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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
GMOs already have to be evaluated by the FDA and determined that they have to be nutritionally indistinguishable from the non-GMO base food. Forcing products to be labeled "contains GMO" does nothing for consumer health or safety, it's just an attempt by the anti-GMO crowd to make their fearmongering mainstream. If you want to institute standards for a "GMO free" label, then that's one thing — but GMO advocates don't like that idea as much, because then it puts the burden on them instead of shifting it to everyone else.
I think of it like this: avoiding GMO foods is a lifestyle choice, not a health concern. It's like being a vegan, not like having a food allergy. There's a very good reason to force everyone to label allergens in their products (because if I'm allergic to peanuts and your product has peanuts in it but doesn't say "contains peanuts" anywhere on the label, then I could die), and there's a very good reason to enforce consistent standards for a "vegan" label (to prevent unscrupulous companies from taking advantage of consumers by labelling their products vegan when they're not). But forcing everything but vegan products to label themselves "non-vegan" is stupid, because whether or not your product is vegan (or contains GMO foods) isn't actually a health concern.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Doesn't ascorbic acid (AKA Vitamin C) have an E- number?
On empty crossroads, seek the eclipse -- for when Sol and Lua align, the lost shall find their way home.
Yes. The package usually says "Vitamin C (E300)". It's just a classification method.
The EU put a ban on some GMO since there wasn't that much information on it at the time. Everybody then just kind of forgot about it. Now it's mostly everyone arguing over farming subsidies, Monsanto's business practices and TTIP. Meaning everything that surrounds GMO, rather than the subject itself.
edited 10th Jul '16 9:12:37 AM by TerminusEst
Si Vis Pacem, Para PerkeleLabeling, in my opinion, wouldn't make a huge difference either way, but it could potentially expedite the discovery that something undesirable had ended up passing under the radar. It doesn't even have to be something potentially lethal, which would almost certainly be noticed well before the product hit shelves, just something unwanted. For example, say a new crop contains a trace amount of a chemical that gives 5% of the human population a mild allergic (hives and watery eyes lets say) reaction if a large amount of the product is consumed. In cases where similar mistakes have gone unnoticed in the validation process of pharmaceuticals, the cause is usually established by piecing together a pattern of similar symptoms being reported to doctors with a particular medication being a common factor.
I don't care particularly strongly either way; it's not a huge issue, but people seem to care about it, and I don't see any compelling reason to deny them that information.
edited 10th Jul '16 9:11:56 AM by CaptainCapsase
I also don't see any compelling reason to provide them the information either.
Non Indicative Username
How about a system of Traffic Light Labelling
(for Fat, Saturated Fats, Sugar & Salt) on food?
I recall a news item about some brand of ketchup that was billed as "all natural" because it contained honey as a sweetener. But FDA regulations stated that a food product could only be labelled "all natural" if it contained refined sugar as a sweetener. Honey wasn't on their list of all-natural ingredients. Go figure.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.It's particularly strange that only refined (IE, man-made) sugar would be considered "natural".
Having said that, it helps that honey is chemically very similar to high-fructose corn syrup. So similar, in fact, that it's hard to tell the difference between honey with corn syrup added to it and honey with no added ingredients.
edited 10th Jul '16 10:00:12 AM by Protagonist506
Leviticus 19:34"Refined" <> "Man-made". The sugar is still coming from plant sources and is processed in a manufacturing facility. To state that it becomes "artificial" as soon as it touches a factory is insane.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The argument I've heard for GMO labeling from people who don't think it's inherently harmful is that it allows consumers to avoid supporting manufacturers they believe engage in dubious ethical business practices, but... aren't they supposed to put company labels on it regardless? Companies like Monsanto could just get around it via shell corporations or the like.
I'd personally like to see labeling that goes beyond "this product contains a GMO", that's not particularly useful. "This product contains this specific GMO strain" is much more pertinent; not everyone wants to be an early adopter (of a new GMO strain in this case), and I consider that to be a valid position.
edited 10th Jul '16 11:00:36 AM by CaptainCapsase
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Well, that's certainly not the case for Monsanto — they're not involved with the actual distribution and sale of crops grown from their products.
I can imagine the logistics of that might be interesting — such as tracing the products used in animal feed...
edited 10th Jul '16 11:02:48 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling OnWhile most individuals that I hear worrying about the GMO issue are the sort who are afraid of frankenfoods, the one time I heard the leadership of an anti-GMO group talk, they were much more focused on the biology of how GMOs are used. Specifically, that agribusiness is breeding them to be as pesticide resistant as possible, so that the crop could get sprayed to hell and back with more pesticides and more powerful ones whose interaction with the human system is iffy at best.
Furthermore, (at least according to the case these folks were presenting) the industry seems to have little thought for what happens when, inevitably, the various organisms out there become immune to these newer and stronger pesticides.
Now, the potential for bias is always worth remembering, and I roll my eyes as much as anyone at the frankenfoods crowd, but there were some legitimate points in there that I hadn't thought of before, and it does make me somewhat more sympathetic to their cause.
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |I've heard about one valid-seeming argument about GM Os being a problem and it's on the farming end: People trying to cultivate partciluar strains of crop plans, i.e. herlooms, are finding they're getting cross-contimination from the GMO stuff several fields over. I'm less sure where I heard this next bit or how accurate it is, but there may have been cases of the GMO-producing companies suing the smaller farmers about "patented" GMO genes in their open-polinated crops.
Actually, the whole "intellectual property genetics" thing is fairly thorny. It pushes farmers away from being self-sufficient by forcing them to buy seed instead of saving for the next year and you can end up with situations where the farm is continuously in debt to the "company store".
On top of everything, the business and PR practices of Monsanto, et. al. are shitty and obstructionist and lawyer-happy, which makes it look like they're hiding stuff even when the science is on the side of GMO plants.
Well, traditional hybrid seeds have to be bought yearly as well
. The varieties are bred so that a second generation will have reduced yields.
GMO contamination: To the best of my recollection, farmers growing GMO crops are explicitly instructed by the seed vendors to grow a buffer of conventional crops around the GMO crops to prevent this from happening. At least, to other farmers who didn't buy and grow the GMO crops in question.
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiotIn the case of GMO patenting and "hybrid" seeds, there's a detectable difference between unintentionally contaminated conventional crops, intentionally contaminated crops, and the GM Os themselves that it shouldn't be too hard to prove that you're not guilty of infringing on their patent. There have, however, been cases were people declared that their plants were merely accidentally contaminated but the courts ruled that the defendant intentionally mixed their crops with plants illegally.
Leviticus 19:34It's not that hybrid seeds are intentionally made to degrade so much as a fact of how genetics works. Hybrids are a cross between two different species: the first time you plant it, you get exactly that cross, but if you let it self-polinate, the resulting seeds will be a random mis-mash of the parent genes. Admittedly, with a lot of work and further selective breeding you could get something close to the original hybrid...eventually.
The main attraction to hybrid seeds though is that they do what they advertise in terms of yield, etc. The main pushback against hybrid seeds is basically from gourmets, who correctly note that being bred for better yield, resistance to damage, etc, doesn't always translate to taste (see: the modern tomato and the explosion of heirloom varieties in the last several years) and ecologists who point out that monoculture crops are a risky venture and biodiversity in the food chain would not be a bad thing.
Texas Congressman Warns Against "Gay Space Colonies" to Prevent the Apocalypse
.
I'm fairly certain I know where he got the idea
:
He is the Speaker of Doom.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Well, if non-vetted GMOs are the problem, it's the manufacturers that should be regulated; Protagonist has it right when it comes to the "science is BAD!!!111!!eleventyone" crowd.
On empty crossroads, seek the eclipse -- for when Sol and Lua align, the lost shall find their way home.