Support GMO foods

[tupac chopra]

You can't have it both ways; drawing any conclusions from inconclusive studies is impossible by definition. Only a madman or a moron points to inconclusive studies and demands action on the basis of those studies.

No the correct action is to clear up the doubt by doing a cancer study.

 

[bilby]

You can't have it both ways; drawing any conclusions from inconclusive studies is impossible by definition. Only a madman or a moron points to inconclusive studies and demands action on the basis of those studies.

No the correct action is to clear up the doubt by doing a cancer study.

What doubt?

I have no conclusive evidence that there is a dragon in my garage. However, I have no doubt that there is not. I am not going to waste my time going to check.

You cannot conclude anything from an inconclusive study. Not that there is doubt, not that there is a mystery, nothing. That's why it's called 'inconclusive' - because no conclusions can be drawn.

Yet you want to conclude that there is doubt.

 

[tupac chopra]

No the correct action is to clear up the doubt by doing a cancer study.

What doubt?

A far greater number of the rats fed GMO corn developed tumors. We need to do a proper long term study to see if a statistically significant number of rats develop tumors as opposed to the control group.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

No the correct action is to clear up the doubt by doing a cancer study.

What doubt?

I have no conclusive evidence that there is a dragon in my garage. However, I have no doubt that there is not. I am not going to waste my time going to check.

Why? The guy who just knocked on your front door seems genuinely concerned that there may be a dragon in your garage. It'd take you all of thirty seconds to open up the door and tell him "See? No dragon. Thanks for keeping a lookout!"

On the other hand, the universe being unpredictable, there's a nonzero possibility that your crazy visitor just might be right and there is indeed a dragon in your garage. Doesn't cost you anything to look, and better safe than sorry.

Yet you want to conclude that there is doubt.

The hypothesis is that GMOs may cause unintended negative health effects. An experiment may be conducted to test that hypothesis. "Inconclusive" means the hypothesis has not yet been falsified; further testing is needed.

I do agree it's best to avoid the alarmist tone in this particular issue, but even YOU have to concede that a falsified result would be preferable to an inconclusive one.

 

[Enigma]

What doubt?

I have no conclusive evidence that there is a dragon in my garage. However, I have no doubt that there is not. I am not going to waste my time going to check.

Why? The guy who just knocked on your front door seems genuinely concerned that there may be a dragon in your garage. It'd take you all of thirty seconds to open up the door and tell him "See? No dragon. Thanks for keeping a lookout!"

On the other hand, the universe being unpredictable, there's a nonzero possibility that your crazy visitor just might be right and there is indeed a dragon in your garage. Doesn't cost you anything to look, and better safe than sorry.

Except it does cost to look.

Imagine if your visitor instead told you that the dragon is definitely trapped in your garage but was waiting in super-invisible intangible astral form (contained only by your garage because your garage is secretly an awesome astral prison) and so won't be visible until it tries to escape. According to them, the dragon will only become visible (and capturable/slayable) when it eventually will try to flee and wreak devastation on the land unless you can capture it. Therefore, they are asking you to keep constant watch on the garage until it does. It'll probably flee in 6 months. Maybe a year. A decade at the outside. Probably.

So, are you going to set up watch and get the appropriate provisions purchased, or are you going to tell the crazy dragon man to get off of your property?

Yet you want to conclude that there is doubt.

The hypothesis is that GMOs may cause unintended negative health effects. An experiment may be conducted to test that hypothesis. "Inconclusive" means the hypothesis has not yet been falsified; further testing is needed.

I do agree it's best to avoid the alarmist tone in this particular issue, but even YOU have to concede that a falsified result would be preferable to an inconclusive one.

What experiment can be done to falsify the hypothesis? Please provide details.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You mean they would have to make sure the containers they're using to haul food are actually CLEAN?

Oh, the indignity!

So you wash your salt shakers before refilling them? That's basically what you are asking for.

You're also going to need completely separate grain elevators.

Existing labeling laws have no such requirement.

Existing laws require manufacturers to accurately list the ingredients used in the manufacture of said product, as accurately as possible. Accuracy -- and a bare minimum of "knowing what we're doing" -- is already a requirement, hence the reason bread companies will be able to tell you if the bread they're selling you is made from whole wheat flour or enriched white flour.

But they aren't required to list the strain of wheat that flour was made from. There are many types of wheat.

The items are commodities. You are not required to list every detail, the name of the ingredient is enough

And you need to list those ingredients accurately. If your product uses corn, carrots, peas and green beans, you can't just list them as "vegetables."

A look over a seed company's website shows 26 varieties of corn but I've never seen what's in the store labeled more than white/yellow/bicolor and occasionally super-sweet. I find 17 carrots even though the store only sells "carrots". I find 30 peas despite the store only selling peas and sugar snap peas. Likewise 5 green beans. Note that none of these lists are anything like complete.

The difference in this case between natural corn and GMO corn would be similar to the difference between enriched flour and whole wheat flour. That difference is significant enough that products that use both have to list them separately (and most even describe exactly what "enriched flour" actually means).

1) White and whole wheat flour are easy to tell apart.

2) Nobody will care about a bit of cross contamination as it's inevitable anyway--whole wheat flour inherently contains white flour, the removal of the outside isn't 100%, white flour contains some whole wheat.

there's no requirement to list the impurities that are left behind from whatever it came from

I'll grant that there's no particular need -- at this time -- to require a listing for "trace amounts of GMO products" unless the product specifically seeks to be certified "GMO free."

But you're after a far stricter definition.

We are saying it would be a lot more expensive to accurately label whether soybeans were RR or not

Which is bullshit. The manufacturer knows whether his supplier is using RR soybeans or not. If he DOESN'T know, it's because he hasn't bothered to find out anything about his suppliers, what products they're using, nor the quality and safety thereof.

Remember the lawsuits about pollen blowing in? (Which have been overblown--the guys who got sued over it were the ones who were taking advantage of the RR genes that were blowing in.) Unless you grow your soybeans in a carefully isolated area (like the seed producers do) you're going to have some RR genes in the product.

Basically: the only way you can be that ignorant about what you are using to make your product is because you're an imbecile and probably shouldn't be putting your product on the market in the first place.

In the real world the grain elevators accept grain from the farmers in the area and mix it all together. The level of testing you're asking for simply isn't needed.

Thus showing you have no idea of the cost and apparently didn't even read the article discussing some of the costs.

Given your stellar reputation for carefully reading the very few external sources you bother to site, I'm going to take a guess that YOU didn't either. But at least three people have asked you to source that claim since I first called you on it, so why don't you go ahead and repost it.

I wasn't the guy who posted it originally.

 

[arkirk]

So you wash your salt shakers before refilling them? That's basically what you are asking for.

You're also going to need completely separate grain elevators.

Existing labeling laws have no such requirement.

Existing laws require manufacturers to accurately list the ingredients used in the manufacture of said product, as accurately as possible. Accuracy -- and a bare minimum of "knowing what we're doing" -- is already a requirement, hence the reason bread companies will be able to tell you if the bread they're selling you is made from whole wheat flour or enriched white flour.

But they aren't required to list the strain of wheat that flour was made from. There are many types of wheat.

The items are commodities. You are not required to list every detail, the name of the ingredient is enough

And you need to list those ingredients accurately. If your product uses corn, carrots, peas and green beans, you can't just list them as "vegetables."

A look over a seed company's website shows 26 varieties of corn but I've never seen what's in the store labeled more than white/yellow/bicolor and occasionally super-sweet. I find 17 carrots even though the store only sells "carrots". I find 30 peas despite the store only selling peas and sugar snap peas. Likewise 5 green beans. Note that none of these lists are anything like complete.

The difference in this case between natural corn and GMO corn would be similar to the difference between enriched flour and whole wheat flour. That difference is significant enough that products that use both have to list them separately (and most even describe exactly what "enriched flour" actually means).

1) White and whole wheat flour are easy to tell apart.

2) Nobody will care about a bit of cross contamination as it's inevitable anyway--whole wheat flour inherently contains white flour, the removal of the outside isn't 100%, white flour contains some whole wheat.

there's no requirement to list the impurities that are left behind from whatever it came from

I'll grant that there's no particular need -- at this time -- to require a listing for "trace amounts of GMO products" unless the product specifically seeks to be certified "GMO free."

But you're after a far stricter definition.

We are saying it would be a lot more expensive to accurately label whether soybeans were RR or not

Which is bullshit. The manufacturer knows whether his supplier is using RR soybeans or not. If he DOESN'T know, it's because he hasn't bothered to find out anything about his suppliers, what products they're using, nor the quality and safety thereof.

Remember the lawsuits about pollen blowing in? (Which have been overblown--the guys who got sued over it were the ones who were taking advantage of the RR genes that were blowing in.) Unless you grow your soybeans in a carefully isolated area (like the seed producers do) you're going to have some RR genes in the product.

Basically: the only way you can be that ignorant about what you are using to make your product is because you're an imbecile and probably shouldn't be putting your product on the market in the first place.

In the real world the grain elevators accept grain from the farmers in the area and mix it all together. The level of testing you're asking for simply isn't needed.

Thus showing you have no idea of the cost and apparently didn't even read the article discussing some of the costs.

Given your stellar reputation for carefully reading the very few external sources you bother to site, I'm going to take a guess that YOU didn't either. But at least three people have asked you to source that claim since I first called you on it, so why don't you go ahead and repost it.

I wasn't the guy who posted it originally.

As our science and our technology gets more sophisticated, it is actually getting EASIER AND EASIER TO KEEP TRACK OF THE THINGS YOU NEED TO TRACK to stay in business. Arguments against labeling are just the standard arguments for public ignorance these vendors always provide. Actually, the strains of wheat do have differences in nutritional value and it would be nice if the giant agribusiness concerns kept us informed of what they are providing for us to eat.

Loren calls food a "commodity" with the same impudence he commodifies human beings. People who don't care about your welfare use that kind of language to escape responsibility. They can then claim ignorance and therefore also claim they are not responsible because "we were unaware." or to put it differently, "all of society was unaware" this "unawareness" is contrived by excusing oneself from labeling. The source of the consequences of whatever might be in that product disappear in an immeasurable fog of universal ignorance. Good work, Loren! Thank you for calling us ignorant to begin with, and getting ready to call us ignorant later.

 

[tupac chopra]

Why? The guy who just knocked on your front door seems genuinely concerned that there may be a dragon in your garage. It'd take you all of thirty seconds to open up the door and tell him "See? No dragon. Thanks for keeping a lookout!"

On the other hand, the universe being unpredictable, there's a nonzero possibility that your crazy visitor just might be right and there is indeed a dragon in your garage. Doesn't cost you anything to look, and better safe than sorry.

Except it does cost to look.

From the study already done.

After mean survival time had elapsed, any deaths that occurred were considered to be largely due to aging. Before this period, 30% control males (three in total) and 20% females (only two) died spontaneously, while up to 50% males and 70% females died in some groups on diets containing the GM maize (Figure 6, panels GMO, GMO + R). However, the rate of mortality was not proportional to the treatment dose, reaching a threshold at the lowest (11%) or intermediate (22%) amounts of GM maize in the equilibrated diet, with or without the R application on the crop. It is noteworthy that the first two male rats that died in both GM maize-treated groups had to be euthanized due to Wilms' kidney tumors that had grown by this time to over 25% of body weight. This was approximately a year before the first control animal died. The first female death occurred in the 22% GM maize feeding group and resulted from a mammary fibroadenoma 246 days before the first control female death. The maximum difference in males was five times more deaths occurring by the 17th month in the group consuming 11% GM maize and in females six times greater mortality by the 21st month on the 22% GM maize diet with and without R. In the female cohorts, there were two to three times more deaths in all treated groups compared with controls by the end of the experiment and deaths occurred earlier in general.

What do you want 100% of GMO fed rats dying and none of the control group.

Is that when the cost is worth it?

 

[Togo]

So you wash your salt shakers before refilling them? That's basically what you are asking for.

You're also going to need completely separate grain elevators.

Loren, you can imagine as many obstacles as you wish, but this already works in Europe. It's not as difficult as you're making out.

Granted that treating different kinds of wheat as different means you can't just mix everything up, but then that's a direction the commodities market has been moving in for decades. Buyers now care where things come from. Brent Crude doesn't have the same price as saudi crude and if you can't prove the source you can't sell it. Electricty from renewable stations is worth more than electricty from coal. Textiles have gradually been improving their sourcing information, mainly to satisfy US trade requirements. There's nothing magical about Softs that should be able to ignore the same tracking requirements that are being brought in for everything else. The fact is, if you can't prove where somethoing came from, not everyone will buy it.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

GMOs produce a lot of food.

But the amount of food we have on the planet isn't the big problem right now, but distribution.

We are a greedy, stingy, cowardly and cruel species when we want to be. And we will go for any quick fix that will keep us from having to change. We are told now that the answer to starvation is more food and GMOs are the way to get that more food. But let's be real. Corporations are not producing more food to feed people but to make more profits and they will lie to us in order to do so. it isn't the GMOs that people mistrust so much, but the corporations. Entities with possibly eternal lives, veracious appetites, and no soul to save nor body to incarcerate. Instead of constructing more humane institutions that reflect the better angels of nature, we argue over the morality of a tool as opposed to its proper use and handling. Make the corporations making the GMOs safer and you will get safer GMOs. It is time to fix the cooks not the food.

 

[mrzyphl]

There have been plenty of long term studies done on gmos. Here are just a few of them.

https://docs.google.com/folderview?id=0B_W2c-uzSPBvam84TWhLXzFYUXc

The organic industry has close to a 10% share of the market. If they could prove that gmos are harmful it would be a massive windfall for them. So why haven't they funded any long term studies?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As our science and our technology gets more sophisticated, it is actually getting EASIER AND EASIER TO KEEP TRACK OF THE THINGS YOU NEED TO TRACK to stay in business. Arguments against labeling are just the standard arguments for public ignorance these vendors always provide. Actually, the strains of wheat do have differences in nutritional value and it would be nice if the giant agribusiness concerns kept us informed of what they are providing for us to eat.

Look at the prices they charge for those seeds--you couldn't sell food at such prices.

We aren't saying tracking is impossible, we are saying that tracking imposes major costs.

Besides, you totally missed the point. I was showing that there are actually many things that all get the same label on a package.

Loren calls food a "commodity" with the same impudence he commodifies human beings. People who don't care about your welfare use that kind of language to escape responsibility. They can then claim ignorance and therefore also claim they are not responsible because "we were unaware." or to put it differently, "all of society was unaware" this "unawareness" is contrived by excusing oneself from labeling. The source of the consequences of whatever might be in that product disappear in an immeasurable fog of universal ignorance. Good work, Loren! Thank you for calling us ignorant to begin with, and getting ready to call us ignorant later.

You apparently do not understand what "commodity" actually means. Things which are commodities are considered interchangeable. You don't care which particular ones you get.

- - - Updated - - -

Except it does cost to look.

From the study already done.

After mean survival time had elapsed, any deaths that occurred were considered to be largely due to aging. Before this period, 30% control males (three in total) and 20% females (only two) died spontaneously, while up to 50% males and 70% females died in some groups on diets containing the GM maize (Figure 6, panels GMO, GMO + R). However, the rate of mortality was not proportional to the treatment dose, reaching a threshold at the lowest (11%) or intermediate (22%) amounts of GM maize in the equilibrated diet, with or without the R application on the crop. It is noteworthy that the first two male rats that died in both GM maize-treated groups had to be euthanized due to Wilms' kidney tumors that had grown by this time to over 25% of body weight. This was approximately a year before the first control animal died. The first female death occurred in the 22% GM maize feeding group and resulted from a mammary fibroadenoma 246 days before the first control female death. The maximum difference in males was five times more deaths occurring by the 17th month in the group consuming 11% GM maize and in females six times greater mortality by the 21st month on the 22% GM maize diet with and without R. In the female cohorts, there were two to three times more deaths in all treated groups compared with controls by the end of the experiment and deaths occurred earlier in general.

What do you want 100% of GMO fed rats dying and none of the control group.

Is that when the cost is worth it?

*IF* the study actually proved that we wouldn't be having this discussion because it long since would have been banned.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So you wash your salt shakers before refilling them? That's basically what you are asking for.

You're also going to need completely separate grain elevators.

Loren, you can imagine as many obstacles as you wish, but this already works in Europe. It's not as difficult as you're making out.

Granted that treating different kinds of wheat as different means you can't just mix everything up, but then that's a direction the commodities market has been moving in for decades. Buyers now care where things come from. Brent Crude doesn't have the same price as saudi crude and if you can't prove the source you can't sell it. Electricty from renewable stations is worth more than electricty from coal. Textiles have gradually been improving their sourcing information, mainly to satisfy US trade requirements. There's nothing magical about Softs that should be able to ignore the same tracking requirements that are being brought in for everything else. The fact is, if you can't prove where somethoing came from, not everyone will buy it.

You've got a glaring error here: While you consider electricity from renewable stations as worth more it's actually a commodity--even if you are buying power from a renewable place you actually might be getting power from a coal station. There's one set of wires from which the producers add power and the consumers draw power.

When you buy power from the renewable source that simply means that the money you spend for the power goes to that company in exchange for the amount of power they push onto the grid, not that any given electron running through your house came from that power station.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

GMOs produce a lot of food.

But the amount of food we have on the planet isn't the big problem right now, but distribution.

We are a greedy, stingy, cowardly and cruel species when we want to be. And we will go for any quick fix that will keep us from having to change. We are told now that the answer to starvation is more food and GMOs are the way to get that more food. But let's be real. Corporations are not producing more food to feed people but to make more profits and they will lie to us in order to do so. it isn't the GMOs that people mistrust so much, but the corporations. Entities with possibly eternal lives, veracious appetites, and no soul to save nor body to incarcerate. Instead of constructing more humane institutions that reflect the better angels of nature, we argue over the morality of a tool as opposed to its proper use and handling. Make the corporations making the GMOs safer and you will get safer GMOs. It is time to fix the cooks not the food.

Actually, the amount is increasingly becoming an issue. There's little margin in food production, as the economies of third world nations improve and they eat more it has resulted in considerable price increases on the world market.

Supply 100, demand 99 -- no problems.
Supply 100, demand 101 -- prices rise, sometimes considerably.

 

[tupac chopra]

There have been plenty of long term studies done on gmos. Here are just a few of them.

Loads of them . Serious independent long term studies really trying to see if GMO'S are harmful to health.
Which one is worth discussing?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Why? The guy who just knocked on your front door seems genuinely concerned that there may be a dragon in your garage. It'd take you all of thirty seconds to open up the door and tell him "See? No dragon. Thanks for keeping a lookout!"

On the other hand, the universe being unpredictable, there's a nonzero possibility that your crazy visitor just might be right and there is indeed a dragon in your garage. Doesn't cost you anything to look, and better safe than sorry.

Except it does cost to look.

Imagine if your visitor instead told you that the dragon is definitely trapped in your garage but was waiting in super-invisible intangible astral form (contained only by your garage because your garage is secretly an awesome astral prison) and so won't be visible until it tries to escape. According to them, the dragon will only become visible (and capturable/slayable) when it eventually will try to flee and wreak devastation on the land unless you can capture it. Therefore, they are asking you to keep constant watch on the garage until it does. It'll probably flee in 6 months. Maybe a year. A decade at the outside. Probably.

See, now you're shifting the goalposts.

"There's a dragon in your garage" is a testable claim.

"There's an ethereal invisible dragon that you can't see in your garage until it finally escapes" isn't a testable claim. It's a really good excuse to paint a pentagram on the driveway and set off a fuckton of fireworks which I can then tell my crazy visitor is an ancient Yoruba Anti-Dragon ritual, but it's not something you can actually verify or not-verify by observation.

In this case, GMO alarmists believe there may be a "dragon" of unintended health effects hiding in somewhere in the genome of genetically modified foods. While this is not overly likely, it is at least a testable hypothesis, and scientists have spent billions of dollars and decades of research on stupider projects than this.

So, are you going to set up watch and get the appropriate provisions purchased, or are you going to tell the crazy dragon man to get off of your property?

See "Ancient Yoruba Anti-Dragon Ritual."

A scientist should have a sense of adventure, IMO.

What experiment can be done to falsify the hypothesis? Please provide details.

There are two possibilities. One involves me shoving exactly three point five tons of GMO corn up your ass in the space of thirty to forty five seconds and observe the health effects on your colon.

The other involves you not feigning ignorance on how experimentation works just to be argumentative.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

So you wash your salt shakers before refilling them?

Yes, and I'm kind of disgusted by the implication that YOU DON'T.

I also wash tuperware containers before reusing them, and I wash my dishes before eating off of them a second time.

You're also going to need completely separate grain elevators.

No you're not. You're just going to need to know whether or not the grain being lifted on those elevators comes from a GMO source or not.

But they aren't required to list the strain of wheat that flour was made from.

Which is something that may change with the new labeling laws.

Significantly, flour manufacturers are at least AWARE of what strains they have been using. They would have to know at least that much in order to manufacture a product of consistent safety and quality.

The idea that a manufacturer would take several tons of a material whose origins he cannot account for -- and cannot even know exactly what the material is -- and then process it into a food to sell to people is, frankly, HIGHLY disturbing and not something I would want to encourage IF it were common.

there's no requirement to list the impurities that are left behind from whatever it came from

I'll grant that there's no particular need -- at this time -- to require a listing for "trace amounts of GMO products" unless the product specifically seeks to be certified "GMO free."

But you're after a far stricter definition.

Not at all. If a product using corn uses a genetically modified strain in its manufacturing process, it should be specified as such in its ingredients. Manufacturers ALREADY KNOW if this is the case or not, all they have to do is list it.

Remember the lawsuits about pollen blowing in?

Yes. Farmers preemptively sued Monsanto over accidental contamination of their fields with GMO products. The judge tossed the lawsuit, citing Monsanto's stated policy of not filing suit against farmers for harvests resulting from said contamination (thus making that policy legally binding).

This is significant, since the farmers were VERY much aware that the GMO seeds had been blown into their fields from neighboring (licensed) growers. That's actually a pretty difficult thing for farmers not to notice.

Unless you grow your soybeans in a carefully isolated area (like the seed producers do) you're going to have some RR genes in the product.

Which, as I already stated, wouldn't need to be listed unless the product is trying to be certified "GMO free." Trace amounts would be acceptable enough... again, unless the farmer or manufacturer is stupid enough to sell his product without knowing anything about the quality or nature of what he's selling.

Basically: the only way you can be that ignorant about what you are using to make your product is because you're an imbecile and probably shouldn't be putting your product on the market in the first place.

In the real world the grain elevators accept grain from the farmers in the area and mix it all together.

So somewhere in the "real world" there is a place where farmers from all over the area randomly drive up to grain elevators in big trucks, dump the contents of their trucks into the elevators, collect a paycheck, and then drive away to SPEND said paycheck. No questions asked, no paperwork, no accounting for what they just dumped in the elevator.

Assuming that I believed this (I don't) I am again kind of tickled that you think this is an acceptable practice.

 

[bilby]

Loren, you can imagine as many obstacles as you wish, but this already works in Europe. It's not as difficult as you're making out.

Granted that treating different kinds of wheat as different means you can't just mix everything up, but then that's a direction the commodities market has been moving in for decades. Buyers now care where things come from. Brent Crude doesn't have the same price as saudi crude and if you can't prove the source you can't sell it. Electricty from renewable stations is worth more than electricty from coal. Textiles have gradually been improving their sourcing information, mainly to satisfy US trade requirements. There's nothing magical about Softs that should be able to ignore the same tracking requirements that are being brought in for everything else. The fact is, if you can't prove where somethoing came from, not everyone will buy it.

You've got a glaring error here: While you consider electricity from renewable stations as worth more it's actually a commodity--even if you are buying power from a renewable place you actually might be getting power from a coal station. There's one set of wires from which the producers add power and the consumers draw power.

When you buy power from the renewable source that simply means that the money you spend for the power goes to that company in exchange for the amount of power they push onto the grid, not that any given electron running through your house came from that power station.

[derail]The drift velocity of the electrons in domestic power wiring, coupled with the fact that most supplies are alternating current with a frequency of 50-60Hz, means that the electrons in your home are the same ones you bought with the property. The distance across the electricity meter is orders of magnitude greater than the distance the electrons travel in a cycle; so you are not buying electrons from anyone. What you are buying is pure energy - the 'jiggle' is what the generators supply, and you consume. [/derail]

 

[arkirk]

Look at the prices they charge for those seeds--you couldn't sell food at such prices.

We aren't saying tracking is impossible, we are saying that tracking imposes major costs.

Besides, you totally missed the point. I was showing that there are actually many things that all get the same label on a package.

Loren calls food a "commodity" with the same impudence he commodifies human beings. People who don't care about your welfare use that kind of language to escape responsibility. They can then claim ignorance and therefore also claim they are not responsible because "we were unaware." or to put it differently, "all of society was unaware" this "unawareness" is contrived by excusing oneself from labeling. The source of the consequences of whatever might be in that product disappear in an immeasurable fog of universal ignorance. Good work, Loren! Thank you for calling us ignorant to begin with, and getting ready to call us ignorant later.

You apparently do not understand what "commodity" actually means. Things which are commodities are considered interchangeable. You don't care which particular ones you get.

- - - Updated - - -

Except it does cost to look.

From the study already done.

After mean survival time had elapsed, any deaths that occurred were considered to be largely due to aging. Before this period, 30% control males (three in total) and 20% females (only two) died spontaneously, while up to 50% males and 70% females died in some groups on diets containing the GM maize (Figure 6, panels GMO, GMO + R). However, the rate of mortality was not proportional to the treatment dose, reaching a threshold at the lowest (11%) or intermediate (22%) amounts of GM maize in the equilibrated diet, with or without the R application on the crop. It is noteworthy that the first two male rats that died in both GM maize-treated groups had to be euthanized due to Wilms' kidney tumors that had grown by this time to over 25% of body weight. This was approximately a year before the first control animal died. The first female death occurred in the 22% GM maize feeding group and resulted from a mammary fibroadenoma 246 days before the first control female death. The maximum difference in males was five times more deaths occurring by the 17th month in the group consuming 11% GM maize and in females six times greater mortality by the 21st month on the 22% GM maize diet with and without R. In the female cohorts, there were two to three times more deaths in all treated groups compared with controls by the end of the experiment and deaths occurred earlier in general.

What do you want 100% of GMO fed rats dying and none of the control group.

Is that when the cost is worth it?

*IF* the study actually proved that we wouldn't be having this discussion because it long since would have been banned.

Loren: YOU will not be telling ME what I care about. People are not "interchangable." Maybe for your purposes, they might seem that way. I have stated over and over that YOU are trying to control what we have a right to know...and invariably it is in the direction of less knowledge for the people. I call that selling IGNORANCE.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Yes, and I'm kind of disgusted by the implication that YOU DON'T.

I can't imagine why one would wash a salt shaker before adding more salt to it.

I also wash tuperware containers before reusing them, and I wash my dishes before eating off of them a second time.

Of course. I picked the salt shakers because you're adding more of what was already there and it doesn't spoil.

You're also going to need completely separate grain elevators.

No you're not. You're just going to need to know whether or not the grain being lifted on those elevators comes from a GMO source or not.

1) Grain elevators aren't just used for a short time. They're fairly long term storage facilities.

2) If you just track what's in there you are going to have a major case of cross-contamination.

But they aren't required to list the strain of wheat that flour was made from.

Which is something that may change with the new labeling laws.

Significantly, flour manufacturers are at least AWARE of what strains they have been using. They would have to know at least that much in order to manufacture a product of consistent safety and quality.

[Citation needed]

The idea that a manufacturer would take several tons of a material whose origins he cannot account for -- and cannot even know exactly what the material is -- and then process it into a food to sell to people is, frankly, HIGHLY disturbing and not something I would want to encourage IF it were common.

Then I suggest you quit eating.

Remember the lawsuits about pollen blowing in?

Yes. Farmers preemptively sued Monsanto over accidental contamination of their fields with GMO products. The judge tossed the lawsuit, citing Monsanto's stated policy of not filing suit against farmers for harvests resulting from said contamination (thus making that policy legally binding).

This is significant, since the farmers were VERY much aware that the GMO seeds had been blown into their fields from neighboring (licensed) growers. That's actually a pretty difficult thing for farmers not to notice.

It's not a matter of noticing it, it's a matter of knowing how things work.

Unless you grow your soybeans in a carefully isolated area (like the seed producers do) you're going to have some RR genes in the product.

Which, as I already stated, wouldn't need to be listed unless the product is trying to be certified "GMO free." Trace amounts would be acceptable enough... again, unless the farmer or manufacturer is stupid enough to sell his product without knowing anything about the quality or nature of what he's selling.

It might not be trace amounts.

Basically: the only way you can be that ignorant about what you are using to make your product is because you're an imbecile and probably shouldn't be putting your product on the market in the first place.

In the real world the grain elevators accept grain from the farmers in the area and mix it all together.

So somewhere in the "real world" there is a place where farmers from all over the area randomly drive up to grain elevators in big trucks, dump the contents of their trucks into the elevators, collect a paycheck, and then drive away to SPEND said paycheck. No questions asked, no paperwork, no accounting for what they just dumped in the elevator.

Assuming that I believed this (I don't) I am again kind of tickled that you think this is an acceptable practice.

You can look at it. Right grain, in good shape. And of course there's paperwork--you don't sell that big an item without paperwork.

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You've got a glaring error here: While you consider electricity from renewable stations as worth more it's actually a commodity--even if you are buying power from a renewable place you actually might be getting power from a coal station. There's one set of wires from which the producers add power and the consumers draw power.

When you buy power from the renewable source that simply means that the money you spend for the power goes to that company in exchange for the amount of power they push onto the grid, not that any given electron running through your house came from that power station.

[derail]The drift velocity of the electrons in domestic power wiring, coupled with the fact that most supplies are alternating current with a frequency of 50-60Hz, means that the electrons in your home are the same ones you bought with the property. The distance across the electricity meter is orders of magnitude greater than the distance the electrons travel in a cycle; so you are not buying electrons from anyone. What you are buying is pure energy - the 'jiggle' is what the generators supply, and you consume. [/derail]

I didn't realize it was quite that short but I agree with the basic idea. I was just using the simplest way to express the notion that it's all one pool of power.

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Loren: YOU will not be telling ME what I care about. People are not "interchangable." Maybe for your purposes, they might seem that way. I have stated over and over that YOU are trying to control what we have a right to know...and invariably it is in the direction of less knowledge for the people. I call that selling IGNORANCE.

We aren't trying to ban "GMO-free" labels, we aren't doing anything to deny you knowledge.

We just don't want to pay the considerable cost of keeping track when we don't care.