On 12/04/2009 02:29 PM, Rick Monteverde wrote:
Sure it's propagated from a clean tested starter batch, etc. The problem is
that what you don't know can kill you, and there's so much that is unknown,
and so much that can kill you.
Do you know how much of the human genome is of recent (and ancient) viral
and bacterial origin?
No but I bet it's a lot.
Are you aware of how much modification goes on from
such sources, and would you even consider such a thing as a risk? The
conventional answers would likely be "no", but you might want to take a look
at some of the recent discoveries on horizontal gene transfer and the
activation of dormant sequences. The same factors in less similar meat, or
the GMO's that the food hippies are so terrified of,
Speaking as a sort of "food hippie", I'd say there's actually something
much more significant wrong with current-day GMO food, which has nothing
to do with the GM operation itself nor any potential "contamination" by
genes which the manufacturers didn't intend to have get into the end
product.
The problem is the choices made by the seed companies when they went
ahead with GM seeds. They didn't go for extra-high-yield grain that can
mature in 2 weeks (for use on the Moon, of course), or tomatoes that
taste like peanut butter, or any of the things ignorant folks like me
might have fantasized about. Instead, they went straight for what seems
to be the "gold standard" in ideal grains: They went for insect resistance.
And insect resistance seems to translate into plants which manufacture
their own pesticides.
The most widely publicized one, which really made it obvious what was
going on, was BT corn, of course. Unlike corn which has been sprayed,
and which has toxins on the surface which can be washed off, BT corn
manufactures a toxin which is present in all parts of the plant. In
other words, the whole plant, corn kernels included, is poisonous, and
no washing or post-harvest treatment can change that. Of course the
toxin is only supposed to affect insects (corn borers, bees, Monarch
butterflies, and other pests) and is not supposed to affect humans, but
equally "of course" that's only supposed to be true at "low
concentrations" and the most intense BT corn is not approved for human
consumption. (If it's a little poisonous to humans, well, what's it
doing in a food crop to start with? And if it's not even a little
poisonous to humans, why are there restrictions on how much of the toxin
can be present in the plant if it's to be sold as food? Hmph.)
Now I haven't researched exactly what goes into GM potatoes or soy
beans, to name two, and maybe they're getting nothing more than
roundup-resistance (which is *presumably* harmless to humans, since it
doesn't involve having the plant manufacture poisons), but I'd bet a lot
that insect resistance has something to do with the popularity of those
seeds, and insect resistance suggests pretty strongly that GM soy and GM
potatoes are also intrinsically poisonous.
And I find that very unappealing.
Before you jump all over me for *assuming* rather than researching it,
keep in mind that GM foods are not labeled in any way, and there is in
particular no way to tell what *variety* of GM soy or potato (or horse
or whatever) went into its manufacture. And a lot of this stuff is
proprietary. So, at the very best, I might be able to determine that
*some* varieties of *some* GM seeds are really obviously harmless to
humans, and safe to eat. But that wouldn't tell me about *all*
varieties on the market, nor about the particular varieties which went
into the bag of chips I'm about to buy. So, ultimately, I could waste a
lot of time researching particular known genes used in GM foods, and I
would no doubt just confirm what I already surmise: Some are obviously
safe, but maybe not all, and I can't tell what's in a GM food, so I
would still end up assuming the worst, and avoiding them all as much as
possible.
In short, BT corn is the existence proof for "intentionally toxic" foods
created with genetic engineering. And given that the manufacturers
aren't tell us exactly what goes into a particular GM food, the
existence of such foods is justification for avoiding all GM food, IMHO.
might not be as risky
or familiar to human tissue as the stuff in 'close' meat. Familiarity breeds
danger. So there's that and the damaged proteins and their coding, prions,
unknown triggers for cancers and other diseases, mutations, etc. I could go
on and on here but for the sake of brevity let's just say that the gods
simply do not approve. Someday maybe when genetics is completely understood
and can be properly engineered, I might take a bite of that sandwich. But
certainly not now. Rent the movie Gattaca from 12 years ago if you haven't
seen it, and think about how incredibly complex life's coding is, and how
little we really know about its processes and interactions.
And I apologize for previously misspelling soylent, if there is a correct
way to spell a made-up movie word.
R.
