GMO's How much do we really know?

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It is rare I start a topic, but I was reading this Canadian magazine yesterday at lunch and to be honest it horrified me.

In North America, companies are not required to tell us when we are eating genetically altered foods. Not only that these companies are contaminating normal crops, or organic crops and claiming them as their own under copyright laws. This does not apply to Europe where I do believe they are required to label when a food has been genetically altered.
To my Europian friends I ask, Do you read that label? Does it affect your food purchases, or do you disregard and feel that eating an apple that has been genetically altered is no different then your organic variety?

What is your take? Do you think we should stand up and force these companies to tell us when we are eating a food that has been altered?

 

The thing with genetical engineered crops is that they are not really tested, any long term effects are unknown. In theory it is all good but we dont know what effect they might have on the human body in the long run. There have been quite the ruckus hereabouts about GMO's and I am pretty sure it is law that products including them are to be labeled. I think this is a fairly basic thing to do, just like we label what species of potato we buy we should label whether it has been modfied or not. I personally have no fear for GMO's but I think the labeling should be there.

 

I agree with Joacqin. I'm a vegetarian and if I buy corn and the like I don't want to eat twisted food.

But IIRC it's illegal to not label twisted food here in Sweden, meaby Joacquin can give us some more info 'bout that.

 

I don't know if they have to label it in Belgium, although awhile ago there was a huge discussion if a law about it should be implemented. I don't remember the result though. But I agree it should be put on the products, just as companies now are forced to put an ingredient list on their products.

Another reason, except that which joacqin said, is that they don't know how GMOs react with people who have allergies to some of the other organism where they got the DNA they implanted in the GMOs.

I don't think GMOs are bad necessarily but I'm convinced they should do some more testing first.

 

Well, when buying something, I obviously have the right to know what I buy. If the opinion prevails, that genetical modified food or ingridients are as save or even saver as "conventional" food, fine. It's still my right to be not that convinced, feel insecure about it and be able to clearly see, what food is modified, which is not and being able to buy complete unmodified food. In Switzerland, the have the right to say something is "not modified" if they can prove it about the whole production process. If there's something modified in it, it has to be labelel. We decide soon if we make the laws stricter. I am all for it.

 

If possible, I buy vegetables and fruits from farmers at a local market. Fortunately, there's one very close to where I live. I don't take anything that looks tweaked. If something is geometrically perfect, it's suspicious. The same goes for overly saturated colours.

 

I know that. I had biology in school too and Mendel's roses. And I live well of animals and food bred for certain topographical circumstances. Yet, that is not my concern about it, i.e. "no messing with nature at all in the name of some romanticised utopic past that never was" nor is it really an argument pro safety a rapid modifications, not long term tested, broadly distributed. Indeed, they can make and test it. I just do not want to be the test-object and then... oops, we haven't considered something... bad luck.

Indeed, related in a way is BSE. I see it as by-product of speeding up the food-production process through making animals to cannibals. I am not against speeding up production and make things cheap aviable in bigger quantities per se. I just want precautions and not a learning by doing approach with whole populations.

 

Labels, yes. Consumers need to have a choice. Dangerous? So is going outside and getting exposed to the sun. Inhaling second hand smoke. Ice cream is dangerous. Like any technology accelerant, genetic engineering should proceed with caution, but there really is no need for all this unwarranted paranoia.

 

@ Blackthorne TA
I know people have been crossing existing plants with each other for centuries and indeed that is a form of genetical engineering. But it is there that the problem with allergies first came to be known. I don't remember the details so I will make a general example.

There was a plant X. They wanted to cross it with a plant Y. It worked and created a new variety of X. But with the added effects of the plant X gaining the wanted immunities of plant Y, also came the problem that people who were allergic to Y (but not necessarily X), also were allergic to the new variety of X, although in all respects it was still the same type of plant.

This is one of the problems that can arise if you genetically engineer plants (and maybe animals) and therefore there should be plenty of tests before a new product is brought on the market, which IMHO isn't happening right now.

If only they'd check our food as much as that of our pets, we wouldn't have to worry about the quality of our food as we do now.

 

This is something I do not understand. Please educate me.

What is it that there is to be afraid of, of genetically modified plant food-sources?

Prions. Ok. Check.

What else?

 

Well, I certainly will not buy genetically modified foods because I do not know what has been done, and the consequences for this. I have read several reports, and often there seems to be various negative effects on people. Nothing can be conclusively proved, the same way that it has not been proved that cigarettes cause health problems either. I don't think anyone buys that, so I don't buy all the PR hype about how good GM foods are either.

But I also do not buy foods grown with chemicals, like pesticides and fertilizers, if I am aware of it, for similar, almost identical, reasons

We will also not buy foods from large commercial companies, both because the food is suspect, the companies have shown their untrustworthiness, and I do not like to support the existence of such things in the first place.

You see, a lot of the health problems we think are to do with food are closely related to the artificial additives. Like the preservative that is placed on fish, on the boats once they are caught, is highly carcinogenic, and leads to asthma-like problems in asthmatics and non-asthmatics alike in some cases. People think it is the fish, but more than often it is not.

It's about a respect for the truth. These companies know they haven't really even considered what harm may be done through this method, yet alone what else they have done to the food as well. They should respect the truth and be up-front about their actions, so people may make a choice based on all they have to know.

By the way, I'd like to see someone cross a tomato and a squid using husbandry.

I don't like them on an ethical basis either. I remember a case where a company had released a strain of their genetic crops, one which dies after the first year of fruiting, so people must buy more seeds to grow, or the grapes directly from them, in the wild and contaminated many many grape-plants. They also sued farmers whose crops had been contaminated, -read; destroyed- as they had violated a copyright by having that particular strain on their plantation. I don't like the large commercial farmers business much either, but they were clearly wronged here, and any company that will do such things will not benefit from me.

I've read up a lot on this stuff, not solely related to food. I don't keep an encyclopediac knowledge on what each chemical compound is linked to, once I learn something is harmful I just avoid it until I learn differently.

 

BTA, I actually thought that involved, but now that you bring up the idea that it could not be involved, you make me insecure. I have to check. But I am not so worried about crossing in traditional ways anyway, I think the risk is getting higher when more technic involved. The more technic involved, the more testing is necessary, my personal rule of thump.

Well, for the dangers, two.

A. The new stuff may have unforseen consequences when consumed. Unpredicted, there for testing is needed, long term. This obviously is also given for traditional breeding, yet the spread of those used to be slow. Indeed that reminds of the thread about Indians and that they have less tolerance of alcohol, while the Europeans were actually bred to be able to consume alcohol in huge quantities to survive the circumstances under which they lived. People are different and react different to the same things. And also, that the joke about the modification is, to make tomatoes look longer like they were "good", yet their appearance was made to deceive. I mean, declaration of food-colour is also standard. So simply, it gets on the market, because testing says fine. Cool, I wait until some real broad testing is finished, then I eat too.

B. How do they interact with nature. What happens when they interbreed wild with other plants, what if the push other plants away ? One should have enough species in reserve, monocultures are bad. I mean, like the potatoe. A joy bringing import from other parts of the world, many regions changed to potatoe-monocultures. As the potatoebeatle (?) also immigrated, he found his favourite food and no enemies, which caused the potatoefamine allover. Indeed, we have right now problems with a cancer-immigrant from another part of the world, which settles in our blue lakes and causes havoc and pushing the other cancers into oblivion and it's a big debate about what to do about it.

Don't nail me on the vocubalary.

 

Do don't see what the big deal is about genetically engineered foods.

The foods that may contain pesticides and other chemicals which are not found in nature, should be labeled.

Genetically engineered are all-natural even though it was science played a significant role in their "evolution".

 

Natural vs non-natural is a marketing ploy. Heard of ricin? That's natural. Very un-artifical. And very toxic. Just because something is natural doesn't mean it's good.

Anyway, crops free of pesticides develop resistance to disease by producing their own *natural* toxins. Just as bad.

 

@ Tassadar

I couldn't agree more.

 

Tassadar and Blackhawk, Allthough the 'organic' label often is used merely as an advertising ploy, (by compaines I don't buy food from either BTW) foods contaminated with GM product and concentrated doses of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, preservatives, and other artificially or naturally occuring, but artificially added products are more harmful than the product in and of itself, and the naturally occuring chemicals in plants are of a lesser concentration, a lesser toxicity, and have a reduced number of other side effects than the ones added by people artificially.

Arsenic occurs naturally as well, but you don't see anyone adding that to their food. Just because poisons are grown in nature does not mean that it's ok to injest man-made poisins, or natuarally occuring poisons added artificially.

But if you want to belive the people adding the poisons, instead of the ones who got sick from them, that's up to you.

But I agree that everything should be concisely labelled, not just GM foods. It's about honesty. You may have no problem with GM foods, but many people do, and they should not be misinformed about what it is they are purchasing.

Edit: For the record, I avoid a lot of foods with naturally occuring toxins as well, like peanuts.

[ January 11, 2004, 10:45: Message edited by: Manus ]

 

But that's just the point I'm making. The traditional crossing proved that there are risks involved that aren't immediately apparant. Therefore I say we should be at least so carefull with genetically engineered food, since mostly the people that do the engineering know what effect is linked to the genetic code they're implementing but don't know what side effects it will also produce. Genetical engineering is still too much in it's early stages to be trusted IMHO.

But the crops that die after a year were created before genetical engineering IIRC, and indeed this poses an ethical question since the only reason for doing so is indeed that the farmers need to buy new seeds every year.

@ Manus
I agree that the pesticides and so are a far greater risk but that doesn't mean we should neglect the smaller risks of sideeffects, since alot of smalls makes one big. But the good thing about genetically engineered crops is that they can make them to resist the things we use those products for naturally. So this removes the need for pesticides and other such products that are bad for our health.

 

Meatdog, I'm right with you there, that the side effects and smaller risks are just as important to monitor, those small effects add up. Where did you get that from? I don't remember saying anything about ignoring them... Anyway the thing I always ask when they say GM foods can resist those diseases or 'pests' is how?

Whatever they have done to make a plant immune to disease (like the bacteria within our immune system), or to produce poisons and kill bugs, makes me wonder what that will do to me when I ingest it.

So to me, this removes the problems of chemicals, but adds another to the tally of questionable side-effects.