GMO, Monsanto, organic dreadlocked nonsense?

fanaskin_sl said:

There wouldn't be apopulation bubbleor the tools of war that would cause that either, altrusim isn't the mother of invention, most tech is driven by countries/major actors desire to strengthen themselves to compete with each other for resources, chicken/egg.

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Sure there would. The largest growths in population come from low technology societies. Where technology doesn't exist, the power of each individual person to augment the power of a single actor is greater. So, more people have children to increase their power--where as now, technology and capital (In whatever form wealth takes) are the major power brokers. The fact is, the moment we learned to farm, our inability to maintain an equilibrium with nature was sealed, our population was destined to explode regardless of a super-actor (Like a states) interest.

Unless you're bringing us back to hunter gatherer level tech, which....I'm sure if I showed how we would need to be digging seeds out of our shit just to survive the coming winter, the person would find it equally abhorrent and embrace technology anyway. And yes, I know hunter/gatherers didn't work as hard as popular myths believe, in fact, they worked less hard than farmers...But their life was still drastically more difficult than even many backwater places today, few exceptions noted. So the point still stands, if I showed someone a world without technology, I'mpositivethey'd opt for all the genetically altered, hydrocarbon exploited goodness we have today. (Hell most people wouldn't even choose to life "of the grid" even with modern tools like Solar Panels available.)

Monsanto is bad for a lot of reasons. Patent laws chief among them, but also because the inherent danger in massive monocropping. GMO food is bad not because anything really unhealthy has been proven from it, but because eliminating diversity from a crop is a recipe for disaster once some really nasty microbe figures out a way around the roundup ready GMOs that dominate the food market.

GMOs Arent That Bad, But Monsanto Is the Worst | VICE Canada

You should eat organic foods because they taste better and its simply a good idea to support farms and farmers that are independent of Monsanto.

So that means there shouldn't be an alternative to Monsanto products? Nobody is against giving farmers better ability to grow food, but does that justify Monsanto making them indentured servants and using terminator seeds? Monsanto is a great example of the ends not justifying the means.

I choose to spend as much of money on food as practical not supporting this corporation.

And yes, Organic fruits and vegetables DO taste better. Organic eggs taste better. Organically feed meats taste better. Most significantly because they travel far fewer miles from the farm to your table, but for a number of other reasons as well. Eat locally as much as humanly possible. There just is no downside to it.

BrutulTM_sl said:

wrong

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How important is the organic food movement? - Curiosity

But what do they know?

To me, this sums up alot of what I think about "organic" Organic isnt a label, and that label doesnt necessarily mean anything in some states and places, but local, truely sustainable and organic food absolutly tastes better. You cant tell me a tomato grown in your garden doesnt taste better than the one in the plastic wrapped 3 pack for .99. Real organic farms are far closer to that than the mega mono farm from South America will ever be.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_...th_a_fish.html

Thats where food SHOULD be going.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/us...nted=all&_r=3&

Good article about the recent GMO ordinance in Hawaii.

You probably could support 7.5+ billion with organic farming. What you could not do it support that population at something which resembles the current technology level.

You take one cubicle-drone out of his 90% pointless office job and put him into the fields doing some honest work (or anywhere else in the food-to-market supply chain) and that probably seems like an improvement. You take 1,000,000 of them out of their slave-cubes and put them to work in the fields and what you have done is entirely changed the nature (and potentials) of the society they exist in.

Just ask China.

And you've made it less stable. 1 drought cycle and we get a war.

rRNA is good. The ethics of how these new technologies are being being handled... those sometimes tend to be completely fucked up.

I meant more with their whole Cultural Revolution thing where they were trying to change the nature of their society.

And they all starved the fuck to death.

But yeah, it was a nebulous allusion.

ZyyzYzzy_sl said:

I just want to know how many people opposed to GMO's actually know about genetic engineering, genomics, molecular biology, and biochemistry.

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Very few. Most of the people in my circle of friends are biology grad students and post docs and even though most of em are pretty granola, everyone acknowledges the need for smart GMO products. As stated earlier, we have to feed 7.5 billion dumb dumbs that won't have the ability or know-how to provide for their own food in any significant quantities. Unless we start de-urbanizing. And I don't think that's going to happen.

Lleauaric_sl said:

How important is the organic food movement? - Curiosity

But what do they know?

To me, this sums up alot of what I think about "organic" Organic isnt a label, and that label doesnt necessarily mean anything in some states and places, but local, truely sustainable and organic food absolutly tastes better. You cant tell me a tomato grown in your garden doesnt taste better than the one in the plastic wrapped 3 pack for .99. Real organic farms are far closer to that than the mega mono farm from South America will ever be.

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Organic may not be a label to you, but to the overwhelming majority of people it is just that, including the people in those videos. And the label is the driving force behind the organic market. You hear Martha Stewart begin with toxins and disease and you know it's going to be the same rehashed, refuted crap that you always hear from people trying to justify paying $10/lb for bell peppers.

Organic foods tend to taste better because the farmer is growing a better product for a high end market. You can't compare the watery $.99 tomatoes grown for the frozen dinner plebeians with ingredients that go into a $55 plate at the Wynn and say "See, organic tastes better!"

I actually have no idea what organic has to do with what you are saying, now that I think about it. You are just saying high quality products taste better than low quality products.