Why I'm Voting Republican

[howeird]

Thanks to cmpriest for the link.

I don't like the paranoid bit about irratiated/genetically engineered food, but the rest of it is spot on.
:-)

Comments

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

Thing is, people need to know about things like GMO/irradiation in order to make good choices for themselves, just like they need to know whether their food is being fed hormones. If someone has, for instance, a severe peanut allergy, they need to know if the not-peanuts they're eating have had peanut genes inserted into them. And, of course, there are also people who choose their foods based on ethical standards as well as nutritional, and want to know if they're eating Monsanto grains genetically designed to drive small farmers out of business (don't scoff, it's real) or something with genes inserted to make them pest-repellant ... and that are totally untested as to their effect on human physiology.

[howeird]

We disagree about where educated caution crosses the line to paranoia. The peanut allergy analogy is ridiculous - there are thousands of peanut genes, and I can't see how any of them would trigger anaphylactic shock in a person eating a non-peanut food. Where did this allergy come from, anyway? When I was growing up in the 50's, nobody was allergic to peanuts. Something has changed in human DNA to make this more dominant than it has ever been.

People who wish their grains to be grown "ethically", whatever that means, have it in their power to patronize the farms which grow food that way. Big Agribusiness can't drive out what there is a demand for. On the other hand, I have been involved in WHO projects to increase rice yields, and can tell you some amusing stories about a highly nutritious, high-yield, low-water-usage red-grained rice which never got to market because the target customer base thought there was blood in it.

I have a hard time believing that there is anything at the gene level which can make a food plant unsafe to eat. I have eaten irradiated tomato and watermellon, to no ill effect. It was all the rage while I was in grade school.

We do agree everyone is entitled to eat what they believe is healthy, we just differ on what "healthy" means.

[bridget-coila.livejournal.com]

I semi-agree here- the likelihood of peanut genes inserted thru GMO being dangerous is pretty low- much lower than using traditional hybridization methods (because genetic engineering can *choose* which genes to insert and leave out)

On the flip side, I've read some things that indicate that peanut allergies (among other things) have been around for a really long time, they just werent recognized as such until the last 20-30 years. One reason for this is that children who got the allergies died of them- and it was chalked up to "food poisoning" (or simply "unknown causes"- infant mortality was HIGH before WWII)
My grandfather's little brother died at age 3 of "food poisoning" after eating nuts. From the description my grandfather recalled, it sounded much more like an anaphylactic reaction than a true food poisoning. This would have been in the early 1920s.
Children growing up prior to 1950 would not likely know someone who was living with a peanut allergy. But they probably knew someone whose sibling had died as a baby or toddler of unknown causes.

That said, I think GE is the ONLY possibility currently available that offers a future variant of peanuts made without whatever might be in them that triggers the allergies. (or conversely, GE of children with the allergies to make their immune system not respond to that protein)

B

[howeird]

Thanks - good point about allergies maybe not having been recognized as such.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

So, what you're saying is that people should be allowed to make their own decisions about what is healthy for them, but only if they use your definitions? *grins*

The way I figure it, people tend to make better decisions for themselves when they have full information than they do if something's been withheld from them. If you're fine with eating GMO or irradiated food, go you. You shouldn't be making that decision for me, and neither should the producers or the government.

[howeird]

So, what you're saying is that people should be allowed to make their own decisions about what is healthy for them, but only if they use your definitions? *grins*

Oh no! People should do whatever they want to do, but I reserve the right to point and laugh. :-)

[edith-mf.livejournal.com]

that was great, thank you.