GMO foods

[cubinator]

Why haven't we really spliced genes from bioluminescent algae, jellyfish, fungi, etc. into foods yet? We seem to have no trouble inventing new forms of corn and apples, and do it for scientific markers in all kinds of tissue, yet I have yet to see a naturally glowing fruit to eat. This is something that is obviously extremely important to develop. I see that there are some glowing food additives, but not really foods themselves.

[Guest]

Probably because developing GMO is expensive, and it's got enough bad press that any GMO effort has to promise really fat returns. Splicing GFP into everything is evidently not profitable enough.

We do, however, have copy protection for corn. Or rather had, I believe Monsanto was forced to drop the idea. They once managed to make corn seeds that could be planted, but they grew into plants that themselves wouldn't have viable seeds, thus forcing farmers to sell everything and buy new seeds from Monsanto, instead of selling some and planting some. It went over just as well as any DRM, only the people affected were taken somewhat more seriously when they complained.

Edited September 2, 2020 by Guest

[K^2]

Yeah, there isn't a big enough market for it to offset the costs. If you are in a food business, anything that makes your food obviously engineered is likely to drive sales down, not up, and few will pay extra for a novelty like this in their food.

We do have non-food novelty GMOs, though. You can buy GloFish in Walmart in most states in US in the pet section. They are species of common aquarium fish genetically modified to produce fluorescent proteins in many different colors. They tend to lumines a little even under common lights, but they are actually glowing under a black light. They started out with some zebrafish populations (danio) that was modified for research purposes, found a marketable use for them as aquarium fish, and have since expanded into other species and multitude of colors. I know that some places, notably California, have strict laws prohibiting sale of live GMO, so you won't find them here, and I don't know what the situation is in other countries, but GloFish are still the most accessible novelty GMO I'm aware of.

[Nuke]

theres too much anti-gmo propaganda out there. and it doesnt make any sense as it can stand to have an impact on global hunger issues. 

i also find it cute when people buy processed foods with 'organic' and 'gmo free' thinking its healthy. 

[Superfluous J]

100% organic Hemlock tea!

Socrates approved!

Edited September 3, 2020 by Superfluous J

[razark]

https://xkcd.com/641/

[SOXBLOX]

Too many people have spent too much of their time in school learning useless things, and now we in the USA have a non-trivial scientifically illiterate population. They sure can yell, though...

Seriously, I saw non-GMO salt for sale. Freaking salt! Since when does sodium chloride have DNA? Oh, and it was the allegedly healthy Himalayan Pink Salt...

[Superfluous J]

10 minutes ago, SOXBLOX said:

Himalayan Pink Salt

That's the Detroit rule.

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, cubinator said:

Why haven't we really spliced genes from bioluminescent algae, jellyfish, fungi, etc. into foods yet?

Haven't we?

Spoiler

Google, "luminescent pigs"

[Scotius]

Radhog! My first reaction would be to kill it with Plasma Rifle, then prepare a dose of Rad-X before eating.

[Guest]

That's another reason it's a small market.  Some people would like it, but not enough to justify the cost.

[Scotius]

6 hours ago, SOXBLOX said:

Too many people have spent too much of their time in school learning useless things, and now we in the USA have a non-trivial scientifically illiterate population. They sure can yell, though...

Seriously, I saw non-GMO salt for sale. Freaking salt! Since when does sodium chloride have DNA? Oh, and it was the allegedly healthy Himalayan Pink Salt...

Yeah, i hate this marketing BS. Like "Mustard. Without preservatives!" No one ever put preservatives in mustard, because it doesn't spoil! It can dry out or oxidize if left open for too long, but it is still perfectly edible - just add some vinegar and mix well to restore taste and consistency. Such tactics are not a blatant lie technically, but i still find them deceitful.

[Entropian]

This "All Natural" thing also bugs me.  You want to know what's also all natural?  Excrement. _{(sorry if this breaks the forum rules)}  The "organic is healthier" thing also makes no sense. 

14 hours ago, Nuke said:

theres too much anti-gmo propaganda out there.

Agreed.  If you have a plant that's GMO'ed to produce pesticides known to harm humans, ok, don't buy it.  If there's a GMO'ed plant that makes bigger fruit, what's the problem?   Humans have already done this for millennia, just through a slower process.

[Guest]

47 minutes ago, Entropian said:

If there's a GMO'ed plant that makes bigger fruit, what's the problem?

Because usually, the way it can make bigger fruit is by having more water in it. That's a problem with selectively bred strains, as well. The result typically tastes like water, as well. Ask any older person about how food used to taste in their youth and you'll get an earful. I've heard stories that early in the 20th century (interwar era and just after WWII), if you cut up a single lemon, everyone in the house could smell it. Try to find lemons like this now.

If you can find them, genuine "naturally grown" (that is, without using modern growth acceleration techniques, and usually a local strain) foods are typically of much higher quality, and simply taste better. Of course, they're typically much more expensive than normal, are not available everywhere, and usually impossible to get off-season. If you have a garden, you can also grow fruits yourself, and they're typically small but tasty, too. I haven't yet heard of any GMO that would actually deliberately attempt to improve the taste. Again, GMO is expensive, and better taste wouldn't make you nearly as much money as just producing more crops. So, as usual in the corporate world, it's all about quantity, quality be damned.

Edited September 3, 2020 by Guest

[razark]

1 hour ago, Entropian said:

You want to know what's also all natural?

Asbestos?  Arsenic?  Hemlock?  Falling off a cliff?  Volcanic eruptions?

[TheSaint]

43 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Because usually, the way it can make bigger fruit is by having more water in it. That's a problem with selectively bred strains, as well. The result typically tastes like water, as well. Ask any older person about how food used to taste in their youth and you'll get an earful. I've heard stories that early in the 20th century (interwar era and just after WWII), if you cut up a single lemon, everyone in the house could smell it. Try to find lemons like this now.

If you can find them, genuine "naturally grown" (that is, without using modern growth acceleration techniques, and usually a local strain) foods are typically of much higher quality, and simply taste better. Of course, they're typically much more expensive than normal, are not available everywhere, and usually impossible to get off-season. If you have a garden, you can also grow fruits yourself, and they're typically small but tasty, too. I haven't yet heard of any GMO that would actually deliberately attempt to improve the taste. Again, GMO is expensive, and better taste wouldn't make you nearly as much money as just producing more crops. So, as usual in the corporate world, it's all about quantity, quality be damned.

We have a large selection of fruit trees growing in our back yard, and while it's a PITA to maintain them (pest control, birds, harvesting, preserving, etc), I will agree with this assessment.

And it isn't just about quantity either, but also about a lot of other factors that local growers just don't have to deal with. If a grower in California wants to sell his tomatoes in Nebraska, he has to produce tomatoes that can survive the trip and still be put out for sale in a condition that someone will actually want to buy. So they have to breed their crops for durability as well. And color, texture, appearance, etc. If a tomato doesn't look and feel like a consumer expects a tomato to look and feel, they won't buy it. And it has to look that way after it has been dumped in bins four or five times, manhandled in a crate, hauled over a thousand miles of roads in a semi-truck, and displayed in a grocery store produce department for a couple of days. That's a lot to ask of a piece of produce that doesn't even cost a dollar.

And it isn't just fruits and vegetables, either. Meat has seen major changes over the last 50 years as well. Hog farmers in the 1980s found themselves trying to compete with chicken (Remember the "The Other White Meat" ad campaign?), so they began breeding their stock to reduce the fat content in the meat. If you try cooking a modern pork roast with a recipe from the 60s you'll find out real quick how much things have changed.

2 hours ago, Entropian said:

You want to know what's also all natural? 

Hitler. Hitler was all natural.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

Because usually, the way it can make bigger fruit is by having more water in it. That's a problem with selectively bred strains, as well. The result typically tastes like water, as well. Ask any older person about how food used to taste in their youth and you'll get an earful. I've heard stories that early in the 20th century (interwar era and just after WWII), if you cut up a single lemon, everyone in the house could smell it. Try to find lemons like this now.

If you can find them, genuine "naturally grown" (that is, without using modern growth acceleration techniques, and usually a local strain) foods are typically of much higher quality, and simply taste better. Of course, they're typically much more expensive than normal, are not available everywhere, and usually impossible to get off-season. If you have a garden, you can also grow fruits yourself, and they're typically small but tasty, too. I haven't yet heard of any GMO that would actually deliberately attempt to improve the taste. Again, GMO is expensive, and better taste wouldn't make you nearly as much money as just producing more crops. So, as usual in the corporate world, it's all about quantity, quality be damned.

This, and this is kind of the benefit of organic food as you say it grows slower and therefore tend to have more taste. 
And yes GMO is expensive so you want to go for staple crops not special products. 
This will change down the line. 
And no nothing you eat outside of game and stuff you gatherer in the wood is any sort of natural. 

First it was that the seeds who was easiest to harvest tended to be harvested most, no serious plan just unnatural selection. 
Serious breeding was an industrial age thing, the last 100 year its been an serious science, doing stuff like exposing seeds to radiation to increase mutation rate to make it faster to select preferable stains, no thought about taste as long as not horrible or  weird secondary effects, this is true for all selective breeding. 
Radiation just speed stuff up. 
Yes GMO where you modify for specific traits don't sounds so dangerous? 
Or is shooting grapeshot blindfolded with an rapid fire heavy gun safer. 
 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

And no nothing you eat outside of game and stuff you gatherer in the wood is any sort of natural. 

I meant naturally grown. By that, I meant stuff that just grows on its own pace, on normal soil, in its native climate (not a greenhouse) without chemical augmentation and other tricks used to make plants grow fast. There's a lot of things besides selective breeding and GMO that you can do to a plant to make it grow faster (and taste worse), and many of them are recent inventions. In fact, in most crops that are not heavily optimized by whatever method, growing conditions are just as important as the strain (a fact well known to wine affectionados).

BTW, it's quite possible to find "natural" variants of some common crop plants, such as the wild carrot. They're quite unlike the "domestic" ones, and very uneconomical to grow on scale, but they exist. Also, while staple crops such as maize don't resemble their ancestors, the less common ones change didn't change as much. 

2 hours ago, TheSaint said:

And it isn't just fruits and vegetables, either. Meat has seen major changes over the last 50 years as well. Hog farmers in the 1980s found themselves trying to compete with chicken (Remember the "The Other White Meat" ad campaign?), so they began breeding their stock to reduce the fat content in the meat. If you try cooking a modern pork roast with a recipe from the 60s you'll find out real quick how much things have changed.

Yeah, and they have got in on adding water, too.  Though lately people started catching on, and I've seen ham wieners that proudly boast they're "97% meat" or "made from 1.5kg of raw meat" (for a 1kg pack). "Regular" stuff has a large percentage of water by weight, apparently. I'm in Eastern Europe, so meat market dynamics are very different from the US here, but one thing older people agree about was that in communist times, meat was in short supply (even then, not all the time), but it was real meat. Under capitalism, food of that quality had been rendered a luxury good. Same with fruit and vegetables.

Edited September 3, 2020 by Guest

[DunaManiac]

20 hours ago, Nuke said:

theres too much anti-gmo propaganda

Yeah, that's really unfortunate, especially in the US.

My take on "organic" foods it is that at best it tastes slightly better, at worst it's marketing.

Spoiler

Seriously though it's kind of funny how people take "all-natural" at face value, remember water bottle companies? No matter how extravagant their claims are, it's just tap water every single time.

 

Edited September 3, 2020 by DunaManiac

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, DunaManiac said:

My take on it is that at best it tastes slightly better, at worst it's marketing.

TBH, I've never seen any GMO being peddled on account of its culinary advantage. Everything I've heard about taste-improving efforts was scientists fooling around in the lab. As explained above, commercial GMO is almost exclusively about crop yield. Right now, GMO benefits pretty much only the corporations, with talk about helping with hunger in developing countries being a secondary benefit (and a smokescreen, hunger is a logistics/economic issue, not production capacity). I do hope this will change someday, and food will be modified to improve "customer experience", but it seems economics do not currently favor this approach.

[Nuke]

14 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Haven't we?

  Hide contents

Google, "luminescent pigs"

glow in the dark bacon! shut up and take my money!

Edited September 3, 2020 by Nuke

[DunaManiac]

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

TBH, I've never seen any GMO being peddled on account of its culinary advantage. Everything I've heard about taste-improving efforts was scientists fooling around in the lab. As explained above, commercial GMO is almost exclusively about crop yield. Right now, GMO benefits pretty much only the corporations, with talk about helping with hunger in developing countries being a secondary benefit (and a smokescreen, hunger is a logistics/economic issue, not production capacity). I do hope this will change someday, and food will be modified to improve "customer experience", but it seems economics do not currently favor this approach.

Whoops, I meant "all natural' "all-organic" foods, not GMOs.

I'll change the post to clear that up.

[Guest]

In that case, it's all right.  Sometimes the difference is very significant, "organic" apple juice tastes like, well, apples (I think it'd be called cider in the US, a term reserved for the alcoholic variety around here), where the regular kind tastes like sugar water. The label doesn't guarantee quality, but the good stuff will usually have it, because why not. And sometimes it doesn't really matter, or it takes a real gourmet to tell the difference.

And all that sounds extremely silly to anyone with chemistry and biology training, to who sugar water is just as organic as apple juice. And asphalt, for that matter. Organic chemistry is concerned with all sorts of carbon molecules, and about the only non-organic thing that's commonly eaten is table salt. So, in theory, the oil companies could start labeling their stuff as "all organic" at any time. Of course, they seem to actually prefer the "synthetic" label, probably because synthetic oil really is better for car engines than dirty natural one.

Edited September 4, 2020 by Guest

[DerekL1963]

6 hours ago, TheSaint said:

And it isn't just fruits and vegetables, either. Meat has seen major changes over the last 50 years as well. Hog farmers in the 1980s found themselves trying to compete with chicken (Remember the "The Other White Meat" ad campaign?), so they began breeding their stock to reduce the fat content in the meat. If you try cooking a modern pork roast with a recipe from the 60s you'll find out real quick how much things have changed.

As someone who does historical re-creation cookery at a fairly serious level, it can be as difficult to replicate a recipe from 1960's as the 1460's.  Grocery store foodstuffs have changed radically over the last few decades.

[kerbiloid]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2172467/Surely-thats-discomfort-food-Forget-chocolate-meet-woman-gorges-STONES-shes-feeling-down.html

Spoiler

The natural inorganic food.