4 ms·

One of the big complaints about GMO plants is that the first generation were designed to meet the needs of industrial agriculture rather than consumers. Pestic

• thomasahle 13y ago
  Why is it better to modify for taste than resistance?
  • bluedino 13y ago
    A major complaint about produce from mega farms is that they aren't grown for taste but pest-resistance or size or color. Since humans have tastebuds, taste is a pretty important factor and isn't considered.
    • mathattack 13y ago
      Why not also modify for nutrition?
      • sdm 13y ago
        You mean like Golden Rice? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice) The anti-GMO crowd seem to be anti-GMO for the sake of it, not because any rational reason.
        • jrkelly 13y ago
          and a Golden Rice trial was recently destroyed (http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2013/08/activists-destroy-golden-rice-field-trial http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2013/08/activists-des...). It's not a great scene.
        • mathattack 13y ago
          Yes. I would think that if this works, there could be other similar uses. If there are natural genes in plants that turn on vitamin production, why not engineer it? It's a shame that they're destroying experiments. There are rational reasons to be concerned about GMO, but destroying tests doesn't help.
    • dfxm12 13y ago
      We have eyes. We eat with our eyes. In fact, we buy with our eyes too. A sign saying "Trust me, I taste good because I was genetically engineered to!" doesn't exactly cut it for me. Outside of an odd berry or grape, you can't sample fruit before you buy it, and there's even no guarantee that that one tomato is going to taste like the one next to it, since you don't know how well (or not) the store is handling them once they get their hands on them... I say this, but then again, it seems like I always complain about the tomatoes, no matter where I buy them. Show me a better tomato. Please.
      • bluedino 13y ago
        >> We have eyes. We eat with our eyes. Shoppers BUY with their eyes as well. A bright red, smooth, round, large tomato sells much faster than a dented, small, oddly shaped tomato. When it's cooked into a sauce you're never going to see it anyway. >> Show me a better tomato. Please. Grow your own. Heirloom tomatoes are very 'ugly' but they have so much flavor compared to those pink-ish orange softballs at the grocery stores.
        • jessaustin 13y ago
          Yeah, in most temperate climes tomatoes grow REALLY easily during the summer. (In tropical climes they grow easily the rest of the year.) Right now we're picking several gallons of tomatoes every couple of days, and this is from a garden I haven't weeded or tended really at all in like a month. (Well I did run a lawnmower over the non-tomato half of the garden a couple of weeks ago. That doesn't really deserve the name of "gardening".)
      • gknoy 13y ago
        Do you refrigerate your tomatoes? I often had terrible tasting tomatoes when I did, as refrigerating them makes their taste change significantly.
    • cortesoft 13y ago
      People also like fruits and vegetables that aren't worm-filled.
      • angersock 13y ago
        Extra protein, and with enough Sriracha you likely won't even notice.
    • BvS 13y ago
      Pest-resistance makes food cheaper and people like cheap food.
  • egypturnash 13y ago
    So I used to buy tomatoes at the grocery store. They were okay, I guess. Then I started going to the local farmer's market. During spring and summer, there's a stand from a tomato farm. They have something like two dozen different varieties of heirloom tomatoes. Lots of different colors and sizes, and all of them have wonderfully intense tastes. They don't all taste the same, either. My mouth is a lot happier after eating one of those than a generic tomato from the grocery store. It's the difference between having a hamburger at McDonald's and a nicely-prepared cut of steak. I'll still buy grocery store tomatoes in the winter, but the place with two dozen varieties of heirloom tomatoes gets my money when they've got tomatoes to sell. Get yourself to a local farmer's market, find a stand selling lots of varieties of something you like, and do some experimenting. You won't want to go back to industrially-farmed stuff selected for disease resistance any more.
    • MrFoof 13y ago
      I almost don't think grocery store tomatoes have a taste anymore. It's like a generic, pulpy piece of fruit. There's no yellow mottling where there'd be concentrations of sugar, however now they're bred to be just red (since consumers think a perfectly red tomato is a better tomato), and to be harder. The benefit is you can get a ripe tomato that can survive transit from Chile, but it's not exactly a great-tasting tomato. They've done the same thing with peaches. White peaches are like a reboot of the peach. I mean, peach is a color, as your box of crayons would indicate. Now we just have a peach that's less sweet and easier to ship. I mean, imagine if you ordered a peach shirt, it showed up white, and you called to complain. They'd probably go, "Well, it's a white peach". Granted, maybe those shirts are easier to ship.
• replicatorblog 13y ago
  It would be great if you or someone on your team did a blog post addressing this issue. I'm generally in favor of GMOs in all their forms, but there aren't many good, non-Monsanto, voices that get heard over the screedy shouters and milquetoast "better safe than sorry" types. For instance, what is the real worst case scenario? Would it be Kudzu meets glow sticks? Man eating plants? Or just a bunch of $50 sprouts that only glow in the most technical sense of the word?
  • mvdileo 13y ago
    If you want to hear scientists un-affiliated with industry talk about genetic engineering in a thoughtful way, it's happening over at http://www.biofortified.org/ http://www.biofortified.org/
  • lukifer 13y ago
    GMO opponents often react reflixively without looking at specifics, but I think their fears are rooted in something real. Setting aside bad behavior from Monsanto specifically (suing farmers, patents, sterile seeds), there is both promise and peril to GMOs, even in the simple act of selective breeding that comprises most of the activity in that space. My primary concern is the lack of long-term thinking in the drive for high production yield, and accompanying side effects to health and ecosystems. For instance, some claim that the high-yield "dwarf wheat" pioneered in the 60s is responsible for exacerbating gluten sensitivity: http://marksdailyapple.com/the-problems-with-modern-wheat/ http://marksdailyapple.com/the-problems-with-modern-wheat/ There is also an overlapping concern with the broken patent system, and whether it is acceptable to "own" the genetic results of evolution, whether human-guided or otherwise. It's not hard to conceive of some scary slippery slopes there. Each individual advancement is probably, on average, not a big deal, and probably a win for both providers and consumers. But if you aggregrate the accelerating advances over decades and centuries, I think there are real consequences for human health and the biosphere. I'm not advocating the elimination of GMOs (as if we could), but at minimum they deserve scrutiny, honest labeling, and long-term follow-up studies.
  • Retric 13y ago
    Worst case is probably accidentally creating a GMO plant that does something vary useful and also produces a novel toxin which Bio-accumulates and is not discovered. Under the right circumstances you could probably kill something like 10-100,000 people that way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation