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Triumph@fedia.io 2 days ago
My favorite is the people who rail against GMOs. Bitch, every food you eat has been genetically modified by humans. Either by selective breeding over a long period of time, or what they used to do in the early 20th century: bomb seeds with radiation and see what came out, toss the weird stuff, keep the neat stuff.
Everything is GMO. What's being done now is actually safer than before, because they actually know what they're trying to create, and are far more surgical in the process.
The problem is that the way GMO is used in practice is to maximize profits: get giant fruits that weigh a lot and catch eyes on the shelf, but are low in nutritional value and have shitty taste/texture.
Like huge strawberries that taste like water, or taste unripe even when they’re ripe. Or giant asparagus that’s as tough as sisal twine.
I have a theory that if you GMO to prioritize nutritional density, it’ll taste better, because the photonutrients are the stuff that taste good.
nutritional value
Is not a consideration either way (and that’s part of the problem) time and “viability” from pick to market are even more important than that and even flavor. Hence, hothouse tomatoes, the most tasteless tomato on the planet.
Right, that’s what I’m saying. But the nutritional density suffers as a result of maximizing size and yield.
wtf are photonutrients?
Phytonutrients, it was fucking autocorrect’s fault
asparagus
Aldi’s in Chicago has wonderfully thin and crisp asparagus almost all the time. Don’t ask me how, I just buy and eat it.
Botanist dragging a barrel of glowing green fluid across the tiles of the station floor
Security Chief: “Botanist! What the ABSOLUTE HELL are you doing with 50 liters of radium?”
Botanist: “Mutating the corn so it’s blight and drought resistant”
Chief: “???”
Botanist: “I’ve also mutated a species of hobby lemon to fill itself with sugary lemonade instead of citric acid”
Chief: “Oh, holy crap okay go right ahead”
Pretty much. Except that there was zero plan about what was going to come out the other end. It was just "irradiate, plant, see what happens."
Lemons are an artificial creation by genetic splice of the bitter orange and citron :
If you think thats interesting, look into the origins of maize corn.
Pretty sure the bitter orange is also a highly divergent crop that may be hybridized as well.
“Hobby lemon?”
Miracle fruit is easier than doing your own genetic modifications
When the fleshy part of the fruit is eaten, this molecule binds to the tongue’s taste buds, causing sour foods to taste sweet
Interesting, TIL!
I think the argument against GMO (for me) isn’t so much the yields and other benefits, but rather the potential for single blight to wipe entire crops (did to the lack of variety, despite their claims to blight resilience) and the shady stuff that gmo companies do - sterilised seeds, patent wars, etc.
It’s already happened to bananas. That’s why banana candy tastes NOTHING like the bananas you can buy today, it tastes like the bananas that died out from a fungus.
It’s more that banana flavoring is a simple chemical (isoamyl acetate) that when tasted was kinda closer to bananas (and pears apparently) than anything else in their minds. Old bananas had more of it than modern ones, but it isn’t like it was ever a faithful recreation.
It’s similar to how some grapes taste more or less like methyl anthranilate, but the chemical itself really just distinctly tastes like artificial grape.
Yeah ancestral plants that became many crops look almost nothing like their descendants in many cases
The funniest I think are secondary crops like oats and rye. Our forebears weren’t even trying to grow a better version of those, those started off as just weeds that people were trying to get rid of in their wheatfields. In the course of purging them they accidentally selected for more wheat-like plants that people would be less likely to rip out until they became actual decent crops on their own, while also maintaining hardiness in areas that wheat couldn’t handle such that they spun off and became popular on their own rights.
Yeah the discussion has to be clear. I’m not in love with splicing genes very unrelated to the destination organism and not seeing what the long-term effects are. Also splicing genes specifically to make crops more resistant to Roundup so we can kill everything but the crop even harder and be unconcerned of the wider environmental impact the pesticide has.
yeah GMO has a lot of potential. i think the scepticism was mostly because it was considered a new technology, but that’s years ago.
bomb seeds with radiation and see what came out
are far more surgical in the process.
…right…
If you can’t tell the difference between random mutation and targeted gene replacement, you DO NOT belong in this conversation.
Either educate yourself or STFU and let the adults talk
Educated genius alert!
ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world 2 days ago
GMOs aren’t dangerous because of the genetic manipulation. They’re dangerous because of everything around it. Now it’s possible to create vegetables that survive a centimetre of glyphosate coating. And if the farmers reuse seeds, they’re breaching copyright law. With this, plants are copyrightable, would you like all of the cancer of contemporary American IP law applied to your food?
IAMgROOT@lemmy.wtf 2 days ago
this is actually such a big problem in tissue culture
no one should be able to copyright LIVING BEINGS
shneancy@lemmy.world 2 days ago
ironically copyright laws as they are today are cancer, maybe they should copyright copyright so that it all just eats itself and dies
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 days ago
in tissue culture this is considered a DICK MOVE
SorryQuick@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
But then if you can’t copyright it companies wouldn’t invest money in it since it wouldn’t be profitable. That’s kinda the whole point of copyright, so that there’s an incentive for innovation. Why invest in R&D when you can just let your competitor do it and immediately steal it from then?
Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 16 hours ago
Copyright suffocate to death innovation by preventing people to use that technology and build on it, it’s just a dick move to make money. People can innovate without shitright too
IAMgROOT@lemmy.wtf 1 day ago
“steal it” you cannot steal knowledge
copyrighting living beings is bad
AlfredoJohn@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Copyright doesn’t create incentives for innovation it creates incentives for stagnation. It’s a guaranteed profit window for a static solution. Competition is what breeds innovation as you need to have the best product for its cost to capture market share. As copyright is inherently an anti-competitive practice only there to minimize risk it reduces innovation in favor of stable profits. Just because r&d costs money it doesnt mean that supply chains and production are handed to competitors for free. Its just a tool to minimize risk for venture capital because those who lobbied for it wanted to protect their assets from risk exposure and did so at the expense of consumers and innovation through lobbying. Removing it wouldnt stop people from creating solutions or trying to invent new products. Those who do the r & d always have a leg up as they have the research available to them for tweaking there process or final output that a competitor would not.
IAMgROOT@lemmy.wtf 1 day ago
why would anyone buy from someone who just copied it instead of made it?
and money has ruined innovation
are you suggesting that we would just stop innovationn without copyright?
sangeteria@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
But then the problem is not the GMO it’s the copyright laws
BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The Epa was the only way we got them to stop with DDT.
They keep ratcheting the poison further and further up to keep weeds out. They basically carpet bombed the South with ddt to kill off something and that killed off the birds and fishes and sucked up anyone that ate it for twenty years.
Which was a lot of the South, but now hunting is a rich mans privilege down here. Wheras only rich folk ate cattle with any frequency, now it’s pretty common food.
I’ve often thought that Monsanto was the only thing wrong with GMOs.
Captain_Patchy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
their buissness model with certainty.
Captain_Patchy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Exactly right. Well said.
Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 16 hours ago
The problems then aren’t GMOs but it’s the fact that someome can patent and copyright it, destroy the patent and copyright system not the GMOs
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 2 days ago
does anyone know how long the copyrights on seeds holds? i.e. i think for many pharmaceuticals it’s 20 years. does this apply here too?
Return_of_Chippy@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yes