Food

I'm commenting only on a now-traditional disinformation about GMO's.

I don't consider mutations to be self-inherently toxic, whether natural or engineered: some are toxic, some aren't, in either case.

Consider that there are specific plant-materials which grab all the arsenic that they can...

Some ferns do it, rice-bran does it, there probably are others that do it.

It is sooo effective a specialized biology, that it is possible to just keep running water through a special greenhouse filled with such plants, and they'll concentrate the specific heavy-metals, so they, themselves, can be the HAZMAT containing the arsenic, after...

IOW, you can significantly reduce the amount of loose arsenic in your ecology with deliberate-use of such things.

They weren't engineered to do that, they just have the genetic machinery to do that.

I've read that rice-bran from some areas of Bangladesh, South China, etc, are sooo arsenic-rich, that they are HAZMAT, themselves, according to test/measurement/evidence.

Obviously, some lobbies want GMO to be a simple dog-whistle, they want everybody's System-1 ( read the important "Thinking Fast & Slow", by Daniel Kahneman: System-1 is the default-instinct system, it can be trained into conditioned-expertise, it is also the mechanism of both addiction & prejudice ) programmed into automatic, unthinking reaction against GMO.

Consider, though, what I'd enjoy: ZERO caffeine-family coffee.

And chocolate.

They're too toxic for me, as they are.

That would require genetic-engineering, to remove those methylxanthenes from those plant-parts.

I'm NOT saying that "Round-Up Ready"(tm) crops are healthy for either us or for our only planet's ecology, but I AM saying that GMO is a category, and it includes oceans more than just Monsanto's dependency-developing pseudocrops.

IS it bad when a crop is genetically altered to improve its resistance to some "rust" or blight?

It comes down to the actual case, is what I'm saying.

Same as "All Whites are bad" or "All Nonwhites are bad" is just prejudice, the same is true of surgeries, both at the body-scale & at the molecular scale.

WHICH genetic engineering??

For what?

Where & How, in the genome?

Why?

What are the side-effects of doing that, both for the organism & for the rest of the food-web that it lives-in??

I'm commenting against oversimplification, is all:

dumbed-down may be "easier", but it is mismanagement, inevitably.

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