Ready to eat a three-foot long, hundred pound, salmon?

[Pure]

genetically modified, that is.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/c...lmon-are-a-fish-fight-over-labeling/19641350/

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_03/b3967111.htm
-----

Any qualms? Do you want safety testing as for a drug? Do you want labelling of such genetically modified foods? Worried about new DNA combos?

Or, is all this as futile as the current quest for 'free range' chicken, and lovingly raised pork chops?



Salmon That Grow Up Fast
If Elliot Entis can win FDA approval for his quick-growing fish, he'll pave the way for other food companies working on genetically modified animals

Elliot Entis doesn't much like to think of himself as a pioneer. And aside from a single framed photo of a salmon hanging on the wall, Entis' tiny office in Waltham, Mass., offers barely a hint of what has been a labor of love since 1992. His company, Aqua Bounty Technologies, has created a breed of salmon that grows twice as fast as normal farmed salmon, because they carry part of the genetic code of another type of fish, the ocean pout.

Aqua Bounty is in the final stages of a five-year battle to get the product approved by the Food & Drug Administration, which has yet to approve any transgenic animal for human consumption. If the company succeeds, Entis' salmon could become the first such product on the market. He hopes to achieve that milestone by 2008.

TOUGH QUESTIONS. Entis' salmon grow so fast because of a change made to one of the roughly 40,000 genes in their DNA. In normal salmon, the gene that controls the production of growth hormone is activated by light, so the fish generally grow only during the sunny summer months. But by attaching what's known as a "promoter sequence" -- part of a specific gene -- from the pout, Aqua Bounty ended up with salmon that make growth hormone all year round.

These genetically modified fish won't look or taste any different to consumers, but they could make an ocean of difference to fish farmers. Entis estimates they'll allow the average salmon producer to cut costs 35% per fish while doubling output. "It's like improving the mileage in your car," he explains

 

[harding]

Jefferson Airplane

Can't remember which one it was, but the guy in Jefferson Airplane (Jorma Kaurken? God knows!) said:

I don't care if there's DDT on my lettuce, as long as it's CRISPY!

However, I'm not necessarily agreeing with that.

Trouble is, unless we know what we're eating, what are we eating? We can't ALL grown our own like James.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

What, you think it will:

1) keep growing after it's dead and eaten
2) cause you to grow as big as it does
3) not be as tasty as the "real" thing

I just love your polls Pure, so slanted I use them as sled hills in the winter.

 

[R. Richard]

His company, Aqua Bounty Technologies, has created a breed of salmon that grows twice as fast as normal farmed salmon, because they carry part of the genetic code of another type of fish, the ocean pout.

You definitely would not want to eat the salmon around Christmas time:

You better watch out,
You better not cry,
Better not pout,
I'm telling you why:
Santa Claus is coming to town.
He's making a list,
And checking it twice;
Gonna find out
Who's naughty and nice.
Santa Claus is coming to town.

 

[3113]

So long as it makes good lox, I'll eat it!

 

[jomar]

So long as it makes good lox, I'll eat it!

3 speaks the bottom line.


I like this statement: "Its developer, AquaBounty, and others in the biotech industry argue that such labeling would make consumers believe that the meat from genetically modified fish is scientifically different than that conventional variates, which they assert isn't true."

That right there makes them suspect, their following paragraph notwithstanding - and I do want it on the label. But the guidelines are out and it's gonna happen more and more.

I honestly haven't looked into it, but overall probably safer than the chemicals pumped into animals that we've been eating for years. It'll just trade one set of concerns/issues for another, of course. Hopefully, the problem foods will be picked up quickly...but we don't know the long-term effects, just like with a lot of things we do to ourselves.

The SO insists on organic, which I'm also not convinced is the end all, be all, or even if it really is, or to what degree, just because it says so on the label.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Everything you eat has been genetically modified. Wheat is a trigenic hybrid, corn was originally a tiny little grass head, Naval oranges are a sterile mutation, etc. The only difference is that instead of making selections for generations or waiting for a natural mutation (frequently detrimental to the species in the wild) they made the selection at the molecular level. Explain to me, just how, in the end, is this different?

 

[TE999]

Everything you eat has been genetically modified. Wheat is a trigenic hybrid, corn was originally a tiny little grass head, Naval oranges are a sterile mutation, etc. The only difference is that instead of making selections for generations or waiting for a natural mutation (frequently detrimental to the species in the wild) they made the selection at the molecular level. Explain to me, just how, in the end, is this different?

Word up! Gregor Mendel experimented with genetic engineering in the 1800's and is called the 'Father of modern genetics'. Man has always bred animals for food and hunting...look at all the different types of sheep, hogs, cattle, chickens and dogs.

I'm sure the Natural Food Nazis' will call this 'Frankenfood' like everything else they can't grow in their gardens and fertilize with their own shit.

 

[jomar]

Word up! Gregor Mendel experimented with genetic engineering in the 1800's and is called the 'Father of modern genetics'. Man has always bred animals for food and hunting...look at all the different types of sheep, hogs, cattle, chickens and dogs.

I'm sure the Natural Food Nazis' will call this 'Frankenfood' like everything else they can't grow in their gardens and fertilize with their own shit.

Word up! It's Frankenfish!

 

[TE999]

Word up! It's Frankenfish!

The bolts in its head gave it away, didn't it?

 

[jomar]

The bolts in its head gave it away, didn't it?

Makes it hard to swim upstream. Good thing they're grown in stalls next to the cows.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

3 speaks the bottom line.

...

The SO insists on organic, which I'm also not convinced is the end all, be all, or even if it really is, or to what degree, just because it says so on the label.

Well when an organic carrot costs $7 and I can get a McDouble for a buck, it's not rocket science on which one sells more?

 

[Dragonlipz]

Can I use JBJ as bait?

 

[jomar]

Well when an organic carrot costs $7 and I can get a McDouble for a buck, it's not rocket science on which one sells more?

You're absolutely right. People have a narrow vision. Have you seen "Supersize Me"?

 

[Zeb_Carter]

You're absolutely right. People have a narrow vision. Have you seen "Supersize Me"?

No, is it funny?

 

[Stella_Omega]

Organic carrots don't cast $7.00

This fish will be fine to eat. We eat wierder things without harm.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Organic carrots don't cast $7.00

This fish will be fine to eat. We eat wierder things without harm.

I know, it was a joke, although the price or the crap labeled 'Organic' is twice as expensive as that which isn't and it all comes out of the same ground.

And besides and McDouble tastes better than a carrot.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I know, it was a joke, although the price or the crap labeled 'Organic' is twice as expensive as that which isn't and it all comes out of the same ground.

And besides and McDouble tastes better than a carrot.

Why do salt-free products cost more than regular salty products?

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Why do salt-free products cost more than regular salty products?

Good question. Lower production? For that matter, have you priced the sugar-free chocolates at See's? 13 bucks a pound! However, I find them worth every penny, chocola-holic bruin that I be.

 

[jomar]

No, is it funny?

Yes, in a "holy shit!" kind of way.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Actually Thomas Hunt Morgan is the father of modern genetics. What Mendel discovered was the statistical distribution of traits. Morgan thought Mendel was full of shit and tried to prove Mendel wrong, but proved Mendel correct, and won a Nobel Prize when Mendel's statistical model was confirmed. Mendel had no idea how traits were passed along.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hunt_Morgan

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

We need to mate salmon with elephants or whales, and end world hunger.

 

[trysail]

http://budiansky.blogspot.com/2010/09/sustainable-sentiments.html


"Sustainable Sentiments"
By Stephen Budiansky

Wherein your blogger, unwisely disregarding the epigram about angels and where they decline to tread, rushes in once more with a far-too-long essay on land, food, and local agriculture before putting that topic finally (he hopes) behind him, at least for a while . . .

When I moved to a small farm 30 years ago I set out to be a practical romantic. I had all of the longing for a connection with nature and land and real things that many of the local-food advocates who responded to my recent New York Times Op-Ed expressed in their numerous and often passionate responses. (See also the letters in last Saturday's Times.) The lessons my children learned from growing up on a farm and from the (still) wonderful 4-H program — knowing where food comes from, experiencing the rewards of hard work, caring for animals — were of a worth that remains incalculable. In that time our local sheep-producers organization has grown by leaps and bounds; it was a bunch of old farts and now there are new young families with small children and plenty of savvy people selling their locally raised lamb to nearby restaurants and farmers' markets. Even if this is a drop in the bucket of American agriculture it's good for lots of reasons, not least that it offers another economic purpose for the land around here than simply to serve as the substrate for 6,000 square foot houses.

But I was on guard from the very start against sentimentality, because I knew all too well that sentimentality is but a hair's breadth from arrogance and pretension. I had read enough of American social, geographic, and economic history to know that no matter how much Thomas Jefferson and Currier and Ives glorified and romanticized the American farmer, the people who actually grew up on farms couldn't wait to get away from them. The work was brutally hard, the isolation stultifying. We still like to imagine pastoral scenes of community barn-raisings and rows of canning jars brimming with peaches and mornings fresh with the smell of new-mown hay; then you read what life was really like. Animals and the land were abused in ways literally unthinkable today; diets were atrocious; diseases of man, animal, and plants devastating.

Some of my instinctive suspicion of the local-food movement as a movement — as opposed to just people offering a product to compete with other products in the marketplace — is the wariness I feel towards anyone who puts on the razzamatazz to push their wares. Whenever anyone starts telling me I need to hand over my money as a moral imperative, a moral virtue, or for the salvation of the planet, my first instinct is to check to make sure my wallet is still in my pocket. The language of the huckster pervades this business; to look at most of the websites and literature of local/organic/sustainable sellers you'd think they wouldn't dream of taking your money, so noble is their calling ("We are in the redemption business: healing the land, healing the food, healing the economy, and healing the culture," reads one typical specimen). Old rule of commercial interaction: when someone says it's not about money . . . it's about money.

But what I really object to is the failure of local and organic advocates to confront the true implications of the agenda they are promoting — which would quite simply be devastating for the global environment were we ever compelled to do what an increasing number of its acolytes say we must do. And all I will say to those who so indignantly deny that locavores are "doctrinaire" (I never said they were "loco" or "rabid") is: look at virtually any of the gazillions of local food websites and books, with their lists of arbitrary rules, their admonitions to limit consumption to a 100-mile radius, their "ten steps to becoming a locavore" (as if it were a religion or self-help program), their grandiose claims for what this will all accomplish.

Among the winners in the unintentionally ironic responses I received ("if you call me a fanatic, I'll kill you" division) was a Huffiingtonpost item entitled "Myth of the Rabid Locavore." After asserting that I must have made up all the figures I cited (since they did not square with her romantic world view) the author of this post called this statement of mine

eating food from a long way off is often the single best thing you can do for the environment, as counterintuitive as that sounds​

"so ludicrous" that I had to publish it on my own website "because hey, the New York Times is only willing to go so far." But in fact I made exactly the same point in my Times article, when I pointed out that by using modern, high-yielding farm technologies and concentrating the production of crops where they grow best, we have

spared hundreds of millions of acres for nature preserves, forests and parks that otherwise would have come under the plow. . . . The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies — and then pay the relatively tiny energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity in the economy. Sometimes that means growing vegetables in your backyard. Sometimes that means buying vegetables grown in California or Costa Rica ​

This is the crux of the entire matter. We can grow tomatoes and cucumbers and pumpkins and basil near cities both because these crops are practical for small acreages and because the economics work: they generate high returns that make it pay to grow them on expensive land. But fresh vegetables suitable for local production account for only about 5% of the land that directly feeds human beings (I'm leaving animal forage, exported grain, and the entire corn crop out of the equation altogether, so you don't need to start telling me again about the evils of corn-fed beef and high-fructose corn syrup).

Nearly all of the the rest of the land that directly feeds people (see chart below) is taken up by basic staples like wheat, oilseeds, and dried beans. These are the crops that supply even vegetarians the bulk of their calories — and these are crops that are all fundamentally ill-suited for small or "local" cultivation. Never mind even the economics of it (these crops do not return enough per acre to make it pay to grow them on expensive land near cities): even if you were living off a trust fund, you couldn't find, near U.S. population centers, the 60 million acres of farmland needed to grow these staples.

But much more to the point: why on earth would you want to try to grow these staple crops "locally"? Wheat grows very well in the Midwest where the climate, soil, and natural rainfall are conducive; it grows extraordinarily well there in large stands that can be fertilized and harvested efficiently. Yields per acre, thanks to the development of advanced strains of wheat and the extensive use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, have more than tripled in the last century. Worldwide, hybrid varieties and synthetic nitrogen have generated even greater improvements in per-acre yields of rice and other staple food crops. Denounce big-ag all you want; buy local tomatoes all you want; the fact remains that chemical fertilizer, combine harvesters, hybrid crops, and modern transportation networks have done a few billion times more to save the planet than you ever will.

This is not just some theoretical argument about efficiency for efficiency's sake, nor is it an economic argument. You can grow these staple food crops like wheat and rice and pulses and oilseeds the old way on 3 or 4 or 5 times more land, or you can grow them on large plots using modern technology on 3 or 4 or 5 times less land. And we're talking about huge amounts of land, with huge environmental consequences. In India alone, improvements in wheat farming alone have spared 100 million acres of additional cropland that would otherwise have had to be slashed out of forests somewhere over the last 50 years to produce the same amount of wheat that Indian farmers produce today thanks to technological advances. That's the equivalent of three Iowas or 50 Yellowstone National Parks. Without modern farming, we literally would have already cut down every acre of rainforest just to grow the staple food crops that feed the world. Would that be "sustainable"?

Many readers insisted that since we are (supposedly) about to run out of oil, we have to shift to local food production. As I just said, it's literally impossible to do so — the extensive cropland required to raise the staple crops that provide the bulk of our subsistence even if we're vegetarians does not exist around cities. (And by the way it never has. Humans since Roman times have transported grain and cooking oil long distances to feed urban populations.) But it's also just plain bad environmental policy to do so even if we could, for the reasons I've just cited. And unless we contemplate a future with no energy use at all (unlikely), modern agriculture — including its relatively small transportation component — is among the most environmentally efficient energy expenditures we can make. There's a lot of frivolous energy uses we ought to eliminate before we start dismantling the essential energy uses that keep us fed.

Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, by the way, is produced from natural gas, not oil, and for decades natural gas reserves have actually increased faster than we've been consuming them.

And why, but why, is it "unsustainable" to employ GM varieties? We've been breeding plants and practicing genetic selection for thousands of years; genetic modification is a way to modify one specific trait that we can accurately identify in order to increase yield, earliness, disease resistance — all improvements that reduce chemical and energy inputs. Isn't that a good thing?

And, O, for just a bit of scientific levelheadedness towards all of the ridiculously exaggerated claims about the nutritional and health superiority of "organic" produce (for which there is not a scrap of evidence). This is a matter that raises basic ethical questions, too: the way all too many "organic" and "natural" producers are trying to market themselves by running down their fellow farmers with scare stories and false claims of nutritional or health superiority. (I'm thinking in particular of the joker in Virginia who goes around trumpeting how his lambs are raised without hormones, and darkly implying that everyone else's is; in fact I've never heard of a single farm-flock producer using growth hormones in lambs.)

And while we're at it, why exactly is it so terrible to grow corn where it grows extraordinarily well and turn it into high-quality protein in the form of beef, pork, chickens, milk, cheese, and eggs? Of course this is a more energy-intensive product than flour or vegetable oil. But I keep coming back to the fact that on-farm energy inputs in the U.S. as a whole amount to 2 to 3 percent of U.S. fossil fuel consumption — corn, beef, and all. Households use ten times as much energy for heating, air-conditioning, and running appliances (including, in the average American home, powering your TV set six hours a day).

Finally, we're told that food security depends on local self-reliance. But the locavores have it exactly backwards on this point. Nothing is more vulnerable than self-reliance: one storm that destroys the crop one year, one local outbreak of an insect pest or blight — and if you have no other source to shift to the result is famine. This was the story throughout human history before modern transportation and commerce networks. Networks on the other hand are inherently resilient because a disruption in one spot will be easily compensated for by another. Everyone has been pointing to the recent incident of salmonella-infected eggs as proof of the dangers of globally interdependent "big ag." Yet half a billion eggs were recalled and I sure didn't notice any shortage of eggs in my store, nor even an increase in price. And don't think local means immunity from such problems: the devastating hoof-and-mouth epidemic in Britain a few years ago began on a small, local, traditional farm where pigs roamed around in the muck and ate natural, recycled food.

The growing urban faith that a return to “natural” or traditional farming methods can cure our many ills ultimately has its roots in the nineteenth-century Romantic reaction against industrialization and the loss of the bucolic, a history I explored in my book Nature's Keepers (available in fine second-hand book stores everywhere). But it’s a city-slicker’s attitude, like that of the tragic protagonist in Jean de Florette who wishes to return to the land to “cultivate the authentic,” to the derision of the locals and ultimately his own fatal end. There's also echoes of David Brooks's Bobos in Paradise in all of this: the yuppie-generation compulsion to justify epicureanism as selfless virtue, personal indulgence as global good.

It's only the luxury of affluence that allows us to forget the misery, poverty, and precariousness of subsistence farming, still the lot of all too many in the world — and that allows us to overlook the fact that the modern agriculture we so often decry is what makes our modern, comfortable existence even possible. It is, ironically, our modern distance from the realities of farming — which the local-food advocates at least in their hearts want to bridge — that allows us to believe that buying local is anything but a tiny factor in our global land use patterns and environmental impact, or that more dangerously leads us to believe that a tiny bit of (harmless in itself) self-indulgence ought to be generalized into an imperative for the whole world: for which it would be a disaster.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8vUowQs7lyM/TH6pYg_JUuI/AAAAAAAAADg/plg5J3bFcwA/s400/food.jpg​

Read more: http://budiansky.blogspot.com/2010/09/sustainable-sentiments.html#ixzz0zvU6MOKG

 

[R. Richard]

For those of you who don't trust genetically modified food, consider the classic case. The Hass avocado is a mutation, a naturally occuring genetic modification. If you don't trust genetically modified food, then don't try a Hass avocado, because, if you do, you're hooked!

The Hass avocado, sometimes marketed as the Haas avocado is a cultivar of avocado with dark green-colored, bumpy skin. When ripe, the skin becomes a dark, purplish-black. Its originator was mail carrier and amateur horticulturist Rudolph Hass, who gave this fruit its name.

The Hass cultivar is the most important commercial avocado worldwide. In the United States it accounts for more than 80% of the avocado crop, 95% of the California crop and it is the most widely grown avocado in New Zealand.

All Hass avocado trees have been grown from seeds (or were grafted from the cuttings) of a single tree which was grown from a seed purchased in 1926 from A. R. Rideout of Whittier, California.

 

[SlickTony]

Mmmm....Hass Avocados. So smooth, so creamy, such a perfect avocado taste (providing they don't get too ripe, and then they tend to taste like Estee Lauder Swiss Performing Extract smells). A few weeks ago I was in Publix and all the Hass avocados were still in a weapons-grade state of unreadiness, so I got one of those big shiny green ones. Bleah...I'd forgotten how watery they are.

It makes me impatient when I hear your social critics dissing things like farmed salmon, let alone GM salmon, especially in light of the fact that these same people are telling us not to eat beef and pork, which, I must admit, are raised in horrifying conditions. Read the Rolling Stone piece on Smithfield, it'll make you want to start keeping Kosher or Halal. Obviously the demand for reasonably priced salmon has become such that even salmon farms can't keep up with it. If farmed salmon goes away, salmon will only grace the tables of the rich. Just go to your fish market and price wild-caught chinook or sockeye salmon and you'll see what I mean.