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A couple I know who avoid GMO products have a few things in common with others I've seen saying the same things: Ignorance of what a GMO really is, a deep distr

• botexpert 10y ago
  Buying organic animal products and doing it for their children. I don't think that's long-term planning for children welfare.
• 6DM 10y ago
  I eat GMO food all the time, but organic milk is so damn delicious. It's the one thing I'll splurge on. Even 1% tastes as good as normal whole milk imo. The rest tastes the same to me shrugs
  • chriskanan 10y ago
    My understanding is that this is partially due to different pasteurization processes. Organic milk is heated at a higher temperature and for less time, than the pasteurization process used for non-organic milk. This carmelizes the sugars in the organic milk, making it sweeter. The process is also the reason why organic milk lasts longer on the store shelf. See this article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-organic-milk-lasts-longer/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-organic-m...
  • ravenstine 10y ago
    Dairy products are highly variant, depending on what the cows are fed. If it's organic, it's possible that it's also grass-fed or something along those lines.
    • 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
      This one tastes like it the cow got into an onion patch.
      • stcredzero 10y ago
        That sort of thing is a major concern for selling goat's milk. Bad things can also happen with hormonal changes when the billy and nanny goats are allowed together.
      • hx87 10y ago
        That's an intentional product in central Europe, believe it or not.
    • douche 10y ago
      You can always tell when the cows switch between grass and silage in the spring and fall. Milk tastes like garbage for a week or two until they get sorted out.
  • bbddg 10y ago
    I try to almost exclusively eat organic products. It's not really about the taste or even much about my own health. The real benefit is to the environment where the plants are grown. The overuse of herbicides, pesticides, and antibiotics can destroy the natural ecology of an area.
    • BinaryIdiot 10y ago
      You do realize organic farming uses significantly more pesticides, right? [1]. [1] https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lhom/organictext.html https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lhom/organictext.html
      • bbddg 10y ago
        Interesting link, I'm admittedly not that educated on this. However, not all organic farms use more pesticides. Some hardly use any pesticides at all. What is the most sustainable and ecologically friendly way to get food then? Local farms, farmers markets, or growing your own food seems like the best but I don't think that's sustainable for the whole population.
        • BinaryIdiot 10y ago
          > Some hardly use any pesticides at all. Citation? I can't imagine they would use little or none unless they were farming something specific, like rice, which can grow under water or if it's grown indoors. > What is the most sustainable and ecologically friendly way to get food then? Local farms, farmers markets, or growing your own food seems like the best but I don't think that's sustainable for the whole population. So I'm having trouble finding the study I read a few years back but it essentially found that large, centralized farms are the most efficient because our transportation has gotten so good and many plants grow better in specific climates versus growing everything locally. So if you have enough scale then centralized, huge farms seems to be the way to go. However that's using today's farming. I've seen many write-ups calling for entire buildings with hundreds of floors for farming. If we can get those energy efficient then we should be able to create the perfect climate for each plant and we'll be taking up vertical space so it'll be better land usage too. Though that would suck if power died from, say, a solar flare and all of our food was in these towers...heh
  • gohrt 10y ago
    It's actually for the same reason that a placebo is good: a but more sugar.
• enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>It seems like folks buying into the GMO conspiracy are often the same folks who buy into any conspiracy. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Just like the right-wing has their anti-government extremists, the left-wing has their anti-corporate extremists. However, the latter group is interesting in the sense that they actually think science is on their side.
  • oxide 10y ago
    I axed that a few minutes ago, it seemed a little harsh. sorry to anyone who was confused by my edit.
  • dmoy 10y ago
    Non-GMO or pro organic may have most of their stuff sourced from big corporations. I don't know about you, but most of the organic food in my grocery store comes from massive corporations...
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• no_wave 10y ago
  You cite "ignorance of what a GMO really is" - what do you think they're misinformed about?
  • mi100hael 10y ago
    Not OP, but I get the impression a lot of anti-GMO folks think that GMO crops are synthetic, irradiated, mutant organisms when in fact they are still just conventionally-grown, chemically-organic plants. In other words, nutters think GMOs are Spiderman when they're actually just Batman.
    • dragonwriter 10y ago
      Moreover, irradiated mutant plants (and those produced by exposure to chemical mutagens) are not GMOs, and qualify for organic labelling.
  • BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    Almost every person I know who is on the organic bandwagon are very insistent, despite the evidence I have provided them, that organic food uses no pesticides and is better for you because it's "natural" whereas GMOs are made by companies who only care about money and are not tested enough and even if they were tested enough they could still do something bad because "you never know". Ultimately it comes down to an ignorance in how the farming process works and an ignorance in how genetics work when modifying plants either in a laboratory or though breading. I've also never met a person who supports organic who also knew about the practice of using radioactivity to cause random mutations in organic farming.
    • utternerd 10y ago
      All of the above reasons are why I stopped engaging with the aforementioned "natural fallacy" folks long ago. It's painful, and seems to get nowhere regardless of how many facts are throw at them.
      • grzm 10y ago
• holri 10y ago
  As a members of a CSA (Community supported agriculture) I trust my supplier of my organic food, because I am part of it. I do not pay a premium compared to traditional supermarket products. But I enjoy a superior quality. But, since I am a prosumer the whole food supply process is quite different.
  • gnicholas 10y ago
    > I do not pay a premium compared to traditional supermarket products Is this comparing with organic products, or also non-organic? What is a "prosumer" in the food/grocery sense? I'm not familiar with the term in that context.
    • holri 10y ago
      It is hard to compare, since the distinct food item does not have a price. You pay the farmer collective a slice of their yearly budget in terms of money or work and get a slice of the yearly production. Furthermore the CSA produces food / varieties that are not even available or comparable in terms of quality in the supermarket. But one member weighted the outcome of one years production and compared it to typical supermarket prices of similar products and found out that the CSA was actually cheaper. The community is sharing their money or work to keep the agriculture running. They are actively engaged in their food production and therefore prosumers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agricultur...
      • gnicholas 10y ago
        So "prosumer" is a portmanteau of "producer" and "consumer"? Just want to clarify because in most/many contexts, it's "professional" and "consumer". Sounds like price comparison is an open question, unless there are more definitive/rigorous comparisons out there. At the very least, it sounds like there's a tradeoff between quality and selection (when you walk into a supermarket you can choose to buy whatever you want, whereas a CSA is limited to what's currently being harvested at a particular farm). I'd certainly be open to making this tradeoff for some of my food, though when I've had CSA deliveries redirected to me by neighbors on vacation, I found that much of the food (even oranges, which I think of as moderately durable) went bad within just a few days.
• dasil003 10y ago
  The tricky thing is it's very hard to really be on top of all the evidence, so we rely on some signaling. The "granola" crowd tends to place unearned trust in organic or non-GMO products, but the "science" crowd tends to place unearned trust in methodologically suspect corporate studies with a clear conflict of interest. I'm pretty much right down the middle on this stuff, but I tend to regard the latter as a bigger problem simply because the amount of money and lobbying involved. Think of the amount of money to be made by increasing grain yields by 1%, can we really expect industry to determine objectively that a higher yield grain is nutritionally equivalent?
  • drvdevd 10y ago
    Your comment gave me an interesting thought: how would a labeling system that describes exactly which modifications were made to the organism in question work?
    • thefalcon 10y ago
      And where does it end? What if the main product isn't GMO, but some small part of the additives in the product were GMO?
      • drvdevd 10y ago
        To be quite clear, personally I'm 100% pro-GMO. But that's because I believe the benefits that can be realized outweigh the risks. However, in this case I'm simply curious from both a packaging/product design and regulatory point of view: how would this work? I agree it would have to stop somewhere. Part of my biggest issue is that a company can patent the gene modifications they make and then say, "You're eating our proprietary cucumber now." I understand their business model, but I think if anything should be "open source", it should be our food.
        • sampo 10y ago
          > Part of my biggest issue is that a company can patent the gene modifications they make Also the results of non-GMO breeding can be, and have been patented.
• johnchristopher 10y ago
  There are organic and local small tomatoes and white raisin in my house and when I have people coming by and eating them they always are amazed how it tastes much better than anything they ever bought at the super market(?). I live in Europe though and we don't seem to suffer yet from the hostility of anti-organic people.
  • fl0wenol 10y ago
    I'd wager that the reason for the difference in taste is in the freshness. It is difficult to farm at scale and sell produce year round across a continent; time to consumption is a luxury beaten out of it at that scale and food often suffers under it. Only the varieties of tomatoes, etc. that can withstand changing temperatures and conditions, make it to market weeks later, and still look good enough to sell will be used, and these are often not as flavorful both initially and after several weeks.
• harryWalders 10y ago
  A deep distrust of corporate interests and government regulators is not only healthy, it's the only sane position to take if you look at even recent history. People have already forgotten about the lead scandal in Michigan.
• kafkaesq 10y ago
  ...and a strange, unearned trust placed in those selling "organic" products. Why is it "strange and unearned"? In many states / countries there are specific regulations that qualify what can be labelled "organic" or not (having to do largely with whether certain classes of pesticides or fertilizer were used in their production or not, for example). Are you saying that pesticides in the food chain are complete red herring, and that any concern about them is "strange and unearned"? I'm not sure I quite follow you, actually.
  • AngrySkillzz 10y ago
    Pesticides are used on organic food too. Often they use much larger volumes of less effective pesticides to compensate.
    • a_bonobo 10y ago
      The non-use of pesticides can be a problem too - there was an outbreak of a dangerous E. coli strain in Germany 2011 due to a contaminated organic farm. (Interestingly, the E. coli in question had acquired a few extra genes encoding for the toxin from another E. coli strain, natural GM) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_o...
      • kafkaesq 10y ago
        Just because the outbreak occurred on an organic farm... doesn't mean it was "caused by" the lack of pesticide use (or any other cultivation practices, per se). In fact, as to that particular outbreak, the very WP page you cite says: Using epidemiological methods the outbreaks in 2011 were traced to a shipment of seeds from Egypt that arrived in Germany in December 2009. Citing as a source: http://phys.org/news/2012-02-insight-whole-genome-sequencing-europe-coli.html http://phys.org/news/2012-02-insight-whole-genome-sequencing...
• matt4077 10y ago
  You're conflating a few issues. Organic food is more than just GMO-free. With regards to milk and meat, I can easily understand that people would want to avoid the hormones and antibiotics used excessively in conventional farming. I know there is scant evidence for these to be harmful to the consumer of the product. But at the very least you're helping a bit to avoid the coming super-resistant bacterial infections. From what I've observed, people buying organic may be wrong about organic food specifically, but they pretty obviously have something else figured out. They cook fresh food every day, they eat together as a family (often with friends), none of them are overweight. For them, cooking and eating are a social activity and O can't escape the observation that they're happier than those families eating a 20pc chicken nuggets box in front of the TV.