I had the following nice comment about the recent GMO post:
Comment:
I read somewhere that rats (or maybe it’s mice) fed GMO are sterile by the 3rd generation. I don’t mean cleansed of all germs, rather unable to reproduce. I’ll try to find the data.
Janell
Thanks Janell,
And to those of you who wonder, we are all quite aware that GMO food is an extremely broad term for a large variety of foods and plant products. Certainly no thoughtful person thinks that every single GMO food has the same characteristics. Whether good or bad. Otherwise, we just test one and we know everything about every one of them. That’s not going to happen.
I would just speculate, that most of them are no better or worse then food that grew the way nature made it. And I would also speculate that some GMO foods might be better, even much better, then the variety that had not been tinkered with. And a few are probably worse. Perhaps even very dangerous. These are things we need to find out before we put them on our dinner table.
My concern is that, by their own admission, in fact they seem proud of it, the promoters of GMO have combined things that could not possibly ever be combined in nature. Like plants and animals, and parts of plants and animals, that glow in the dark.
Another recurring theme seems to be, “Roundup resistant.”
When I can do so without a huge penalty and cost and/or bother, I buy organic food. One of the reasons I do that, is because it is well known that the modern chemicals used for pest control, are among the most toxic chemicals known. Many are based on nerve gas. Some disrupt the ability of cells to produce certain parts of the body, or disrupt the metabolic function of cells.
Virtually all of the pesticides are almost like catalysts in that a very, VERY tiny amount causes a catastrophic reaction. Obviously this reaction is INTENDED for the pest. But, just as obviously, pretty much all of the pesticides are very harmful to humans. The label even says so.
And, clearly they design them to be tenacious and remain attached to the plant. They don’t do much good if they immediately fall off, wash off, or evaporate.
Therefore, I would prefer to not eat very much pesticide. I would prefer to not learn firsthand, what kind of damage it can do to my body. So I like to buy organic.
For all of the above reasons, it seems insane to me, to be proud of developing a food that can be virtually drenched in one of the most dangerous and toxic chemicals we have come up with.
This is literally the Uber-ANTI-Organic food.
I believe that quite some time ago, they found that human breast milk in America, could not be sold in the stores, because it usually has too many contaminants that are known to be dangerous. The mothers have a lot of known, problem chemicals in their bodies already.
If we were Canables we would only be able eat Health Food folks. If Whole Foods Market ever figures out that they could have a trapdoor in the toilets and skim off a small percentage of their customers, to sell to the cannibals, they could command a high price for people that go to the trouble and expense of eating organic.
But don’t tell Whole Foods about it. I plan to shop there again when I get back to the states.
Doesn’t our government tell pregnant mothers, to not eat more than one serving a week of fish, or perhaps it is seafood? Bbecause there is so much mercury and other known toxins contaminating our oceans and getting into the flesh of marine animals that we eat. We must be careful to not eat very much of it or we will die even sooner than otherwise.
So, back to Monsanto being very proud of creating a food that can survive being drenched in these toxins at a far higher level than ever before. Yet people don’t seem to see anything wrong with that?
Can you spell, ‘tunnel vision?’ Or is the phrase, ‘brain-dead?’
Also, do you need to be an environmental scientist, to know that the poisons that we use to protect our plants from pests, wash downstream into lakes and rivers and pretty much all of them eventually end up in the oceans. Hopefully some of them break down and become harmless over time, but many do not, and what if some become much more harmful over time?
So, someone is very proud of learning a way that they can put, perhaps 10 times as much toxin on the ground, so that it can wash down to the oceans?
And, like drug resistant bacteria, we are already seeing, ‘super weeds’ adapting to be resistant to Roundup. I’m told that was the original reason for making Roundup Ready plants.
It’s not a question of putting on their thinking caps. I don’t understand what these people use for brain cells.
And I really can’t understand how they can sell these ideas to the American public. Yet they do. I can only assume that these are the reasons that, especially the Republicans, want to have less education available to people. It is an unnecessary expense. If people have never learned how to think, then the government can tell them anything. Monsanto can tell them anything. And as long as it comes in a snappy video, with lots of gorgeous women and handsome men, all smiling and happy, it must be great!
Sort of like the advertisements for pharmaceuticals, that after you’ve been out of the US for a while, you may think that they are an attempt at humor.
“Be sure to ask your doctor about the purple pill. It is so pretty that you will surely want to get a prescription for them. It is so pretty that we won’t bother to tell you what, if anything, it might try to accomplish. It is so pretty that even though we tell you many of the known frightening things that it will cause as side effects, we know you will still want it.”
Or, things like:
“Do you sometimes have trouble going to sleep right away? Then you should buy XYZ. It will make you gorgeous and happy just like this impossibly beautiful woman that we are showing you. And only a few of the people taking it have committed suicide, or had their legs fall off, or become incontinent, or had anal leakage. The heart attacks, and asthma, and Alzheimer’s, that seem much more common if you take it, will surely be a reasonable risk, and order to go to sleep right away.”
I guess the assumption is that people have a five second attention span, and only hear the first five seconds of the commercial. Then, they can say anything they want at the back of the commercial, and everyone ignores it.
Back in the 60s, and early 70s, when the use of recreational drugs beyond the very traditional, alcohol and tobacco, was increasing dramatically, there was an expression, “Better living through chemistry.”
It was meant, when used by the original chemical company that started saying it, as an honest, and valid statement. Good news.
We have learned a lot of genuinely good things in the last hundred thousand years. The Chinese figured out that boiling their water to make tea, usually made it safe to drink perhaps thousands of years before the Europeans figured it out.
In fact, several experienced travelers, have assured me that if you’re in an area where travelers diarrhea is a serious threat, to go eat at a Chinese restaurant. The very nature of the way they cook Chinese food, significantly reduces the danger of travelers diarrhea and other similar problems. It could be true.
The Europeans figured out that wine and the granddaddy of beer, was much safer to drink than water from a stream or a polluted well. People have told me that the Mayflower was really planning to go further down the coast of the New World to form the colony. But they ran out of beer.
I was told that this was not a joke. The very mild beer used in those days was the only safe liquid to drink. The trip had taken longer than planned, and they had to stop at Plymouth Rock.
Eventually, sailors figured out, that a lack of vitamin C, cause scurvy and other serious and fatal health problems.
And many countless and innumerable good things have been found to have better living through chemistry.
But in the 60s, it became a catchphrase for popping some pill to make you feel good, at least temporarily. You might feel quite miserable in an hour to. Just like people that drink alcohol to feel good now, knowing that they will feel like hell soon. But they think “Hey, I’m a ‘Now kind of guy.'”
And so even when the legitimate dangers of many, probably most, carefully made and pure, recreational drugs were widely known, people still took them. Even when it was widely known that many, probably most, were made in laboratories that could care less about being careful of dangerous contaminants, people still took them.
And the most amazing to me, is that, I am told, that it is by no means rare, for someone to pop a pill, or liquid, or injection, or whatever method, of introducing a totally unknown substance into their body, just to see how much fun it might be.
Feel free to call me old-fashioned, if that’s what it means.
But, back to the original thought of this post. I have no problem at all with honest and thorough research into what would happen if we changed something? That is one excellent way of learning things. But you must be honest and thorough. Clearly Monsanto and others do not have that reputation.
It has been shown that a lot to have money in opposition of truth in labeling, has been donated secretly. So, clearly we will never know how much the bad guys have spent on this.
But, they have admitted spending over $56 million in California and Washington to keep us from knowing what is in our food. To me that says they are certain that we would not buy it, if we could figure out which package it was in.
As Janell points out, a lot of this research takes many years and generations to learn the dangers.
There are many examples of seed grains being protected from pests using a mercury based product. You then plant the seed and grow the rice or whatever and it is generally considered to be very safe to eat.
However, with poorly educated people that happened to be starving in remote countries, it became very common for them to think that the prohibition of eating the seed rice, or seed wheat, etc., was foolish because people would say, “I ate some for dinner, and look at me. Absolutely nothing is wrong.” So, more people would eat some of it, because they were very hungry, and they could not remember that if they planted it, they would get many thousands of times more rice. But that would be months from now, and today is today.
They also could not imagine that whole families would die within weeks, from mercury poisoning. It was a slow poison and that caught them by surprise.
The Romans figured out that processing wine in vats that were lined with lead, which was an easy way to make a liquid proof container, also seem to make the wine taste sweeter and more palatable. They had no idea about the dangers of lead poisoning. And some sources think that that was an important factor in the fall of the Roman Empire. More and more, primarily rich, people were becoming goofy as they succumb to lead poisoning.
A famous Arctic expedition used food stored in metal cans that were cutting edge technology at the time. The whole idea was brand-new and they did not appreciate that using the old-fashioned, lead solder, was poisoning them. They then lived on a diet of canned food that was unbelievably high in lead, and they became so irrational, that when they needed to escape their trapped ship and take dog sleds to the south and warmer, safer lands, even though they were traveling as lightly as they could, they took a cast iron bathtub with them.
As far as I know, no one has ever learned exactly why that seemed like a good idea to them. Perhaps to melt snow and make drinking water. But no one alive today knows why, because all of them died as a result of the chronic lead poisoning. They became not very bright. In a land where you had to be clever in order to survive.
Thalidomide was a wonderful and powerful drug and widely used because everyone knew it was very safe, until they finally realized that unless we want our children to all be born without arms and legs, we need to be careful how we use it.
A few years ago, I read that thalidomide was now being used again, because it was the best choice for something or other. But, they clearly did not give it to anyone who could become pregnant.
So, apparently some of us have learned nothing, by watching a hungry farmer eat a bowl of rice, laced with mercury, and feeling full and strong for the first time in months, but dying within weeks, even though he was a young man.
I do not propose bans on very many things. I do not propose a band on GMO or GE. What I propose is honest, intelligent, and thorough research, into the characteristics and results of, any new technology. Hell, we still don’t have honest, intelligent, and thorough research, into the results of many old technologies. Just look at all a confusion about what kind of diet is best for humans. Although, it is widely understood by 95% of the world, that the Standard American Diet, (SAD) is not a good choice.
It certainly appears to me, that dozens, or clearly hundreds, of philosophies of eating, can be written up in a cute book or video, and sold for a fortune. Millions of us are looking for answers. And obviously, not finding them.
To me, it seems statistically certain, that most of these proposals are largely wrong. And entirely possible that all of them are wrong, because we really just don’t know. Not yet. I have certainly never heard of one that always works as predicted for everyone. Not one.
But, some work really well for a few years.
This food thing is a tough puzzle to solve. Because, in my opinion, we don’t yet understand the variables very well, and there are a zillion of them.
Most of us that figured out that there is more to healthy eating then beer and cans tamales, with a Mars bar for dessert.
But, WOW! Can we ever get some argument started, if we just expressed an opinion about what to eat and what not to eat? Diet is a subject that is very controversial. At least in America.
People have diet jihads. Few subjects can elicit such a rabid response from otherwise bright people. Diet, politics, religion, and boat anchoring, are safest when not mentioned in public. When you hear them come up in public, get your coat and go for a walk. After the police of left, and the crime scene tape has come down, you can go back in your house.
Therefore, what I propose is honest, intelligent, and thorough research, into the characteristics and results of, any new technology and even many of the old ones. From anchors to zebra mussels.
Dave
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