I live my life a quarter mile at a time.Quote:
Originally Posted by icarusfall
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I live my life a quarter mile at a time.Quote:
Originally Posted by icarusfall
Tones, I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm saying that the "organic movement" selects what is good or bad on arbitrary, social, concepts of "naturalness" rather than the sustainability and health benefits. It also completely and utterly ignores the degree of human intervention in the domestication of all our foods. I think it's a nice start, but what would be better is adoption of practices based on their environmental and nutritional merit; rather than how "natural" they are.
What you're saying on the genetic side is complete bullshit. Almost all natural genetic mutations are identical to gene splicing. If genetic information is translocated or inversed naturally within a genome; it's like whole new genes are introduced, exactly the same thing as splicing. There is no way to tell the difference between a mutated genome or a spliced genome. So the usual argument of "omg we don't know what the gene would do" is stupid, because we don't know what a natural mutation would do in the environment; and have no way of controlling it.
What "organic movement"?
I have no idea what this means.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nash
I don't think there's anything wrong with it at all, but I think removing the moral decision from each person is unfortunate. Granted, this is the industry I make my bones in, so I'm more entrenched in the philosophy than most, but I feel people are far too disconnected from how their food is produced. It's how we got from people being contributors to their survival to no one knowing how to grow some chives in the window. I'm not insisting you all grow some carrots in a bucket or face the firing squad, but learning more about your food can't do anything other than enrich the experience of eating - and starting a little garden of your own is very easy, even in an apartment.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rhydant
Children used to be involved in the experience of agrarian life as soon as they could walk. I realize we live in a softer society now though. Some time around 18, when you're starting to make some of your adult decisions, I think you should kill some of your own food if you want to continue being a carnivore. It would do nothing but good for us. There'd undoubtedly be less of a demand for meat, lessening the pressure on industrial scale production. People would have been involved in deciding something very primal about their existence, which should give people more thought on producing things of their own.
And if you eat commercial eggs/poultry, you should visit a production facility. I guarantee you you'll start buying the more humane option. Poultry production is the absolute most shameful thing we do to animals in the US.
Whole Foods Hippies - you know the type.Quote:
Originally Posted by YellerDog
I completely agree with this last line, but it is hard for growers to get more money for their product to cover the costs of sustainable practices on the conventional marketplace. Not everything in certified organic agriculture is sustainable for the environment, just like not everything in conventional agriculture is not sustainable. Certified organic hydroponic tomatoes shipped from Canada to the southern US are far from what many would consider "sustainable," for example.Quote:
Originally Posted by AstroBlue
I also understand the hypocrisy of many organic consumers. They drive thirty miles each way in their new Prius to Whole Foods, to consume it in their 4000 sq ft house. Add a healthy dose of smug, and maybe some condescending bumper stickers, and you have the organic consumer stereotype.
What really fucks me up is that we didn't have to go that far out of our way to get all our meat local. Using it means we make about 50 cents less per burger, but surely that's the right choice to make. Most of the truly twisted things we've done in food production were all incremental excesses. We can save a penny a pound if we do this thing... "I don't like it, but it means another 6k at the end of the year... ok, let's do it." It's not like there's a cabal in an ivory tower getting high on the bones of extinct species. It's people who made a series of bad decisions.
I've killed a pig in Puerto Rico when I was 12. No big deal to me. Needed adults to hold it down though.
I've helped slaughter deer. And gut fish.
Meat demand would probably drop greatly if more people had to do any of that. Personally, I don't believe in applying human ethics and morality to animals, so I still eat meat after those experiences. (though I don't believe in torching animals. Torching anything that lives is bad for the minds of all involved).
But a lot of people are pretty idealistic, and would probably stop eating a few things if they ever made the connection.
I came pretty close when I got my own broadband connection for the first time. I didn't think the swelling would ever go down.Quote:
Originally Posted by icarusfall
GM crops aren't made by swapping a few nucleotides. The segments that are spliced usually contain dozens or even hundreds of base pairs, and are usually in the form of a protein coding sequence that doesn't even exist in that family of plants, let alone that species. It may be an extreme example, but you'd never get a bio-luminescent tomato no matter how long you selectively bred the plant, since there's nothing even remotely similar to promote, but in the lab it's almost trivial.Quote:
Originally Posted by AstroBlue
Fair point.