G.M.O. Tobacco

[sgreger1]

I saw a show that showed how our modern consumable fruits and veges are nothing like they were, or originally were. It's through seed manipulation, maybe cross breeding, or whatever, that seeks to make the biggest plumpest item, and the original strains were not like what we buy today.

Yes wild fruits look alot like other shit you see while hiking, but after thousands of years of cultivating certain crops, we have learned to breed them for quality and we get what we now see on the shelves today. We began agriculture over 25,000 years ago, the fruits we like have evolved significantly since then because we became the deciders of their evolution by picking the best from their gene pool and did this for thousand of years, so now a few thousand generations later they are move evolved to our liking than their original natural ancestors.

Now that we have technology, we have brought it to the next level, instead of breeding for quality over many generations, we just change the genes in them by injecting them with shit to create GM foods, the problem is that we are modifying them to be able to not die if pesticide gets on them or to even secrete their own poison. A GM tomato secretes pesticide out of it naturally that will explode the stomachs of insects that try to eat it. (As one would imagine, there are side effects that come with eating poison secreting fruits)

[WickedKitchen]

January 2008, the U.S Food and Drug Administration declared milk and meat from cloned animals safe for human consumption, allowing cloned food products to enter the U.S. food supply.

The statement that once it's in it cannot be fully removed is true. I've been searching for the article I read a couple of years ago but alas I can't find it. It was a bout this beef/dairy cloning industry. Where it's been in practice in Europe and Japan for a while it didn't set well w/ the US population. A couple of years ago this was a big story here. I remember it being on the news and everything. The thing that's scary is that companies don't have to label the product as coming from an 'engineered' source. The important part of the article was that even though cloned dairy and meat cattle was not well accepted the journalist went deeper into it. As it turns out when a farmer purchases semen from a "prize" bull in order to get a good herd that semen comes from a cloned bull. Even though the meat and milk came from an un-cloned animal it's very likely that that animal's father was himself a clone.

Again, I wish I could find the link to support the above paragraph but I've got to work instead of search, search, hurry up and search.

[tom502]

http://www.clonaid.com/

[danielan]

January 2008, the U.S Food and Drug Administration declared milk and meat from cloned animals safe for human consumption, allowing cloned food products to enter the U.S. food supply

So, what's the problem with cloning?

I mean, I can kind of understand why you might not want GMO, but cloning, by definition, is an exact copy. So, if the milk or burgers from the first cow were safe, it would seem to follow that the milk/burgers from the clones would be identically safe to consume, or the process should not be described as cloning.

If I can think of a concern about this - it would be that this is the purest form of loss of genetic diversity and a single disease could wipe out the species if it ended up being entirely based on a single clone.