Octopus Overlords

[T]he company is introducing novel strains of familiar food crops, invented at Monsanto and endowed by their creators with powers and abilities far beyond what you usually see in the produce section. The lettuce is sweeter and crunchier than romaine and has the stay-fresh quality of iceberg. The peppers come in miniature, single-serving sizes to reduce leftovers. The broccoli has three times the usual amount of glucoraphanin, a compound that helps boost antioxidant levels. Stark’s department, the global trade division, came up with all of them.
...
But here’s the twist: The lettuce, peppers, and broccoli—plus a melon and an onion, with a watermelon soon to follow—aren’t genetically modified at all. Monsanto created all these veggies using good old-fashioned crossbreeding, the same tech­nology that farmers have been using to optimize crops for millennia. That doesn’t mean they are low tech, exactly. Stark’s division is drawing on Monsanto’s accumulated scientific know-how to create vegetables that have all the advantages of genetically modified organisms without any of the Frankenfoods ick factor.
...
They may be born in a lab, but technically they’re every bit as natural as what you’d get at a farmers’ market. Keep them away from pesticides and transport them less than 100 miles and you could call them organic and locavore too.
...
[G]enetically modifying consumer crops proved to be inefficient and expensive. Stark estimates that adding a new gene takes roughly 10 years and $100 million to go from a product concept to regulatory approval. And inserting genes one at a time doesn’t necessarily produce the kinds of traits that rely on the inter­actions of several genes. Well before their veggie business went kaput, Monsanto knew it couldn’t just genetically modify its way to better produce; it had to breed great vegetables to begin with. As Stark phrases a company mantra: “The best gene in the world doesn’t fix dogshit germplasm.”

What does? Crossbreeding. Stark had an advantage here: In the process of learning how to engineer chemical and pest resistance into corn, researchers at Monsanto had learned to read and understand plant genomes—to tell the difference between the dogshit germplasm and the gold. And they had some nifty technology that allowed them to predict whether a given cross would yield the traits they wanted.

The key was a technique called genetic marking. It maps the parts of a genome that might be associated with a given trait, even if that trait arises from multiple genes working in concert. Researchers identify and cross plants with traits they like and then run millions of samples from the hybrid—just bits of leaf, really—through a machine that can read more than 200,000 samples per week and map all the genes in a particular region of the plant’s chromosomes.
...
Monsanto computer models can actually predict inheritance patterns, meaning they can tell which desired traits will successfully be passed on. It’s breeding without breeding, plant sex in silico. In the real world, the odds of stacking 20 different characteristics into a single plant are one in 2 trillion. In nature, it can take a millennium. Monsanto can do it in just a few years.

And this all happens without any genetic engineering. Nobody inserts a single gene into a single genome. (They could, and in fact sometimes do, look at their crosses by engineering a plant as a kind of beta test. But those aren’t intended to leave the lab.) Stark and his colleagues realized that they could use these technologies to identify a cross that would have highly desirable traits and grow the way they wanted. And they could actually charge more for it—all the benefits of a GMO with none of the stigma. “We didn’t have those tools the first time around in vegetables,” Stark says.

KKBlue wrote:I finished watching GMO OMG and have to say I still believe much of the cancers and Alzheimer's is a direct link to the foods we eat.

Odin wrote:Any idea when I'll be able to start buying these wonderfoods?

LordMortis wrote:I have no problems with cross breeding based on super duper computer algorithms of understanding.

KKBlue wrote:I finished watching GMO OMG and have to say I still believe much of the cancers and Alzheimer's is a direct link to the foods we eat.

Jeff V wrote:I wonder how many of you will continue to bad-mouth Monsanto after they successfully engineer an overproduced crop (corn) to produce highly desired bacon instead.

Kraken wrote:Monsanto's been a bogeyman for quite some time. I don't remember which movie opened my eyes to their practices -- Food Inc, maybe? There have been several.

That said, the only way 7 billion earthlings are going to have food is through GMOs and other agricultural wizardry yet to be discovered. We are fortunate to live in a bountiful country where we have the option to be choosy. Personally, I'm not convinced that there's any physiological reason to shun GMOs (although there are legitimate ecological concerns about releasing engineered genomes into the wild), but I know the jury is still out.

For all their slimy business practices, Monsanto and friends are a necessary evil unless you're cool with population control through starvation.

Alefroth wrote:

Kraken wrote:Monsanto's been a bogeyman for quite some time. I don't remember which movie opened my eyes to their practices -- Food Inc, maybe? There have been several.

That said, the only way 7 billion earthlings are going to have food is through GMOs and other agricultural wizardry yet to be discovered. We are fortunate to live in a bountiful country where we have the option to be choosy. Personally, I'm not convinced that there's any physiological reason to shun GMOs (although there are legitimate ecological concerns about releasing engineered genomes into the wild), but I know the jury is still out.

For all their slimy business practices, Monsanto and friends are a necessary evil unless you're cool with population control through starvation.

We can feed way more than 7 billion people without GMO's. It just takes smart growing and harvesting practices, and actually getting the food to the people.

mori wrote:Most of us just have to become vegetarians.

Kelric wrote:

mori wrote:Most of us just have to become vegetarians.

And convert as much space to green space as we can: flat rooftops should be solar panels, food producing, or just filled with regular old native plants that promote birds and bees and other insects. Lawns can be replaced with gardens or wild flowers or anything but grass, etc. There is a lot of work we could do.

But damn you if you take away my bacon!

mori wrote:Most of us just have to become vegetarians.

RunningMn9 wrote:

mori wrote:Most of us just have to become vegetarians.

Won't that just hasten the environmental destruction that our current agricultural model wreaks? (massive amounts of fresh water for irrigation, massive energy in the form of fertilizers and pesticides and stuff, and the impact of pouring massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides into the ground and local water supplies, and so on)

Kraken wrote:Somebody recently wrote something that crossed my facebook feed (how's that for authority?) arguing that cattle graze marginal grasslands much more efficiently than they could ever be farmed. The case study was specific to Australia, but it made a valid point: in some parts of the world, meat production is the better use of land.

Victoria Raverna wrote:
What if we figure out how to cook the grass and feed them to human directly? isn't that going to be more efficient than feed them to cattles then we eat meat from the cattles.

RunningMn9 wrote:How would it lessen? If we don't do it, the land isn't productive enough to feed everyone.

Kraken wrote:Somebody recently wrote something that crossed my facebook feed (how's that for authority?) arguing that cattle graze marginal grasslands much more efficiently than they could ever be farmed. The case study was specific to Australia, but it made a valid point: in some parts of the world, meat production is the better use of land.

Alefroth wrote:

Kraken wrote:Somebody recently wrote something that crossed my facebook feed (how's that for authority?) arguing that cattle graze marginal grasslands much more efficiently than they could ever be farmed. The case study was specific to Australia, but it made a valid point: in some parts of the world, meat production is the better use of land.

That's true, but it isn't the standard way of producing beef. There must be a reason CAFO's are used so heavily.

Alefroth wrote:It takes many times more resources to produce food by giving it to a cow first. If it didn't lessen, we'd at least have more food for humans for the same resources expended.

the deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against GMOs. It’s full of errors, fallacies, misconceptions, misrepresentations, and lies. The people who tell you that Monsanto is hiding the truth are themselves hiding evidence that their own allegations about GMOs are false. They’re counting on you to feel overwhelmed by the science and to accept, as a gut presumption, their message of distrust.

AWS260 wrote:This seems like the most appropriate thread for this Slate piece on GMOs. A good read (though lengthy).

the deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against GMOs. It’s full of errors, fallacies, misconceptions, misrepresentations, and lies. The people who tell you that Monsanto is hiding the truth are themselves hiding evidence that their own allegations about GMOs are false. They’re counting on you to feel overwhelmed by the science and to accept, as a gut presumption, their message of distrust.

ImLawBoy wrote:

AWS260 wrote:This seems like the most appropriate thread for this Slate piece on GMOs. A good read (though lengthy).

the deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against GMOs. It’s full of errors, fallacies, misconceptions, misrepresentations, and lies. The people who tell you that Monsanto is hiding the truth are themselves hiding evidence that their own allegations about GMOs are false. They’re counting on you to feel overwhelmed by the science and to accept, as a gut presumption, their message of distrust.

I'm not a scientician, so I largely go by my layman's interpretation of what I read. I still haven't read anything that convinces me that the supposed dangers of GMOs are anything more than a bogeyman. In fact (and this might rile up a few people), I tend to think that the case against GMOs is quite similar to the case against vaccinations. Not a lot of science to back it up, but plenty of scare tactics.