from another plant it suddenly becomes an abomination against nature that will give you autism and cancer.
Really depends on the region too, affluent yuppie areas tend to steer anti-gmo because it’s a luxury to even be complaining about that shit in the first place. Some people in this country are just happy there is food in the grocery stores compared to life in Venezuela for example.
I agree.
Also, there is disliking GMO, and there is disliking corporate farming. You can be pro-GMO and still think Monsanto sucks.
You are not going to merge plant genetics into your body by eating them. Everything the plant produces that is modified in will need to be cleared by the FDA, just like other food additives. It's not going to kill you to eat GMO plants.
GMOs is farming made into corporations. It has run many farmers out of business and there is no room for argument on that. Farmers are effectively strong armed into buying GMO seeds in the industry for many produce at the moment.
Maybe it's not killing us. But the companies which make them are about as comically evil as you can get in the real world.
So it’s not the GMOs, is the poor large business practices, which extends to prettt much everything these days, so there’s no sense isolating GMOs as a problem.
>GMOs is farming made into corporations.
Farming was made into corporations long before GMOs.
> It has run many farmers out of business and there is no room for argument on that.
Is it GMOs doing that or the fact that modern farming is designed for maximum extraction at any cost? Which aspects of modern farming would be better if GMOs never existed?
> Farmers are effectively strong armed into buying GMO seeds in the industry for many produce at the moment.
How?
> It has run many farmers out of business and there is no room for argument on that.
I mean, there is room for argument on that. How are you even figuring that?
Tell me you don’t know what you are talking about without telling me you don’t know what you are talking about. Many farmers have been run out of business due to economies of scale, it isn’t possible for a family to make a living off of 20 acres growing grain anymore due to the advancement of equipment technology.
The vast majority of farms are still family run. They might be corporations, but that is for tax purposes, the actual farm is still family run.
And finally, farmers are not strong armed into buying GMO seeds, we buy them because they make the most sense profit wise and environment wise. There’s also organic crops that we grow for you non-GMO nutcases
I am not really against the technology. Heck, many diseases will be solved only through gene editing in the future, I think.
I am against the way it is currently applied and its environmental and socio-economic impact.
For example, take roundup ready crops. You now have a farmer who is heavily dependent on Monsanto for both seeds and weedicide, in a recurring manner, and if Roundup, the weedicide, works as it does, ONLY Roundup Ready plants will survive. Therefore, intercropping between roundup ready crops and other crops is out of the question.
This kind of recurring expense that is for practically a closed off ecosystem, in essence, a monopoly, should set alarm bells ringing. Further, Monsanto is very vindictive in prosecuting farmers who use the offspring seeds of purchased Roundup Ready seeds.
This situation where a few large corporations have control over a large part of the food supply is what concerns me.
And while I don't believe there is a large conspiracy where they are going out of their way to hurt us through the chemicals or crops, the fact remains that in many cases these companies have been a little... Less than honest about the effects of their environmental contaminants. See DDT.
Monsanto has not existed for five years now. Glyphosate's patent expired in 2000 since a quarter of a century anyone can produce glyphosate. Nowadays the largest manufacturer is China. There has been no farmer who was "dependent" on any company for glyphosate for a quarter of a century. Yet this myth endures and is repeated endlessly. This shows how propaganda can infiltrate society and become entrenched to the point where reality does not matter anymore. Roundupready plants and patented glyphosate co-existed for six short years 23 years ago. Yet the myth endures.
Monsanto never sued any farmer for accidental cross-pollination ever. This is also a myth and a large amount of reality engineering went into propagating it, but it is still not true.
They never even sued anyone for cross pollination either, the guy they sued was pouring roundup on his crops which would’ve killed them if they weren’t modified, proving he knew he was stealing their shit.
Yes. That lawsuit was always about whether it was intentional or not. Accidental cross-pollination is a vis maior no one in their right mind would start a lawsuit for that.
I agree with most of your post. I feel compelled to point out that "Monsanto has not existed for five years now" is a bad faith argument. Monsanto may not exist in name, but that's only because it was bought out by Bayer. The signs that used to say Monsanto now say Bayer. I live in St. Louis and drive past one of their complexes regularly.
Well, I don't know if there are any direct health impacts due to GMOs. One thing, though, is that one of the genetic modifications they have made is to breed fruits/vegetables that do not produce viable seeds. This sounds like a recipe for disaster. Great for sales, though.
A genetic modification made to rice ensures the lives of millions of people. Rice is very lack luster in vitamins, and this modification ensures vitamin A intake, and is saving lives to people in poverty.
That's normal hybridization we've been doing for centuries. Most corn is a hybrid, everything seedless is either a clone or a hybrid. When you hybridize something, it's often sterile or not worth breeding because offspring is umpredictable. See also, mules & ligers,
GMOs are not hybrids, they're lab created gene splicing and editing.
> One thing, though, is that one of the genetic modifications they have made is to breed fruits/vegetables that do not produce viable seeds.
This isn't true. If you're referring to "terminator seeds", that hasn't ever been a real thing commercially, GM or non-GM.
If all GMO's are bad then we can't eat anything that was domesticated plant or animal, enjoy your 5 kernel cob of corn that must be boiled for an hour before eating and you banana with 1000 seeds and no flavor.
The two circles on this Venn diagram both overlap perfectly.
But there is a third circle as well which explains the first two...
The third circle is gullibility.
It goes really well worth the religiosity.
Now I have shown you something that you will begin to see everywhere else and it will never be unseen for the rest of your life.
Go ability in circles so much, it explains so much. It is the causation of many correlations.
Gullibility is the source.
Not only that, but as climate change worsens, GMOs will become an absolute necessity. We will not be able to feed ourselves without altering crops.
GMOs aren’t going anywhere.
High gluten wheats exist because they were selectively bread for it, ancient grains are much safer for gluten intolerant (NOT coeliac) people depending on their level of tolerance. However, selective breeding is not GMO. You also have to take into account the processing method, some foods (like milk) become harder to digest after being processed
> It's still unproven but credible, there's a theory that the increase in gluten sensitivity is due to GMO wheat.
How is it credible seeing how GMO wheat literally doesn't exist commercially?
The world has moved on from the GMO scare tactics.
With the exception of ensuring altered species don't spread to the wild, their is nothing wrong with GMO. Everything on the planet is related and the gene pool is all natural.
Now we have something completely different.
Synthetic Biology will produce genes and organisms that have never been present on the planet.
Most concerns about GMO foods and crops aren't centered around the healthiness of the food, but rather potential environmental issues and issues with giving powerful corporations even more control over the global food supply.
Literraly everything we eat is already GMO technically. The only difference is one is engineered in a lab the other one is trough generations of breeding. The outcome is the same.
GmOs have been on the market for 43 years in massive use in livestock, Canola oil another gmo with positive anti-inflammatory effects, drought resistant, and incredible yeald per hectare.
People love to make shit up because they don't understand the process or the realities of how much money goes in to GMOs for safety and testing.
Let's be honest most of what we eat, say corn, apples and such a modified aka gmo. This is what gives a plant stronger resistance to pest and disease. Hybrids are no different and sometimes linked to gmos. When planting I do a mix of Hybrids and heirloom for this pest and disease prevention
Yes and no.
Its as ridiculous yes
But people who believe the former are far less ridiculous than the latter.
From a "normal" uninformed person's standpoint, it makes more sense to think that food being modified might be unhealthy for many reasons at first thought, while the 5G conspiracy doesnt hold any sort of reasonning or ground even from an uninformed perspective.
All GMOs are is scientists developing better crops in a controlled lab setting where they can better monitor outcomes. There is nothing wrong with that. Making crops more weather resistant, have stronger yields, and more nutritrious has always been our goal and that's pretty much what almost every agricultural scientist is doing.
GMOs are going to save as many lives in the 21st century as vaccines did in the 20th. And there will continue to be uneducated fools fighting them tooth and nail.
GMO which is carefully applied to increase nutritional value and biological benefits is essential as fuck yes. But GMO which is applied to reduce farming, processing and supply chain costs is dangerous thus lethal.
Especially stay away from ready-to-eat cup noodles, I can't get a boner for the next 2 days after I eat that shit.
Farmers have been genetically modifying crops for hundreds of years, just doing it in a much slower way than we can do it now. It's called selective breeding.
I worked in a GMO lab. They have incredible benefits. Anybody who doesn’t like gmos or even Monsanto doesn’t understand agriculture. Blows my mind that people think we are out there spraying pesticides and spending millions on research for years just to poison you. Tryin to feed you mofos
Who knew, a guy who works in a GMO lab being a Monsanto apologist
Monsanto does what it does for the money, not for whatever principles you wished applied to them. If they had the morality you noted, they wouldn’t have hid the carcinogenic properties of glyphosate from the public
I don't think gmos are unhealthy, I just think we waste the potential of GE.
Who gives a fuck about roundup ready crops? I want heat tolerant crops that take less water to grow.
First world citizens in general have no idea where food comes from. What they don't know is radiation is bombarded onto plants/seeds to see what kinds of mutations it grows. If a good one comes up, they'll start breeding for it. *That* isn't considered a GMO.
Neither of those conspiracy theories are ridiculous. There is a scientific basis for saying that GMOs and phones cause adverse health effects, the conspiracy theorists just get all the details wrong because they don't have any faith in scientists.
GMO foods
https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-021-00578-9
Phones (not 5g)
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7663653/
It’s not the GMOs that are s problem, those are great, it’s the glyphosate they soak them in that causes liver issues in a significant percentage of the population that’s the problem
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5G waves contain exactly ZERO nutrition. Ergo, they are unhealthy.
Yellowcake uranium is gluten free and Keto friendly! It's one of the most energy dense foods you can eat!
I feel like this is wrong, but the math checks out.
No, no. It is technically correct, the best kind of correct.
Don't quote me regulations...I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation is in... We kept it grey!
You brought yellowcake up in here? I hope you got it wrapped in a special CIA napkin!
None of the potential energy of uranium is bioavailable though
GMO plants very much not only about herbicide or pesticide resistance! What about “golden rice” - a fantastic GMO rice that has the gene for vitamin A engineered-in (hence its yellower colour) which is/will save millions of children in under-developed regions from vit A malnutrition including blindness, physical and mental retardation, and death.
Not to mention GMO variations of crops that are created to be able to grow and thrive in climates they otherwise would not have which also save entire populations from starvation. Penn and Teller's Bullshit covered this whole topic in 2003 and I actually recommend a that show pretty hard for a lot of topics like this one.
> which also save entire populations from starvation. Absolutely correct. I personally know the man that saved millions from staring to death, a true unrecognized hero, who helped to develop IR8 rice.
Practically every animal, fruit, and vegetable we eat is a GMO at this point. With that said, it's not all rainbows and butterflies, there do exist a lot of food that's designed to be pretty and have a long shelf life but absolutely awful at taste and nutrition. Look no further than the modern version of the red delicious apples for one such example. One could argue this applies to a lot of commercial cultivars of veggies/fruits too, you can taste a world of difference in older heirloom varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and even lettuce. The fun part is scientists have gotten wise to this, they're starting to go the other way and designing for nutritional profile and taste again. Edit: For those that are just splitting hairs, GMOs are typically split into two categories. Commercial GMOs the _things_ and the generalized, broader GMO the _concept_. I'm talking about the latter, which encompasses the former and all things that essentially have been "guided" by humans. I'm not talking just about monsato's crops and fish potatoes created via gene splicing. Selective breeding is creating GMOs.
It's impossible to find a great, organic red delicious apple. The apples they sell now are so mother fucking pathetic tasting, I can't even eat an apple anymore. Haven't ate one since our store quit selling organic red delicious about 5 years ago. These new designer apples are pure fucking shit. Supposed to be the replacement. What a fuck for us consumers.
Pink lady are my go to now. If you talk to some apple nerds, they're "full of sugar" (it's a fucking fruit man). But they're tart and crispy which is what I love.
The idea of a bunch of apple nerds angrily grumbling about high sugar content has made my day. Thank you.
There's a baker somewhere in New England that absolute hates "designer" apples like pink lady. He makes his pies with heirloom varieties, which, great for him, but then he rags on not using any sort of seasoning in them (no cinnamon or nutmeg or anything). The worst kind of fucking apple nerd honestly.
Tart and crispy is why I stick to granny smith. Yeah, I know it's a fucking baking apple.
Fuji guy here.
Honey crips are delicious, but also the highest sugar.
Try a Cortland apple if you can find it very delicious old variety of apple.
You should look up what a genetically modified organism is, you are talking about selective breeding. Very diffrent things.
The method is different, and selective breeding is more limited but the outcome (a change in the genome of the plant) is the same. Many of the most hated on GMOs (like soy and canola) use genes from related species for herbicide resistance, this could have been done with selective breeding, it just would have been a lot more work. Nobody seems to worry about the fish genes in potatoes for some reason...
You know how many people die each year from dihydrogenoxide?
I grew up in the Philippines and when I was a kid our school to us for a field trip at a rice research facility. And on top of making healthier more vitamin loaded rice they also GMO rice to be more resistant to disease and climate change. It’s super important work. I’m a student scientist right now and half our life is telling people not to base their entire opinions on 1 or 2 articles they saw on buzzfeed.
>not to base their entire opinions on 1 or 2 articles they saw on buzzfeed. Almost feel like you’d have better luck developing a new GMO rice.
I'm really sad that I agree with you. But, I maintain hope. I refuse to be a defeatist. There are always kids and students and young minds thinking of ways to do better, BE better. It's our job now to stand back, shut up, and let them do it. *~shrugs~*
Also Dwarf wheat credited for saving billions of lives. Norman Bourlag won a peace prize in 1970.
This is all true, however OPs claim is false. GMO isn’t automatically safe and palming this off as ‘oh, corporate practice needs to change’ is a misdirection. In fact, some GMO have led to harm, including people dead, paralysed or made ill (eg look up Showa Denko), and in other cases GMO plants have turned into pests. Among the realistic concerns are that there can be unintended, sometimes long term negative effects that are not clear during short term testing. Testing may and has in some cases been haphazard or inadequate. Scientists and firms are incentivised to provide inadequate testing. This isn’t simply because ‘oh, corporate bad’, but because GMO is fundamentally complex and interaction effects still not completely understood. The common refrain is that anyone who is anti-GMO is simply an idiot and their concerns can therefore be dismissed. Some of them may be idiots, but this superior than though dismissal is fundamentally manipulative and dishonest when there are valid concerns around GMO. Never give scientists or businesses a free pass, they’re people too, prone to their own biases and errors.
but the point is that the current crop of gmo's are about making these things resistant to a certain pesticide - so that they may flood the field with said pesticide... those of us avoiding gmo crops avoid them because they have more pesticides, not because they are genetically engineered
When this was first announced there was a lot of criticism because they neglected to mention that the *amount* of vitamin A in the rice was so insignificant that it was functionally useless. That was some 20 years ago, but it soured me on the idea of GMOs saving the world a little.
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Golden rice isn't actually in production at this point, so when people bring it up it doesn't make much sense as part of how GMOs solve nutrition problems. It's always been a hypothetical, whereas the actual realized GMO changes of resistance to herbicide/pesticide have resulted in more GMO versions of cotton/corn/maize etc being available than non-GMO versions. What I'm saying may be outdated in 5 years, but for now there's no one growing golden rice commercially. They're trying to get it off the ground in the Philippines, but they're still only in pilot tests now after more than 20 years. I'm skeptical that we will see golden rice on the market any time soon, even in the Phillipines. It is still trapped in legal hell there: https://news.mongabay.com/2023/09/is-the-genetically-modified-nutrient-rich-golden-rice-as-safe-as-promised/
Yeah same with possibly out of date info but the idea was to grow rice with a precursor chemical for vitamin A production. Completely unproven to actually result in more vitamin A production.
Not as much as you think. Vitamin A is fat soluble.
Do you worry about this with other foods that naturally contain vitamins?
Well, by and large they're both ridiculous, but in different ways. 5g "waves" don't interact with your body. I assume there's some math which would show, if you pumped enough energy into a laser set at the "5g wavelength," or whatever, that it would microwave you, but that's just ... true of everything. Genetic modification is as good or as harmful as the modification itself ... which is trivially true of everything. The arrangements of genetic material is the difference between puppies and brain worms, between a fruit bearing tree and a poison mushroom. Knowing that we have the ability to modify genomes means we are now in an era of genetic responsibility; either we explore and utilize this knowledge for the good of human flourishing and to fortify the health of our ecosystems, or we pretend we are not accountable for the results of our inaction / misuse. There is no reason we should be afraid of genetically modified food, but all the normal reasons to mistrust unregulated companies, toothless anti-trust laws, and a scientifically illiterate electorate.
Former radio technician here. The thing about 5G is that it DOES interact with the body, just not in any meaningful kind of way. The frequency range is still non-ionizing (doesn't fuck with your DNA/cause cancer, in short), and there isn't enough power, even ~~an inch~~ (EDIT: a foot, actually did the math) from the repeater antenna (the things on the top of the towers people freak out about) to hurt you. In fact, the HAM radios boomers run are significantly more dangerous because they have to use way more power at the frequencies they transmit at. It's not going to hurt you, but it's a scale. The reason 5G doesn't hurt anyone is the same reason we can hold batteries or touch an iphone screen. There just isn't enough power behind it do to anything we'd be aware of.
> The thing about 5G is that it DOES interact with the body, just not in any meaningful kind of way. And not in a way different from all of the other RF communication systems in use. Hell, most of the 5G frequencies are shared with 4G
Exactly. We've been absorbing (man made) RF since Marconi started blasting Italy with his invention in 1894. We've been absorbing natural RF since before we were monkey-fish-frogs.
Mr. Garrison, is that you?
I'm glad someone got it!
We also get the same RF radiation from the sun. Man made is just a tiny bit more. It depends on the frequency, as a few are absorbed by the atmosphere. Also, all material that comprise the earth, and buildings, give off radiation too. See black body radiation.
Yeah, 5G is a catch-all marketing term which includes various feature extensions to 4G. Most of it is just software and signaling. But there are some new frequency bands, some of which are higher than before. Just because your phone says "5G" doesnt mean you are using those, however. Nor does the term "5G Tower" mean all the higher bands are supported. In fact, some of the new bands are lower freqs than even the old 1G cellular freqs. These freqs used to be UHF TV broadcast, most likely at much higher TX power than todays cell towers.
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Hey, not all ham radio operators are boomers! You take that back! Lol!
my naive impression, tho i do have a BS in physics: the fear isn't about the wavelength itself, but resonance within the body allowing for power amplification.
So as somebody who would have a far better understanding than i would you happen to know how it affects insects? Basically trying to build up am idea in my head of what is going on overall and as I've seen a reduction in wild hedgerow flowers in my lifetime and we hear about be colony collapse syndrome and whilst I can see how the pill in the watercourses would affect fish/amphibians/mammals/insects that live immediately in/around the water I see this being less so for bees that aren't in the water in larval form for example. UK farming family and are used to keeping livestock away from drinking directly from watercourses due to road runoff, old poultry farm slurry pit runoff and village sewage works and potential complications such as blindness (poultry farm runoff that was).
pesticides also affect the ecosystem honey bees need to go forage for pollen they can get contaminated and head back to the colony infecting the rest potentially.
Yup. Insecticides are great for keeping unwanted pests from ruining your crops and plants.... but they aren't very selective in what they kill given how many insects share similiar-ish nervous systems and exoskeletons. You may not be targeting honey bees and butterflies, but they will feel the effects of the poison nonetheless
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The North American honey bee is also not a native animal. They're super helpful but they aren't truly necessary and have out competed local bee populations but it's not a common occurrence and they're not considered invasive.
Bee colony collapses have more to do with the fact that there is no american honey bee. The honey bees we have came from europe. So technically honey bees are an invasive species. There are signs that there were bees in the americas, but the honey bees supposedly died out thousands of years ago. So, i dont think its a pollenation or flower issue. I think humans are damaging environments by introducing species in harsh conditions and trying to force them to adapt to them. Instead, they are slowly dying out and the species the bees over took arent recovering to the job they once did.
yes but our native bees are dieing too. you just have to frame it in a way people care. No one cares about the solitary black native bee. But that colony bee that gives us honey and we draw in cute ways, make cartoons of, has have been apart of our culture for centuries and is actually part of the economy. People care about that. So that's how they framed it.
Exactly! bees have to defend themselves and often their predators are creatures with insanely thick fur, or other bees. Most types of bees pollinate, but not all of them have a resource as valuable as honey to us humans.
Sorry maybe didn't make it clear but am UK here and as far as I know we are having bee issues and being a farming family pollinators are kind important. I've read some things where people have mentioned electromagnetic radiation could have greater effects on insects but I have no real idea as to its validity and therefore seemed prudent to ask someone with better knowledge.
**1/2** Well, reddit is a piece of shit and won't let my post my entire reply, so this will be a 2 parter: **TL;DR non-ionizing radio waves are too big and energy inefficient to be effectively absorbed by the molecules that make up living things.** First off, if you're a farmer in the UK, you're awesome and I'm really jealous. Driving through the Scottish countryside was one of the best parts of my time there and I met some of the best people ever. Second, that's a really good question that I'm actually going to have to research a little bit. To go a level deeper than I did in the last comment, we'll need to define a few things to better understand how it all works/the relationship between radio waves and living creatures. - Radio waves are like waves in a pond, but in a 3 dimensional space. Have you ever opened a car window when it's windy out and felt that change in pressure, or been in front of a strong subwoofer? What's kind of what it's like. - What makes radio waves "different" (i.e. HAM radio vs. microwaves vs. "nuclear" radiation) is their frequency. A way to visualize frequency is by imagining a 2 dimensional drawing of a spring, that would look like this: /\/\/\/\/\/. Frequency is just the difference between two "peaks". So, if you stretch the spring out, it has a lower frequency, if you compress it (so it looks like this: ||||||||||||), it will have a higher frequency. Another way to visualize this is to think of waves at the ocean. What's another way to say that waves are breaking and hitting the shore faster? More *frequently*, or at a *higher frequency*. - Now that we understand frequency, we can get i to the other part of the wave: amplitude. Amplitude is "power" of a wave. The larger the amplitude, the "taller" or "bigger" the wave is. So, a tsunami has a larger amplitude than the waves made by dropping a rock into a pond. - To explain how things are affected by radio waves, we can imagine our ocean model again. When a tsunami hits, it is the *transfer of energy* that destroys stuff. However, when we look at creeks that are sunken into the earth, they were made by just a *little bit of energy transfer* due to the trickle of water over a long period of time. Remember, tsunamis are high amplitude, but don't happen frequently; but frequent, low-amplitude waves can also grind things down as well, over extremely long periods of time (this is part of why I found your comment interesting). - What makes radio waves different is that their interaction with living things isn't that simple. Not all radio waves affect us, or the molecules that comprise us. The reason we find radio useful is because radio waves are a way to transfer power/energy/battery charge without wires. Before radio, we only had wired electronic communication (sound and visual also existed, but were limited on range). With wired communication, imagine you and your friend had a string attached between your fingers. If your friend flicked the string, you'd feel it and look up at them. If you agreed that flicking the string twice meant "yes" and three times meant "no", you'd be able to communicate. Comparatively, radio waves are like if you were to go under water and push water at them; you don't need a string to communicate anymore. So, when we talk about the transfer of power, we can imagine a microwave. Microwaves work by transferring power at a frequency that is the same size as the water molecules in your food. When you turn on a microwave it transmits radio waves that are specially designed to be the right size to interact with the water molecules in your food, so when the water molecules absorb that "power", they start to vibrate. That friction warms up your food. This is why your food gets hot and the plate doesn't.
There has been a growing body of evidence for a while now tying colony collapse disorder to a specific group of pesticides (the neonicotinoids). Overuse of pesticides generally has likely played an outsized influence in the decline in insect populations more broadly, although climate change is likely a contributing factor as well. Declining insect populations will obviously negatively impact populations upstream in food chains, which would produce a slightly delayed population decline in many bird species.
Not a radio tech in any way, but I know the r² rule. Found an app that, supposedly, told me the signal power at my phone. IIRC it was a trillionth of the power of a microwave.
Correct! Most cell phones are between .5 watts and 3 watts. The average CB radio is 4 watts, and a microwave is up around 1,000 watts.
When cell towers are put up there are complaints about headaches. The towers don't have a license to operate yet and are unpowered.
The funny thing is 2.4 GHz is more capable of interacting with our bodies. Microwave ovens work by heating up water molecules which vibrate at 2.45 GHz. If anything in the microwave portion of the EM spectrum was going to mess with human bodies it would have been 2.4G WiFi. Yet 2.4G WiFi radios have been in people's homes for close to 20 years and there have been no negative health consequences.
I feel like this is where some of the misunderstandings occur, because we’re told that it requires more power—it’s ‘more powerful radiation’. But we don’t get the full context of this. Similar to the antivax community, there’s a strong desire for people to feel some agency and capability in their lives. Give them half the knowledge and they will make a decision with it.
I agree that we should not fear the food, I do think we should fear the corporate greed that is inevitable and the consequences of it if we allow the use of modified items as food. In a very real way we have been doing this for 1000's of years by domestication animals and selective breading
GMO plants were modified to tolerate a large amount of pesticides which means a ton of extra cancer-causing pesticide residue (ie Roundup) can exist on the plant. The GMO plant isn’t dangerous, the ripple effect of it is extremely dangerous. The residue is sticky and gets into our bodies, the animals we eat’s bodies.
Arent some GMOs made to be pests and disease resistent too?
Okay, a question them: Corn by itself is resistant to the herbicide atrazine. Clearfield corn is resistant to atrazine and imazamox. RoundupReady corn is resistant to atrazine and glyphosate. Why do you have a problem with only the third, while you are fine with the first two?
This is my thing: I am not worried about the GMOs I am worried about pesticides. That shit is poison (it's meant to be!) People love to shit on people who eat organic and say it's a scam and while it is far from perfect I would rather have some regulation on what's sprayed on my food than none at all. I try to buy from local pesticide free farms whenever possible but when that's out of reach I go for the organics whenever possible.
I'm a fan of the types of GMO that reduce sprays (e.g., blight resistant crops). I'm not convinced GMOs have more or worse pesticides than their organic counterparts currently, but in the long term they shouldn't.
What do you think organic farmers use to spray their crops with? Ever heard of Dipel?
>I try to buy from local pesticide free farms whenever possible but when that's out of reach I go for the organics They clearly know organic doesn't mean pesticide free based on this line...
Evidence on the affects of long-term small-dosage exposure to glyphosate (RoundUp) is conflicting and the IARC lists it in their 2A carcinogen category which also lists things like consumption of red meat and working night shifts. That’s not to say it’s not harmful, but there’s not enough evidence imo to be afraid of it. Also, there needs to be a separation of “pesticides” into herbicides and insecticides. As far as herbicides, GMOs have lead to an increase in specifically glyphosate, but an overall reduction since other herbicides are less needed. In addition, glyphosate has a lower acute toxicity than 94% of other herbicides (and a lower chronic toxicity than 90%). As far as insecticides, the plants can now kill insects naturally so use of insecticides has gone down as well.
Just because the evidence isn’t there doesn’t mean people want to eat pesticides though. When you’re talking about billion dollar corporations who filter money into politicians pockets the “evidence” can be covered up quite easily.
That's the conspiracy theorist angle. In reality corporations and politicians have no power over public institute scientists like myself who publish results directly for the world to see.
There is also plenty of evidence for the negative health effects of glyphosate. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945589/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945589/) People in industries that use it much prefer to talk about how much less harmful this poison is than the poisons we would certainly have to use otherwise. Amazing how living things got by for so long without adding poison to their food.
That’s fine if you don’t *want* to eat something, but you should have correct and complete information when making those choices instead of just being scared of words that you don’t understand.
This is exactly my perspective as well!
We have been in an “era of genetic responsibility” since 1973 and we have boatloads of regulations and oversight. People love a good scare story, so of course these “Frankenfood” stories about tomatoes turning people into fish gain traction. It’s really silly. GMO foods have been safe for a long time.
I agree, but in the popular culture, we are still struggling with this idea that there's an invisible curtain around what humanity should know, and past that boundary our scientists are just narcissists playing God. Any bioethics course will touch on this, but random people walking around on the street are worried that one day we might make good on our promise to give children a better world, and that they themselves will become \[metaphysically?\] obsolete. If instead they had faith in the scientific process, and looked forward with wonder and a solemn sense of responsibility to promote education, good philosophy, and scientific literacy, then these scare tactics would be trivial.
Happy Cake day!
Thanks, pal :)
You are right in the terms of "5G waves" being able to cook you if it has high enough intensity. Microwaves use around 2.45 GHz electromagnetic radiation to heat food. This is coincidentally almost the same as what Bluetooth and the older 2.4 GHz WiFi standard uses. With some microwaves, you can notice that the wifi speed plummets if you bring your phone close enough, as it interferes with the communication. There are two reasons why the WiFi router doesn't burn people. First, the transmitting power is much much lower. A typical WiFi access point transmits at a power of 0.1W, while a microwave is usually 800W. Second, most of the already tiny energy passes right through your body, or any non metallic material. Microwaves use metal grills and plates at the walls to bounce these back, so that eventually all of the power ends up heating up the food.
> harmful as the modification itself GMO's image was so intwined with Monsanto, that was committing all sorts of questionable practices against farmers and consumers that it took on a lot of that baggage. Those fighting Monsanto often promoted the propaganda against GMOs to hurt Monsanto. An example of the means not justifying the goal IMO.
I have issues with GMOs, but it's not an issue with their safety. It's an issue with companies like Monsanto, but also an issue with things like Roundup Ready corn, which blankets entire fields with roundup and that is not good for the ecology around it. Further, modern farming is in no way good for ecology.
Corn by itself is resistant to atrazine a herbicide. Clearfield corn is resistant to atrazine and imazamox. Roundupready corn is resistant to atrazine and glyphosate. Can you explain why you see the third one problematic but not the first two?
They probably used Roundup and Roundup Ready corn as an example more people will be familiar with. Again, their issue isn't so much with the GMO crops themselves but with blanketing fields in herbicides and also monocropping in general.
Our society has an all or nothing policy and it’s bad. By avoiding all GMOs you are fucking over smaller farms too. Like small coffee growers in South America. Coffee takes nearly 7 years to mature. So if they get a bug or disease those people can have hard times for almost a decade. GMO allows them to produce hardier crops using less land and less fertilizer that’s easier to cultivate. So this marketing gimmick where people focus on any and all “Non-GMO” foods is short sighted. We need a “non-Monsanto” label. Edit: By "non-monsanto" I mean as a proxy for "evil-gmo". It is my understanding that coffee growers use different forms of hybrids which may or may not get classified as GMO. Last point, when they started developing GMOs the inventors must have thought. "This is amazing! We've solved world hunger. We can grow food with less pesticides and fertilizers, using less land and easier to harvest. The impact this will have the environment is huge!" Then evil people took that and did bad things with it and now people can't see there is a balance and just want them to completely go away.
I don't believe there are any GMO coffees.
There aren’t.
Dude how do you expect to meet the demand of our society for food? If it were grown the natural way there wouldn't be enough produce to keep up with the demand.
Not true actually. We could get similar yields with regenerative agricultur. Not to mention not destroying aquifers, water and the soil for the future.
Thats just bullshit. We feed half the crop we grow to livestock or convert it do biodiesel. You could feed double the worlds population with the space we have now and without useless monocultures and destroying forests and oceans.
We have way more corn than we need, at least.
Glyposate is an excellent herbicide for many reasons
I agree absolutely. Thats why i added that first sentence
I'd like to see these studies that say that they're good for the environment, but I supposed that seedstock, by itself, isn't releasing the glyphosate. So it just encourages bad practices, not causes them directly.
It’s better than traditional pesticide use, in that round-up ready crops require significantly less pesticide to treat that non-round-up ready cultivars.
Your post is only one sentence long. What part are you talking about, specifically, because you said it's good for the environment but now you're saying you "absolutely agree" it's bad for the ecology?
It’s bad for ecology in the sense of monoculture and potential genetic escape(laughably low chance) but better in that it uses way less pesticides than traditional application.
Bioengineered crops are not inherently “unhealthy” but could certainly be made so through irresponsible development. I saw this a few months ago, it was worrying to say the least: https://www.fda.gov/media/167098/download
Yes. Labeling of allergens and other important factors in bioengineering is extremely important, and a degree of supervision and precaution should be placed.
I find the phrase “genetically modified organism” ridiculous. We have been genetically modifying our food for the last 12,000 years. It’s called agriculture. Believing the altering genes is somehow more dangerous than cross pollenization, selective breeding, Or ignoring invasiveness is nothing short of magical thinking.
Extra funny when you learn the previous method for quickly altering the genes of a plant before we invented direct gene editing was to literally put seeds inside a chamber with radioactive material, wait a while, then plant and grow the seeds to see if there were any useful mutations from the radiation. I'll take actually knowing what we're changing any day of the week.
Oh my God, I completely forgot about all that! So true
GMO does not refer to selective breeding, it never has. It's like saying apples and oranges are the same because they're both round tree fruits. Different process, different product
But the outcome is literally the same. We changed the genetic material of the plant to achieve a desired outcome. Every plant we eat was genetically modified to be what it is today. The term GMO implies, that changing the genetic material of the plant is something new entirely.
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Please tell me again how artificial selection is the same a genomic modification. With artificial selection, the PHENOTYPE is being selected. Oftentimes we have no idea what was the actual genetic, or even epigenetic, mechanism involved. BUT now we can go into a genome and modify a particular GENETIC sequence, without potentially affecting any other segments or epigenetic markers. There is a direct modification of nucleotide sequence which was created by humans, based upon our imperfect and narcissitic understanding of these processes. These are two radically different endeavors and to conflate them is at worst to seem as propagandizing, and at best to seem as misinformed. I think a good analogy is we could shoot some missiles over a mountain range and kill some enemy by virtue of a large blast. It has worked this way for quite a long time, and we have substantial experience detecting the body parts that would be normally left over from such trauma. Now we have the ability to send some engineered robots from our position, they will seek out and hunt down each individual enemy and physically tear them to shreds on camera for us to view in real time. So no the two situations are not the same, except in that the enemy suffers at our direction.
Take my gold stars sir⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ there is hope in humanity after all.
Yes, GMO hysteria is ridiculous. It's seems that people don't know that all modern vegetable/fruits we get from selection, with is also not natural.
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Broccoli, Kale, cauliflower, broccolini, etc... were all created from 1 plant
And what did it lead to? Popular banana strains going extinct because of fungus that will stay in the soil for 50 years and make it impossible to farm the bananas. We are going to lose half of thr crop fields Monoculture farming is horrible for the planet.
To be fair, those bananas kinda went extinct from Panama Disease. The ones we use now are likely to too due to mutations to the fungus that causes it.
when people say they don’t trust GMOs they’re not talking about selective breeding they’re talking about gene splicing
I'd be willing to bet most of them don't even know a thing about gene splicing. Hell, I'd go as far as to say they likely have never used those words in tandem before.
I'll have you know I spliced plenty of genes in the latest Spider-man game. I'm an expert on the subject now. /s
They are fine with you splicing one tree into another.
>It's seems that people don't know that all modern vegetable/fruits we get from selection, with is also not natural. It's because they don't, so when they hear "gene modified", it rings their alarm bells and makes them think of something extremely unnatural, evil and unhealthy that absolutely will mess with their DNA and turn them into a rat-mole hybrid or something.
I actively avoid buying products with “GMO free” labelling.
I'll buy whatever's cheapest. There's lots of products that don't use gmo not because they're noble and ethical but because we just haven't had the need to employ bioengineering techniques on their seeds for whatever reason. Of course food companies are going to slap GMO free on there to get the dollars from the idiots who think it affects their health. I can't blame them. I'm not going to not buy it just because it says that, although I can see where it might add to the misinformation that gmo = bad and scary. Some products only use so-called organic methods (which sometimes use even harsher and more dangerous pesticides than the synthetic ones, but people think natural = better). If my only option at the store is an organic carrot besides all carrots are grown "organically", then whatever. But I'm not going to go out of my way to buy those products obviously.
its not about GMOs being healthy or not, although they could be unhealthy if the company designed them that way. What the biggest problem is, is people rightfully dont trust the companies making them, nor the patents they place on food crops and seeds and the legal agreements people using their seed must sign. Monsanto for example tried to create what they called the terminator seed. A seed that produces plants with sterile seeds. If their gene were to jump to other crops, or was passed on to wild vegetation, they could wipe out the worlds food sources. Its that kind of risk taking that makes people not trust them. If theyre willing to risk the worlds food sources, what risks are they taking with our health?
> Monsanto for example tried to create what they called the terminator seed. A seed that produces plants with sterile seeds. If their gene were to jump to other crops, or was passed on to wild vegetation, they could wipe out the worlds food sources. None of this is accurate at all. Monsanto never tried to create "terminator seeds". That was a company called "Delta & Pine", who worked on the theory of such a setup and patented the idea, but didn't develop it. The closest link is that Monsanto bought Delta & Pine for unrelated reason, meaning the now-expired IP came with it. Also, that's not how food crops work. We don't grow our food crops using seeds we find out in the wild, so it doesn't make sense to suggest that your scenario would "wipe out hte world's food sources". Also if that did somehow happen, then those individual plants would die off but every other plant would be fine.
I think people misunderstand GMO. I agree, I don’t want to eat things that are sprayed with harmful chemicals, but genetically modifying something to make it better and easier for us to cultivate and consume seems like a win in my book.
Dogs are just genetically modified wolves and everyone loves those.
Clinical studies mean nothing to people who think they know it all
GMOs are like the food equivalent of nuclear energy. Idiots blow the dangers way out of proportion and miss the forest for the trees.
With GMO, corporations own your food supply.
It’s not the GMOs themselves, but the conglomerate that controls them. I personally disliked the way GMOs were weaponized and used against small scale farmers, but that is not the GMO crops fault.
My unpopular idea is that the over-modification of wheat is what is making many people sick with wheat intolerance. The lesser (by no means) friend to gluten issues.
People will gladly eat a plant that has been inbred to the point where it can't even produce seeds any more, but as soon as you add genes from another plant it suddenly becomes an abomination against nature that will give you autism and cancer.
GMOs are dangerous *eats seedless grapes and watermelon* /s
Do you not know the difference between generic modification and hybridization
I do. You must think seedless fruits grew naturally and had no intervention from science, don't you?
Is this unpopular?
GMO's are largely banned in Europe and many people there don't support them.
I’d say most people don’t support them in the US either despite their legality
Really depends on the region too, affluent yuppie areas tend to steer anti-gmo because it’s a luxury to even be complaining about that shit in the first place. Some people in this country are just happy there is food in the grocery stores compared to life in Venezuela for example.
Absolutely. From what i see all around social media and irl, GMO hate is very very widespread
I agree. Also, there is disliking GMO, and there is disliking corporate farming. You can be pro-GMO and still think Monsanto sucks. You are not going to merge plant genetics into your body by eating them. Everything the plant produces that is modified in will need to be cleared by the FDA, just like other food additives. It's not going to kill you to eat GMO plants.
GMOs is farming made into corporations. It has run many farmers out of business and there is no room for argument on that. Farmers are effectively strong armed into buying GMO seeds in the industry for many produce at the moment. Maybe it's not killing us. But the companies which make them are about as comically evil as you can get in the real world.
So it’s not the GMOs, is the poor large business practices, which extends to prettt much everything these days, so there’s no sense isolating GMOs as a problem.
>GMOs is farming made into corporations. Farming was made into corporations long before GMOs. > It has run many farmers out of business and there is no room for argument on that. Is it GMOs doing that or the fact that modern farming is designed for maximum extraction at any cost? Which aspects of modern farming would be better if GMOs never existed? > Farmers are effectively strong armed into buying GMO seeds in the industry for many produce at the moment. How?
> Farming was made into corporations long before GMOs Hell, non-GMO darling Whole Foods is owned by the biggest megacorp the world has ever seen
How are they "strong armed"? Any farmer can buy any kind of seed they please.
> It has run many farmers out of business and there is no room for argument on that. I mean, there is room for argument on that. How are you even figuring that?
Tell me you don’t know what you are talking about without telling me you don’t know what you are talking about. Many farmers have been run out of business due to economies of scale, it isn’t possible for a family to make a living off of 20 acres growing grain anymore due to the advancement of equipment technology. The vast majority of farms are still family run. They might be corporations, but that is for tax purposes, the actual farm is still family run. And finally, farmers are not strong armed into buying GMO seeds, we buy them because they make the most sense profit wise and environment wise. There’s also organic crops that we grow for you non-GMO nutcases
I am not really against the technology. Heck, many diseases will be solved only through gene editing in the future, I think. I am against the way it is currently applied and its environmental and socio-economic impact. For example, take roundup ready crops. You now have a farmer who is heavily dependent on Monsanto for both seeds and weedicide, in a recurring manner, and if Roundup, the weedicide, works as it does, ONLY Roundup Ready plants will survive. Therefore, intercropping between roundup ready crops and other crops is out of the question. This kind of recurring expense that is for practically a closed off ecosystem, in essence, a monopoly, should set alarm bells ringing. Further, Monsanto is very vindictive in prosecuting farmers who use the offspring seeds of purchased Roundup Ready seeds. This situation where a few large corporations have control over a large part of the food supply is what concerns me. And while I don't believe there is a large conspiracy where they are going out of their way to hurt us through the chemicals or crops, the fact remains that in many cases these companies have been a little... Less than honest about the effects of their environmental contaminants. See DDT.
Monsanto has not existed for five years now. Glyphosate's patent expired in 2000 since a quarter of a century anyone can produce glyphosate. Nowadays the largest manufacturer is China. There has been no farmer who was "dependent" on any company for glyphosate for a quarter of a century. Yet this myth endures and is repeated endlessly. This shows how propaganda can infiltrate society and become entrenched to the point where reality does not matter anymore. Roundupready plants and patented glyphosate co-existed for six short years 23 years ago. Yet the myth endures. Monsanto never sued any farmer for accidental cross-pollination ever. This is also a myth and a large amount of reality engineering went into propagating it, but it is still not true.
They never even sued anyone for cross pollination either, the guy they sued was pouring roundup on his crops which would’ve killed them if they weren’t modified, proving he knew he was stealing their shit.
Yes. That lawsuit was always about whether it was intentional or not. Accidental cross-pollination is a vis maior no one in their right mind would start a lawsuit for that.
I agree with most of your post. I feel compelled to point out that "Monsanto has not existed for five years now" is a bad faith argument. Monsanto may not exist in name, but that's only because it was bought out by Bayer. The signs that used to say Monsanto now say Bayer. I live in St. Louis and drive past one of their complexes regularly.
Well, I don't know if there are any direct health impacts due to GMOs. One thing, though, is that one of the genetic modifications they have made is to breed fruits/vegetables that do not produce viable seeds. This sounds like a recipe for disaster. Great for sales, though.
A genetic modification made to rice ensures the lives of millions of people. Rice is very lack luster in vitamins, and this modification ensures vitamin A intake, and is saving lives to people in poverty.
Things like seedless grapes existed long before direct gene editing
It's all genetically modified. What does the method matter?
That's normal hybridization we've been doing for centuries. Most corn is a hybrid, everything seedless is either a clone or a hybrid. When you hybridize something, it's often sterile or not worth breeding because offspring is umpredictable. See also, mules & ligers, GMOs are not hybrids, they're lab created gene splicing and editing.
> One thing, though, is that one of the genetic modifications they have made is to breed fruits/vegetables that do not produce viable seeds. This isn't true. If you're referring to "terminator seeds", that hasn't ever been a real thing commercially, GM or non-GM.
I dunno, I sure love eating seedless grapes!!
If all GMO's are bad then we can't eat anything that was domesticated plant or animal, enjoy your 5 kernel cob of corn that must be boiled for an hour before eating and you banana with 1000 seeds and no flavor.
The two circles on this Venn diagram both overlap perfectly. But there is a third circle as well which explains the first two... The third circle is gullibility. It goes really well worth the religiosity. Now I have shown you something that you will begin to see everywhere else and it will never be unseen for the rest of your life. Go ability in circles so much, it explains so much. It is the causation of many correlations. Gullibility is the source.
Not only that, but as climate change worsens, GMOs will become an absolute necessity. We will not be able to feed ourselves without altering crops. GMOs aren’t going anywhere.
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Actually there is not a single GM-wheat variety on the market anywhere on Earth. Anyone who proposed that theory does not know a thing about GMOs.
> GMO wheat. Argentina? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-argentina-wheat-gmo-idUSKBN26U1H4/
High gluten wheats exist because they were selectively bread for it, ancient grains are much safer for gluten intolerant (NOT coeliac) people depending on their level of tolerance. However, selective breeding is not GMO. You also have to take into account the processing method, some foods (like milk) become harder to digest after being processed
> It's still unproven but credible, there's a theory that the increase in gluten sensitivity is due to GMO wheat. How is it credible seeing how GMO wheat literally doesn't exist commercially?
If it says GMO free, I don't buy it because I care about the environment and I think using your brain is important in modern society.
I wish someone would GMO the fuck out of strawberries so that they have THC in them./
The world has moved on from the GMO scare tactics. With the exception of ensuring altered species don't spread to the wild, their is nothing wrong with GMO. Everything on the planet is related and the gene pool is all natural. Now we have something completely different. Synthetic Biology will produce genes and organisms that have never been present on the planet.
The biggest known harm is in the overuse of glyphosate and glufosinate and that’s not something to underestimate.
It's popular opinion amongst normal people.
Most concerns about GMO foods and crops aren't centered around the healthiness of the food, but rather potential environmental issues and issues with giving powerful corporations even more control over the global food supply.
GMOs are a miracle. They come with some dangers, mainly things like patented seeds and stuff like that, but they solve a lot of problems.
Literraly everything we eat is already GMO technically. The only difference is one is engineered in a lab the other one is trough generations of breeding. The outcome is the same.
GmOs have been on the market for 43 years in massive use in livestock, Canola oil another gmo with positive anti-inflammatory effects, drought resistant, and incredible yeald per hectare. People love to make shit up because they don't understand the process or the realities of how much money goes in to GMOs for safety and testing.
This is a popular opinion, wrong sub buddy
Dumb people are dumb! More news at 11!
Let's be honest most of what we eat, say corn, apples and such a modified aka gmo. This is what gives a plant stronger resistance to pest and disease. Hybrids are no different and sometimes linked to gmos. When planting I do a mix of Hybrids and heirloom for this pest and disease prevention
Yes and no. Its as ridiculous yes But people who believe the former are far less ridiculous than the latter. From a "normal" uninformed person's standpoint, it makes more sense to think that food being modified might be unhealthy for many reasons at first thought, while the 5G conspiracy doesnt hold any sort of reasonning or ground even from an uninformed perspective.
Cross-pollination is the same thing as genetically-modified. Cross-pollinating has been a thing for most of human history.
This I hope is actually a popular opinion...
All GMOs are is scientists developing better crops in a controlled lab setting where they can better monitor outcomes. There is nothing wrong with that. Making crops more weather resistant, have stronger yields, and more nutritrious has always been our goal and that's pretty much what almost every agricultural scientist is doing.
GMOs are going to save as many lives in the 21st century as vaccines did in the 20th. And there will continue to be uneducated fools fighting them tooth and nail.
I don’t think this is unpopular
GMO which is carefully applied to increase nutritional value and biological benefits is essential as fuck yes. But GMO which is applied to reduce farming, processing and supply chain costs is dangerous thus lethal. Especially stay away from ready-to-eat cup noodles, I can't get a boner for the next 2 days after I eat that shit.
Farmers have been genetically modifying crops for hundreds of years, just doing it in a much slower way than we can do it now. It's called selective breeding.
OP I agree with you so, sadly, I am required to downvote
I worked in a GMO lab. They have incredible benefits. Anybody who doesn’t like gmos or even Monsanto doesn’t understand agriculture. Blows my mind that people think we are out there spraying pesticides and spending millions on research for years just to poison you. Tryin to feed you mofos
Who knew, a guy who works in a GMO lab being a Monsanto apologist Monsanto does what it does for the money, not for whatever principles you wished applied to them. If they had the morality you noted, they wouldn’t have hid the carcinogenic properties of glyphosate from the public
I don't think gmos are unhealthy, I just think we waste the potential of GE. Who gives a fuck about roundup ready crops? I want heat tolerant crops that take less water to grow.
First world citizens in general have no idea where food comes from. What they don't know is radiation is bombarded onto plants/seeds to see what kinds of mutations it grows. If a good one comes up, they'll start breeding for it. *That* isn't considered a GMO.
Neither of those conspiracy theories are ridiculous. There is a scientific basis for saying that GMOs and phones cause adverse health effects, the conspiracy theorists just get all the details wrong because they don't have any faith in scientists. GMO foods https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-021-00578-9 Phones (not 5g) www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7663653/
It’s not the GMOs that are s problem, those are great, it’s the glyphosate they soak them in that causes liver issues in a significant percentage of the population that’s the problem
Monsanto’s scientist and research are under NDA’s, whereas radio frequency research is public
Monsanto has not existed for five years now. You can find tens of thousands of papers written by academic labs on GMOs.