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You start with a false premise. Engineering will favour whatever you want it to (Diversity, tastiness, colour, shape.). It's natural selection that will apply
by j-pb 11y ago
You start with a false premise.
Engineering will favour whatever you want it to (Diversity, tastiness, colour, shape.). It's natural selection that will apply only one selection criterium: Most surviving offsprings.
How do you think we got this diversity in grain and vegetables?
For example rutabaga, turnips, kohlrabi, cabbage, collard greens, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, mustard seeds, and rapeseeds were all created though engineering from the mustard plant.
Same goes for all grain that you eat today, they were engineered from a few shitty grass species.
As for tomatoes, good luck finding a non engineered one that isn't poisonous. Same goes for almonds.
Have you seen undomesticated banana btw? Go buy some Musa balbisiana. I hope you like large pits and bitterness.
Or dogs? How much diversity have you seen in wolves? How many crazy fucking dog breeds are there?
Engineering =!= monoculture. We all agree that monoculture is shit.
But going full hippy "let's only eat what mother nature provides" is as far removed from reality as possible. Mother nature provides bitter poisonous shit, that is full of seeds, so that you don't eat it and so that it can reproduce.
It is up to man to take that and make it so that survival of the fittest means survival of the tastiest.
- pheroden 11y agoAnd all those were done in the absence of capitalism, so they're not apt comparisons.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- j-pb 11y agoFirst of all capitalism doesn't apply to home grown diy stuff, so even if your argument was validity it would still be irrelevant here. Secondly, even though I am very much in favour of a social state, so I am not arguing for capitalism in general here, capitalism is pretty much a unregulated market economy. How would you describe most societies of the last few hundred thousand years? Socialism and everything related to it is a very modern concept. That was only made possible through the abundance of modern industrialisation. If anything, the communist states that claimed to be defenders of socialism (I wouldn't call them socialist in any way but, meh), have shown that they were the biggest proponents of monoculture. How do you feed a billion people through state organised agriculture? Through fields that are hundreds of miles long, so that they can be harvested easily and efficiently by a single machine. You can still see the industrial agriculture wastelands of this philosophy in east germany today. Wind that would normally be broken by vegetation and the borders of smaller fields can erode the top soil and leaves nothing but unusable desert.
- pheroden 11y agoWay to project, not sure how you extrapolated all that from my comment. My point is that when a bottom line is involved, you will see only a few options come to dominance once the dust settles. And while home grown efforts do bear fruit, they very very seldom become mainstream.
- Turing_Machine 11y agoCapitalism has produced enough surplus food that even poor people can be fat, something unprecedented in the history of the human race.
- j-pb 11y agoWell, fatness in todays society is basically a sign of malnutrition. Healthy food is still expensive.