GM food

[B725]

I see a bit in the Brexit thread about GM food so starting a separate one. Over time hasn't food stuff already been modified as wheat and barley etc yield far more now than year's ago so that farmer's could never of dream today's crops. Even animals and bird's have altered so much in the food chain to produce more meat, so why not look further into it as the world population is getting bigger. Is it so bad to have drought and disease resistance plants. 

Edited September 4, 2019 by B725

[old'un]

Yes, animals and plants have changed but through selective breeding over a long time, not through genetically altering the animal or plant, although I do not have a problem with GM.

[DoolinDalton]

Why doesn't GM stick to manufacturing cars!  If their food is the same standard as a Vauxhall, then I'm not eating any! 

[B725]

Arnt hybrid plants a form of genetic modification, as long as the food is safe and we don't end up with leaves growing from our ears or elsewhere surely it has to tried. 

[SpringDon]

8 minutes ago, DoolinDalton said:

Why doesn't GM stick to manufacturing cars!  If their food is the same standard as a Vauxhall, then I'm not eating any! 

Lol

5 minutes ago, B725 said:

Arnt hybrid plants a form of genetic modification, <snip> 

No, not at all.

[welsh1]

7 minutes ago, B725 said:

Arnt hybrid plants a form of genetic modification, as long as the food is safe and we don't end up with leaves growing from our ears or elsewhere surely it has to tried. 

There is a difference to cross pollinating or grafting one type of plant with another to get a better plant.

Put it this way, people are happy to cross a spaniel with a labrador, some say it gives you a better breed( i don't), but would you cross your spaniel with an octopus? thats what GM is about, taking the dna of another species and grafting it onto the thing you want to change.
Who is to know that by changing the dna of a crop to give an improved harvest that the new GM crop is producing a toxin that will destroy bees in the future, or the crop is so successful that it is nearly impossible to kill and becomes a virilent pest like japanese knot weed.

[old'un]

9 minutes ago, B725 said:

Arnt hybrid plants a form of genetic modification, as long as the food is safe and we don't end up with leaves growing from our ears or elsewhere surely it has to tried. 

In 1999, a scientific paper was published which claimed that maize engineered to express the insecticidal Bt toxin was harmful to the larvae of the Monarch butterfly, the larvae grew more slowly and suffered higher mortality rates feeding on this GM plant, although further tests found it to-be insignificant.

[B725]

So who is to believed. 

[old'un]

Plants are now being altered to produce there own insecticide, tomatoes and potatoes have been modified to-be blight resistant, its possible that in the future GM plants that have these traits could cross pollinate with plants that are perfectly safe now but once cross breed/pollination they become toxic to us, GM plants that are tolerant to all herbicides could be a problem if they are found to-be toxic and have cross pollinated with a plant we rely on for food.

Who knows, only time will tell, there are loads of papers on the subject just Google GM plants.

One such paper…https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2408621/

[islandgun]

GM is the the way forward, drought, disease resistance and nitrogen fixing, Monsanto did a lot on herbicide tolerance so that they could sell more Roundup, the idea enables farmers to apply Roundup without hindrance, unfortunately this wiped out a lot of other wild-flowers, and as Oldun points out, GM crops maybe crossing with undesirable spp making it hard to kill

[wyn]

I think GM crops  could be a bit dodgy mainly because they are produced and controlled by 4 or 5 large corporations.

[Benthejockey]

3 hours ago, B725 said:

So who is to believed. 

Depends who you're paying to do the survey!

 

3 hours ago, welsh1 said:

There is a difference to cross pollinating or grafting one type of plant with another to get a better plant.

Put it this way, people are happy to cross a spaniel with a labrador, some say it gives you a better breed( i don't), but would you cross your spaniel with an octopus? thats what GM is about, taking the dna of another species and grafting it onto the thing you want to change.
Who is to know that by changing the dna of a crop to give an improved harvest that the new GM crop is producing a toxin that will destroy bees in the future, or the crop is so successful that it is nearly impossible to kill and becomes a virilent pest like japanese knot weed.

The Simpsons will have predicted the future again! They created tomacco. Tomato tobacco. Addictive tomatoes.

[Vince Green]

The main purpose of GM modified crops in America is to make them resistant to gyophosphate weed killers used in crop spraying. So when they spray a field the weeds are killed but not the crop.

The problem that the environmentalists have with that is the crop plant still absorbs the gyophosphate. So when we eat the crop we eat the gyophospate in the plant as well.