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| 5/17 |
| 2004/8/1-2 [Health/Disease/General, Recreation/Food] UID:32619 Activity:insanely high |
8/1 I found a bug on the organic Raomain I bought from Trader Joe. Is is
still edible as raw salad? I know organic farming means not relying on
pesticide to kill of bugs but would there be a danger from parasites?
\_ TROLL ALERT, TROLL ALERT
\_ Eat the bug and like it! If necessary, you CAN be wormed.
\_ If this sort of stuff bothers you, you can buy kosher food.
Many people do, even if their religion does not require it. -- ilyas
\_ It's food. Food that is grown is grown outside. Insects and
animals live outside. Food that is grown outside will be touched
by insects and animals. That is the way the world is. Occasionally
one of those insects will make it into the packaging, especially
with leafy greens. Throw the bug away and wash the lettuce, problem
solved. Are you people really that removed from where your food
comes from? -aspo
\_ Aspo, no offense, but you are an idiot. What about greenhouse
grown food? Is that 'outside'? Get a clue.
\_ Um, yeah, uh, greenhouse grown food is grown in an anti-
septic foam nutrient solution. Food technicians in
Intel "bunny suits" meticulously pluck any alien life
forms from salad leaves, carefully brushing each leaf to
ensure a complete absence of unwanted bugs, weeds,
chemicals, or icky "dirt". -John
\_ If you knew how many bug bits are in every carton of fruit
juice, organic or no, you probably wouldn't be bothered by
this at all. Still, I think the whole organic thing is BS.
Genetically modified often means the plants have better natural
resistance to pests, so they can use fewer pesticides than
organic crops, not more. BTW, leafy stuff should be fine if
you wash it. Sprouts, broccoli, etc, is the kind of thing you
should cook.
\_ If the pests don't even want to eat them, do you?
\_ I don't think you know what 'organic' means. The federal
standard provides that the food is produced without
pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, irraditation, or
bioengineering.
\_ While most organic farming is bs, there is one aspect in
which genetically modified crops are worse. Many gm grains
do not produce seeds that can be reused for the next growing
season which means that farmers must purchase new seeds
every year rather than simply take seeds from the last
harvest. The fact that farmers are beholden to ADM or some
other large conglomerate is worrying, but the main problem
is that by moving the natural selection process for grain
from the wild to the lab, we can make the grains less
able to cope with new forms of pests and infection.
There is another lesser concern with gm crops for some
peta/vegans, and that is crops which include animal genes
might violate their no exploting animals principle.
\_ There are no crops for consumption that I'm aware of
that contain animal genes. When I've done work with
animal genes in plants, it's been as a research tool,
it serves no purpose to put an animal gene into a
plant for crop use.
\_ There's a strawberry which contains a protein from a fish
which makes them resistant to freezing (natural antifreeze)
I don't think it's been approved for human consumption,
though.
\_ http://www.geo-pie.cornell.edu/media/fishberries.html
\_ What about crops which are more resistant to herbicides
which encourage farmers to apply more weedkiller?
\_ Oh, and it's especially cute when the crop in question can
interbreed with wild varieties and give them herbicidal
resistance too.
\_ I think anyone who's done farming knows that it's always
better to try and use the minimal amount of chemicals.
The best way to do that, ultimately, will be with GM
crops, not organic. Besides which, organic crops alone
cannot produce enough yield to feed our population,
so unless 2 billion people volunteer to not eat in the
future, or environmentalists agree to start letting
us convert forests to farm land, then GM crops are the
only option. Besides, everything is genetically
modified, it's just that in the lab we can do it more
efficiently.
\_ You're not too bright are you? Just by switching from
slash and burn to organized agriculture I am sure we
could produce enough food. There isn't a shortage of
food in the world and this is not because of
pesticides. There's plenty of arable land left unused.
\_ You should read the Skeptical Environmentalist. He
makes it quite clear that by properly farming the
land already converted for agriculture use we could
easily feed the entire planet (even if the population
continues to increase). GM isn't really needed and
in the case of grains with the "terminator" gene,
it will actually make things worse since subsistence
farming will stop being the strong cheap source of
food for the developing world. |
| 5/17 |
|
| www.geo-pie.cornell.edu/media/fishberries.html About the creators of the GEO-PIE Project No anti-GMO literature would be complete without mentioning-- or even better, illustrating-- the"fishberry," the monstrous half-strawberry, half-fish. Even scientists and media sources frequently refer to tomatoes or strawberries with fish genes. The flounder gene encoded a protein which confers cold resistance to the fish. The goal was to develop tomato plants that could withstand frost in the field and fruits that resist cold damage in storage. This particular experiment however was a failure and did not produce frost resistant plants. Despite the failure, the story continues to circulate as if the experiment worked, or worse, as if the fish-gene tomato might exist or has ever existed in the marketplace. BBC special feature on genetic engineering uses the failed "tomato with fish genes" experiment to illustrate successful genetic engineering is particularly ironic. After explaining the steps of the process, the website concludes cheerily: "This GM tomato plant contains a copy of the flounder antifreeze gene in every one of its cells. The plant is tested to see if the fish gene still works. AFPs-- technically called thermal hysteresis proteins-- prevent freezing damage to cellular structures by slowing or stopping the formation of ice crystals inside a cell. Could there be "tomatoes with fish genes" in the future? But given the apparent "yuck factor" perception, it is doubtful that such a product would be marketable without a major change in public opinion. One key point that most retellings of the story miss is that the gene used in the experiments is not actually a "fish gene" in the sense that most people imagine. Although the genetic code is the universal language of life that all organisms on earth understand, there are "regional dialects." The genetic vocabulary used by plants is slightly different than that used by animals and other organisms-- technically referred to as "codon bias." Although a plant nucleus is capable of understanding an animal gene, the process works better if the gene uses a vocabulary more similar to the one a plant normally uses. For this reason, the researchers who developed the "fish-gene tomato" did not physically move a gene from an Arctic flounder into a tomato; instead, they created a synthetic gene from scratch based upon the genetic sequence of the flounder gene, but which had been translated into plant dialect to optimize its expression in the tomato. In 1996, a short-lived anti-GMO activist group based in Rochester, NY, named themselves after the nonexistent fishberries. The much more common variant of this tale about strawberries with fish genes--the "fishberry"-- is more problematic. There are no published studies involving strawberries, no companies which have announced research or marketing plans for such a product, no government records of field testing such a plant, and no trace in the media to explain how this story may have originated. It is possible that scientists from DNA Plant Technology (or elsewhere) may have publicly speculated about the benefits of using antifreeze genes in strawberries when the 1991 tomato research was published. The story may also be a conflation with Frostban-- a genetically engineered bacteria developed to protect strawberries and other fruits from frost damage--which had been field tested in 1987 and 1988. Nonetheless, shortly after the 1991 tomato study, the emphasis shifted from tomatoes with fish genes to strawberries with fish genes, and the image quickly became widespread in the media and in activist literature (and their costumes). How would this completely fictional story come to be repeated so widely? We suspect that scientists like to use the hypothetical example to illustrate both the universality of the genetic code and the "gee whiz" potential of genetic engineering to solve important agricultural issues. corn that produces the same protein used by organic farmers. Nonetheless, despite the widespread circulation of the tale, strawberries with fish genes are an urban legend and have never existed outside the minds of enthusiastic researchers and alarmed activists. References Hightower R, Baden C, Penzes E, Lund P, and Dunsmuir P 1991. Type II fish antifreeze protein accumulation in transgenic tobacco does not confer frost resistance. Cloning of an antifreeze protein gene from carrot and its influence on cold tolerance in transgenic tobacco plants. |