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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 05:19 PM EST |
Use of a particular technology to modify your food doesn't
have anything to do with whether the result of the
modification makes the food healthier or not.
Monsanto makes its money by modifying food for economic
reasons, and most of the time these have nothing to do with
health. Making crops resistant to herbicide so you can get
rid of any weeds - that's good economics (especially from
the point of view of a company holding a patent on the
herbicide). Corn (maize) that produces insectide, ditto.
Whether this means humans eat more herbicide or insecticide,
and whether this particular herbicide or insecticide is
totally safe, are secondary factors.
But you *could* (and some scientists did) also use the same
technologies to, say, add Vitamin A to sweet potatoes or
rice, or make wheat more drought-resistant, or make rice
more flood-resistant. All of those have the potential to
hugely increase human health, and in some cases is already
doing so.
The thing is, you can't in general look at a food item and
tell whether it's been genetically modified. The
technology leaves no particular traces, it's just a tool.
It's like reading a novel and asking whether the author used
a computer to do the editing. The computer makes editing
easier, but whether the edits make the plot more interesting
or not is up to the author. You can't say that using a
computer results in bad books.
(Well, you could, if you built a much more sophisticated
argument, that the availability of easy editing makes
authors lazy, affects their work habits and writing style,
changes the dynamic of the author-editor relationship, or
some combination, and demonstrated how any of those changes
might result in an inferior plot, and futhermore rebutted
arguments that these changes have good effects that outweigh
the bad ones.)
PS The *perception* of effects on human health is an
economic factor that companies like Monsanto pay a lot of
attention to, but the perception is only loosely coupled to
human health.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: albert on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 05:31 PM EST |
I hate to be so cynical, but I have learned to live with it.
{:-)> [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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