GMO Foods

I just wanted to put my oar in that the opponents have it mostly backwards.  While it is a big deal for a few people in America, who can afford to pay extra for whatever food preferences they like, it is bigger in Europe, which I note sometimes when I am reading European news sources and seeing the sidebar. The opposition to GMO foods is greater there.  Mostly, you can't grow them there at all.

I think there are a few interrelated worries.  First, there is the idea that something will suddenly get badly out of control, a plant that swarms entire niches, crowding out those decent local plants that have worked hard for us for so long. It will have toxins, or unrestrained growth, we fear. GMO foods are based entirely on domesticated plants that cannot survive in the wild.  They ain't going anywhere without human assistance,  any more than a Pekinese that had some aggression gene mistakenly altered in a mad scientist's CRISPR experiment would be anything other than food if it escaped into the woods. Plants that are 99.9% domesticated versions that cannot in any way compete in the wild are not going to be changed in a single characteristic and become kings. Those strawberries aren't taking over the garden, much less the world.

Take the seeds from all your favorite vegetables in the produce section and plant them.  Let me know how that worked.

That would be weeds that do all of those dangerous things.  Weeds are the opposite of GMO foods. A toxic plant that wildly outcompetes everything in its area is pretty much the history of plants before domestication. That experiment has been run millions of times.

I have a little more sympathy for the more sophisticated version, that says there is a long tail of unintended consequences which are not very predictable, and human beings intervening in such things has produced some terrible results. Yet I would still counter that no, this is weeds that do that.  Adjusting a single gene is much more likely to produce results we can observe closely and correct for immediately even for subtle changes. Genetically crossing two plants (or animals) in the usual method of completely interfering with nature that we have used for 12,000 years means slamming in thousands of new gene mixes every time, hoping for very clean and precise results but more often getting unexpected and useless stuff.  There have been unintended consequences of humans screwing with stuff in that manner for thousands of years. (Though still less than when we just let plants and animals do what they want and try to eat the result.)

There are far worse consequences of humans not screwing with stuff, and most of what humans do to improve plants has (eventually) been overwhelmingly to the good. What we have done up till now has been prevented from being hugely more dangerous mostly because most of our experiments have been useless and gone nowhere.  We've pretty much run all the dangerous experiments already.  We have a bad feeling about the unfamiliar, certainly.

Most GMO's are about field production - frost resistance, shorter growing season, insect resistance, advantages in harvesting.  Because we go to supermarkets and see fruits that are much more perfect than those we remember from even a few decades ago, we are more likely to be aware of the changes to appeal to shoppers, such as size, regularity, and color.  We resent this a bit, feeling that we are being manipulated by agribiz into falling for an inferior product.  We may want to contemplate - and then define - what we mean by "inferior" in this context, though.  And keep in mind what I keep saying about memory when we do that. 

There is another set of worries about big corporations controlling so much of our food, and doing things we don't understand, and clearly not caring about us very much, with all their money and power.  We have this idea that it will lead to monocultures and good foods disappearing forever.  I know little about Monsanto, but have read so much obviously-stupid criticism of them that I confess I long ago moved away from neutral to being slightly on their side.  When I read up on it a bit last year, I concluded that they are insensitive and didn't make much effort to explain things to people.  Whatever unfair pressure and marketing they did in undeveloped countries has been dwarfed by the unfairness of Greenpeace and other activists spreading falsehoods in those same places. This is largely a European phenomenon, convincing places that need food that something is somehow wrong with what is now on offer, trying to get them to refuse it or outlaw it.  This happened even back in the Green Revolution days with Norman Borlaug. People who need food aren't getting it because Europeans, including especially the very-political EU, are keeping them from it.

Yet even if Monsanto and others were so terrible and unfair, that would be a reason to support CRISPR rather than oppose it.  It is the big companies that can afford all the lawyers, lobbying, and adjustments of the over-regulation of places like California.  Small companies can't do that.  Small academic labs can't afford to develop a niche-specific tomato and bring it to market. CRISPR is relatively easy and cheap. Regulation favors big corporations in all industries, including food. If the guy at your farm stand wants to sell cukes in the next county, he's going to rapidly encounter obstacles that make it just not worth it to him.  As for monoculture, that is also a problem for small farmers rather than big ones.  We see acres of soybeans and think how undiversified that looks compared to a little garden with Belgian Endive.  We feel that just can't be right.  But that farmer can change what soybean he grows next year, and change back if he prefers.  True monoculture happens when farmers on the edge cannot afford to plant anything less than their optimum crops, pretty much year in and year out. Welcome, Irish Potato Famine.  The rich are better equipped to hedge their bets.

I sometimes wonder if these objections are similar to people hating on oil companies: a type of person they think they don't like (not their tribe) is making too much money. This has to stop so that the good people can make money instead.  And/or have more status.