Would you willingly eat them?
Do geneticly altered foods scare you?
by Jayson 6 Replies latest jw friends
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Holey_Cheeses*King_of_the juice.
Only if its got more than one head.
cheeses, just being frivolous again.
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Stephanus
Re: Do geneticly altered foods scare you?
No
Would you willingly eat them?
Of course. Often the gene alteration is to one specific gene, of known effect. "Traditional" gene alteration techniques, that is, via radiation or chemical mutation, alter hundreds, even thousands of genes at a time. An example from South America: the local bee was gentle, but low in honey production. It was crossed with the higher honey producing but more agressive African bee (nothing more natural than cross breeding now, is there?). Result: killer bees. With modern biotechnology, the high honey gene could have been transferred to the gentle bee, while the agression gene could have been left behind. And there's nothing "Frankenfood" about this - how can transferring a bee gene to another bee be bad?
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Stephanus
Just a clarification: I'd eat the honey from a genetically altered bee, not the bee itself!
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searchfothetruth
Jayson,
Did you read the articles earlier this year on Kraft foods?
Apparently they have been putting GM ingrediants in their food without labelling. They tried to sell the same foods over here but they weren't allowed to, and thats how it came out.
Monsanto has had a lot of funding from Tony Blairs government, despite opposition from his own party. They have been planting GM crops next to natural crops and these have cross-pollonated.
I think messing with nature is always dangerous but it will be years before the consequences are felt.
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JH
We never know what we eat. I'm healthy and never was sick in my whole life, and I eat lots of junk food.
Genetically engineered foods do scare me abit because I don't know the consequences on the long run. Tht scares me more than just eating lousy.
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Abaddon
As has been pointed out, we live with genetically modified dogs and cats, ride genetically modified horses, eat genetically modified pigs, cows, sheep and chickens, grow cereal crops that were selected due to the characteristics they had, some of which was caused by interspecies gene transfer in the wild, eat genetically modified apples and other fruits, have genetically modified a family of vegetables so you can get sprouts or cabbages or other varients, all through genetic modification... good old fashined 'unnatural' selection, or breeding.
Now rather than it taking generations, we can now do it cleverly, and introduce genes from gene pools which we would not be able to do through breeding.
The gene from x organism doesn't know it is from x organism, and the DNA chain it gets stuck in doesn't know (say), that it's 'pure' (read product of thousands of years of domestication) goat DNA has been 'sullied' by wicked bad spider genes.
Obviously caution should be used, but the problem is much of the protests are based on the 'we haven't done this before' (partially true but only in extent), and 'bad things will happen' (unproven and what people always say about new technology... imagine the 'protests' about mules the first time that happened), rather than on any hard science. Having said that Monsanto et. al. are corporate female progeneter copulators, and not to be trusted.
If I had the cash I would be looking at ways to produce (through genetic modification) cats with coat patterns modeled on the big cats with genes for small stature thrown in for good measure, naturally making the engineered animals sterile so I would be able to corner the market in healthy well tempered permenantly kitten-sized replicas of big cats. People would pay a fortune for them.
This is no more moral or immoral than breeding the old fashioned way, eliminates the need for neutering, and would also eliminate inherited conditions, maybe even add in immunity to common diseases of cats where this was possible, whilst providing people with characteristic companion animals or animals designed for a set purpose, just as has been done by conventional breeding for a long long time.