#gmo talk

gardener, so not a big issue), I can't plant something, collect the seeds, then plant those seeds the next year to get the same plant. But that's small scale, so not important on the scale we're talking for feeding starving countries/peoples. When there are no starving people, we can get pickier about GMO vs. non-GMO with our food. If you can afford it, but non-GMO if you prefer, but don't shame people who can't. If any of that makes sense? (2/2)

I mean, most crops we grow aren’t open pollinated. If you’re growing any sort of Hybrid, it’s genetics break down over time.  Wheat hybrids bred for standing well, disease tolerance, etc can have their seeds used for only so long before those genetics break down and you need more seed. R1 soybeans (which are glyphosate resistant) can be grown the next year. It’s honestly more about genetic patents than seed viability the next year.  And improved genetics, but that’s an entirely different story.

Open pollination does work for small scale, like you’re describing, because you can control and essentially “baby” the plants. But to actually meet the requirements for farmers even being able to pay for their operation, much less feed the world, open pollinated plants simply don’t work.  If you want to learn more about that, you should look up Norman Borlaug and what he did for  agriculture in developing countries. You can also learn a lot about how modern wheat varieties were developed and it’s so cool.

I can respect a person’s decision to not  purchase GMO... but most of these labeling movements (looking at you Non-GMO Project) don’t even care if the  products can contain a GMO in the first place. 

For gardening... I know there were a couple flowers and vegetables on my list... but, like, it’s not even an option for the most part, honestly.  So a lot of gardening related GMO talk is just straight up fear mongering. 

Scientist: you know that’s actually a pretty good point. Here, I developed a pest-resistant GMO crop so that we don’t have to spray it with pesticides.

The biggest real downside I’ve hear for GMOs is that it creates a potential for a corporation to patent the food supply. But some dystopian shit would have to go down for things to reach that point.

It’d be easy to prevent, too: make it impossible to patent live creatures.

Link

*strangled noises of pain*

You know, every time someone starts railing about how GMOs are evil, I want them to go over to the next diabetic they know and tell them, verbatim ‘hey my uninformed, pseudomoral opinions is worth more to me than your life’

Because guess where most insulin these days comes from? Genetically modified bacteria that produce human insulin, which keeps thousands, if not millions of people around the globe from fucking dying. 

they don’t do that kind of thing out in the open (normally) because introducing mutagenic substances into the wild and the water is highly frowned upon by basically all environment protection laws. But in labs? yeah applying random mutagenic substances and then screening for phenotypes is a standard for breeding both for just making a new breed and for genetic research about plants (where the interesting phenotype then gets sequences and compared to the normal phenotype sequence to figure out what gene does what)