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Why do you think natural things are prima facie good ?
by ehmish 7y ago
Why do you think natural things are prima facie good ?
- DVassallo 7y agoWith “natural” I mean natural for humans to eat them. Those foods can be assumed safe because, by definition, they have been eaten by humans for hundreds of thousands of years. Can you say the same thing for GM food?
- tptacek 7y agoYou can’t even say the same thing about broccoli.
- DVassallo 7y agoBroccoli have been eaten for over 2000 years. If they killed us, we would have known.
- tptacek 7y agoOh, that’s the cutoff? What about Brussels sprouts?
- DVassallo 7y agoYou think that the risk of consequential harm (say, death within 10 years) is the same for Brussels sprouts and GM foods? Haven’t we learned anything from mad cow and trans fats? Edit: The risk is reduced significantly after we’ve eaten something for a few generations. The problem is if we test something new on the global population before a local tribe tries it on themselves for a few generations.
- tptacek 7y agoWhat does mad cow have to do with GM? Ironically: the process that begat mad cow: also "natural".
- DVassallo 7y agoEating meat-fed cows is not natural. Eating trans fats is not natural. Eating GM foods is not natural. The first two proved to have catastrophic harm. Why are we confident GM foods are safe? We’re treating no evidence of harm as evidence of no harm. And we’re doing it on a global scale.
- tptacek 7y agoIt sounds like "natural" just means "stuff you don't approve of". Some of your list overlaps mine, others don't. That's fine, but it's kind of a boring argument.
- DVassallo 7y ago“Natural selection” is the process that makes something “natural”. If it hasn’t passed the test of time, it’s not natural. Which part of my list doesn’t overlap with yours? You consider Impossible Foods natural?
- pvg 7y agoThe only "natural" thing to eat then would be wild berries, tubers and tramplings by unruly ungulates.
- batbomb 7y agoCan you name one item at an organic grocery store that was eaten by modern humans even 50000 years ago?
- sbenitoj 7y agoGrass fed cows are about as close as it gets
- DVassallo 7y agoYes: meat, fruit, vegetables, nuts... Quite a lot. It doesn’t have to be 50000 years. For example: I trust that drinking cow milk won’t kill me even though it hasn’t been common for long. Can’t say the same for GM food.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Yes: meat, fruit, vegetables, nuts... Yes, but if you zoom out to categories that broad, GM food still fits within them. GM foods are not any less like foods eaten tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago than anything else we eat.
- DVassallo 7y agoThe same was said for meat-fed cows and trans fats. Turned out their consumption had fatal consequences.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> The same was said for meat-fed cows and trans fats. Meat fed cows and trans fats were products of the same relatively (compared to both the inherent nature and existing regulatory framework requiring proof of safety of novel food element of and faced by GMOs on the former case, and the latter of those in the latter case) uncontrolled evolution of food supply that characterizes the long history of “safe” food against which GMOs are contrasted.
- cwyers 7y agoOver the thousands of years we were eating foods before the inventions of GMOs, we had plenty of other ways to breed crops and livestock to be more desirable. We also tended to die a lot of malnutrition.
- sbenitoj 7y agoMost tribal people died of natural causes or traumatic injuries, malnutrition was not widespread. Read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price for more background on this.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> We also tended to die a lot of malnutrition. Only because populations tended to run closer to their own carrying capacity so that any shock (from variation in the natural environment or human conflict or ...) would put them over and cause malnutrition, not because normal supply was inadequate. It's only fairly recently that humans other than in the most ideal environments could produce more than a small surplus of food even in good years (of course, that capacity was acheived in part by millenia of engineering for food for yield traits, with a lot of incidental changes induced along the way.)
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Those foods can be assumed safe because, by definition, they have been eaten by humans for hundreds of thousands of years Even prior to GM foods, humans have been engineering food to change it's traits for longer than civilization, and essentially everything humans eat today is a product of such engineering. GM foods differ systematically from other forms fo engineering only on the degree of precision and control possible (which is far from perfect, but much greater than any other known technique.) Basically nothing humans eat today has been eaten for hundreds of thousands of years.
- DVassallo 7y agoThey did it in local tribes. If the experiment proved harmful, the impact was local. In this case, the impact could be global. Big difference.
- ex3ndr 7y agoI have made some research and problem with risks of feeding animals to other animals is a much different problem than prion diseases. Eating other animals is the key factor for transmission of prions, not producing them. Misfolded prion can be formed anywhere. Just not feeding animals to animals won't prevent it, it will reduce impact. But that was true for millions of years, whats different here?
- sbenitoj 7y agoWhy do you assume unnatural foods are inherently safe for human consumption?