It always struck me as weird how there is such a disproportionately higher level of campaigning against GMO products, which for all intents and purposes could encompass nearly everything domesticated if the term is taken more liberally (although in this case, refers to deliberate gene modification), compared to hormones and steroids, which have a high possibility of the chemicals being sequestered by people or animals that consume the products containing them and are far more likely to be harmful.
I've assumed it's because people that eat at meats don't care what GMO is, but if you're one of those super vegans then you'd want GMO labelled so you can avoid it.
If that's true, then it's stupid we're pandering to a tiny insignificant amount of the population.
GMOs have the potential to end world hunger, the problem with them is that it's corporations putting patents on the genetics and making them only resistant to their own pesticide products.
Free and open information is important. Not only should it be labeled, it should have the specific genetic variation specified. Sure, it can be used by some who disagree with GMOs to avoid them, but it can also be used by those who like GMOs to pick which ones to support, thereby adding market interaction to the mix.
GMO is a buzzword. We have been selective breeding for over 2K years with plants/pets/cattle/poultry. It's only recently are we able to speed up that change to happen over a single generation instead of 5-100 generations. Plus we are able to bring the genetics of other plants to the crop to protect it without using chemicals or allow it to have more fruit.
In all, GMO is the future, and honestly its disgusting how people are scared of something that is as old as animal husbandry but with new technology.
I doubt someone buying a single orange will care if it's labeled with a genetic variation to produce more fruit since they're going to buy just one anyway and it won't change the price to begin with.
Adding genetic variation lists will just fill the sides of containers with hundreds of sciencey sounding words that everyone both doesn't understand and fear.
>specific gene variation labeling
How long until people start to claim they have jellyfish genome intolerance?
muh traditions, they wuz started by Our Lord Baybe Jesuhs
Also the companies that add all the post germination chemicals have a vested lobby based interest in keeping all the moneys to themselves
People don't even know what GMO is, they just think it's bad.
"I don't want no DNA in my tomatoes" - actual person
Why don't we just label antibiotics and hormones instead of GMOs? 99.99999999999% of actual GMOs people fight against are perfectly fine. Antibiotics are also usually perfectly fine, but a more understandable fear. Hormones are pretty eh.
We're probably going to be allowed to "play God" with the human genome before we can get full access to playing God with our food...
hershey the same company that paid the US off to ban importation of cadbury products
No one in their right mind would pick hershey's over Cadbury.
except we in the US have no choice thanks to the hershey company
It's like asking for labels on fruit that tell you whether it was picked by migrant labour or not. It's all in the name of free and open information, right? Well no, if something like this were introduced then there'd clearly be an agenda at work. Furthermore, this kind of labelling just tends to be more misleading. It says nothing about the safety and health of the food product, nor is it a reliable way to tell if the company or companies producing or manufacturing the product employs ethical practices. It'll be used and abused like "fat-free" or "sugar-free" labels, or those labels that imply a product is 'from' your own country.
That's actually not a terrible idea; all the Republicans would starve to death
This is a horrific idea. Not only would this policy potentially mean each item of food you bought had to come with a book full of alterations, but the only consumers who would have any idea what the nomenclature meant would be the sort of people intelligent and clued up enough to know that it was nothing to worry about.
Oh shit? No wonder you Americans have such disgusting chocolate. I always wondered if it was just my Britishness that explained my disdain for Hersheys, but now I understand.
I think there's obvious problems with GMO's when it comes to patenting crops, but apart from that it's a great innovation in tech. I don't know why society pushes for organic when this is so bad for the environment in water use and land use for the yield you get.
GMO hate is as dumb as being anti-vax
Not to mention the numerous, numerous regulations on what is considered "organic". It's far more complicated than simply being something not GMO. Right down to what kind of soil you have on your farm and what type of pesticides or fertilizer had been used on it going almost 10 years back in some places.
Farmers put a lot of cash into turning their farms into "organic", and so organic labelled foods are sold as a premium.
In the end because of this, I feel as if even if GMO foods are forced to label themselves, they will still win out because it's just so much cheaper to produce.
because it's 90% corn syrup and 10% carob.
So would reducing our meat consumption, or proper redistribution of food, or helping developing nations modernize their infrastructure, or stopping dumping of cheap foods that undercuts local farmers, or shifting away from traditional monocrop farming towards more integrated and self-sufficient systems.
And, like you pointed out, GMOs won't be a proper solution as long as they remain solely in the hands of self-serving corporations that want to keep their edge over competitors and prevent their clients from having control over their seeds. Anything short of a breakthrough that drastically reduces design costs and allows independant farmers to make their own modifications won't do much to address world hunger.
Given that fact, I don't see what should be so controversial about labelling GMO ingredients as such. It's just common sense. If buying certain foods would contribute to the growth of companies like Monsanto, I want to be aware of it, and I don't see how that makes me stupid or akin to anti-vaxxers.
The whole idea of being against transparency for fear of accurate information being wrongly interpreted by certain people is pretty shifty as well. You'd think that in the self-proclaimed land of individual freedoms, people would be encouraged to make choices for themselves based on facts rather than having that information kept away from them "for their sake".
Honestly, because people are idiots. Enforcing labeling of something will heavily reduce consumption because "why would they be labeling it if it isn't bad?"".
So fuck any form of labeling at all, then?
Seriously, since when has this been a valid argument? Would you be okay with information being witheld from you in any other context just because idiots might take it the wrong way?
Shouldn't I be able to know where my food comes from? Why should other people's bad judgement warrant my being denied this right?
If you truly think this is an issue, then the solution lies in proper education, not enforcing secrecy.
It would be the same as enforcing any other arbitrary labeling of food.
The only things that should be forced to be on packaging is health-related information. As GMOs have no observed health effects, labeling should not be enforced. Secrecy is not enforced, it's not "secrecy" at all, it's leaving the choice to the company.
The display of anything that relates to the composition should be enforced, not just health-related info. Nutrition is such a crapshoot when it comes to contradictory studies that solely enforcing the display of ingredients that have been 100% confirmed to have adverse health effects would result in no enforcement at all.
Choice should be given to the consumer, not to the company that may profit from taking that choice away through opacity.
That's an absolute shitload of information, and would necessarily include stuff like which pesticides, fertilizers, regions, lineages etc of the crop.
We should not enforce labeling on things that studies have shown to be harmless.
I don't see what would be so wrong about displaying all of this. Food companies seem content with wrapping their products in tons of packaging, they have more than enough room to put that information on it.
No study have proven any food to be harmless. It should be clear by now that any study that relates to nutrition can't be taken as absolute facts, they're mere indicators at best. Not just because of frequent conflicts of interest, but also simply because health and human biology is incredibly complicated and you can't account for every scenario.
For instance, in the case of GMOs, studies aren't conducted for every single strain that goes into the market. All they point towards is that there's nothing inherent to GMOs that may cause health complications. But a new strain might combine components from two different plants that weren't mixed before, and end up having adverse health effects. Should we conduct studies for decades every time a new crop is designed?
If not, then it seems reasonable enough to at least inform consumers when they're part of the contents.
It just seems like basic consumers rights to me to be provided information about what you put in your body, but I don't know, maybe Americans don't care about it as much. I don't see why you'd be against this unless you would personally profit from witholding such information.
The reason why such labelling is asinine is because regulatory authorities already have safety standards for all food products. There's no information to be gained from such labelling short of feeding into the fears of people who don't understand biology and chemistry.
hershey's tastes like literal vomit, it's not just you.
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