Sorry to say but it’s quite retarded IMO to spent a pile of cash on researching how to stop potatoes and apples from turning brown when chopped into pieces. USDA has approved some modified one’s too.
Read the piece below on a HBS blog and I just cannot get my head around what’s the upside to this? Where’s the commercial value? Who’se funding them? How do they recoupe their R&D expense? Unless of course R&D in agri terms means hiring one rocket scientist and have him read books for a few years and tadaaa!
Seriously - I am not that slow at eating my apples or potatoes to make investing in how they can be stopped from turning brown worth anything
Perfecting the potato
José B. Alvarez and Mary Shelman delve into the world of agribusiness in the case “Simplot Plant Sciences: Designing a Better Potato.” Simplot, one of world’s largest privately-owned companies, has developed a genetically-engineered potato that doesn’t turn brown after cutting. While the potato contains no foreign genes, the company still faces commercialization challenges, due to the zeitgeist surrounding genetic modification.
Fuck Monsanto and the rest of these pieces of sh!t companies.
Food should remain natural and yes, guess what, natural food does not always look the best.
People who have been to farmers’ markets in southern Europe will know what I mean. Many of the vegetables that are sold there could never be sold in North America because they look like sh!t but boy do they taste.
I grew up in North America and I never realised that the apples that you buy in supermarkets are coated with wax. So that they are shiny and even. WTF. Now when I go back home there is no way I am eating that shit.
Sorry for the incoherent rambling but I just feel like going on an amok run when I think about the food industry in North America.
It would be difficult for me to care less about GMO’s. I want Monsanto and Cargill and Bayer and whoever else to spend as much money as possible to develop the best tasting, highest yielding, most physically appealing crops they can, and if I get cancer at 68 instead of a heart attack at 74, so be it.
I do need you to keep enjoying your brown apples though, and by all means, stay away from BP, Exxon, Altria and Wal-Mart as well. The more socially concsious investors out there who are morally or ethically opposed to those companies, the more money I can make owning them. Everyone is a winner.
it’s about selling to fast food restaurants and retail. selling pre-cut potatoes and apples for use to cooking. i saw frozen pre-cut potatoes at the store recently and thought, who is too lazy to cut a potato. and i also thought, hmm, cooking a frozen diced potato will never work out. monsanto must be thinking of selling diced potatoes/apples fresh or helping their frozen varieties stay whiter longer. i know who would buy this, crappy restaurants and terrible home cooks. the same people who buy other gmo crap en masse.
It’s cool to be cynical and not give a sh!t, I guess. But have a look at your fellow countrymen and tell me that nothing went terribly wrong in their food consumption.
If you have any common sense and admit that something very worrying is going on, then I suggest that you have alook at what GMOs, hormones in foods, antibiotics & co have to do with it.
“Low fat” seems to be the biggest culprit in my opinion. Because people are dumb, they confuse dietary fat intake with body fat and starting buying things labeled “low fat” that were packed with sugar and corn syrup. I really don’t see GM foods as even a small part of the problem.
^^^Totally agree. There is corn syrup in everything in the USA. It’s just terrible.
On the GM / hormones part : you might call me crazy, but I have noticed that North Americans and Europeans are starting to look, well, “different”.
While there shouldn’t be a big difference between them, I swear they look different.
They bulk differently, they get fat differently, the facial structures are also different. Americans, all else equal, seem to have “more meat” on them, on their faces, everywhere. It’s really weird.
You notice it when you see a group of american tourist chicks in Europe : even if they are in shape, their thighs are noticeably thicker.
I know these are weird things to say, but it’s true. I never noticed when I was living in North America.
An obvious explanation is the growth hormones North American consume since they are babies.
Being that I have a degree in nutritional biochem I was curious to do some research on the subject, I worked on a GMO rice for developing countries. First problem they were trying to solve is that on average ~30% of fresh food is disgarded by the farmers due to bruising and rotting. If a company found a way to make sure a fruit doesn’t oxidize when it has been bruised, that would be worth a lot of money. The second problem was the pre cut problem, which has already been addressed. The last problem they were trying to solve was basic scientific knowledge about oxidation. There is a lot of money to be made in preventing oxidation in all sectors, not just agriculture. Granted all they really did was increase the PPO gene so that it stopped expressing, but it is another study in the gene silencing realm. If you search gene silencing, that is your anti-cancer/neurodegenerative therapeutics. I am sure if you did an indepth search and went through their FDA filings you could find a lot more information, but to me it looks like an easily fundible project.
The vast majority of the anti-GMO lobby is uneducated nonsense. There are valid concerns with this industry (the legal/patent issues are concerns, as is contamination of environment with GMO crops), but not in terms of making people fat. There is no evidence of the such. The impact on human health is minimal or zero by all scientific study. This is like the autism vaccine nonsense. The corn syrup and other dietary disasters of the North Americans is why they are fat compared to Euros. Not because of RoundUp resistent canola. The hormone stuff in American dairy/meat is also a more realistic concern.
Of course. Says the guy who also praises the tar-sands industry. You keep on enjoying these chicken that are the size of turkeys and that were engineered to have more breast meat so that they can hardly get on their feet. There can’t be anything wrong with that.
interesting. i never considered the waste as a result of damage. i mean, if i’m picking through a pile of potatoes at the store, i’m probably not going to pick the browning one with a big gash in it. makes sense.
hey, keep it down. we don’t want to make our Super Chicken overlords upset.
EDIT: on a serious note, it’s illogical to think that just because we have altered the natural order of things that it’s automatically bad. what if it’s actually better for us to consume they modified chickens? what evidence exists that it’s bad for you? i’ve seen none. don’t be another run-of-the-mill troglodyte on this issue when i know you’re intelligent.
Completely irrelevant, something like 99%* of turkeys we consume in the US are the result of artificial insemination because the males have been bred with such enormous, succulent breasts that they lack the necessary depth for sexual entry.
*- all numbers pulled out of my ass, but this is in th vicinity of true, if television ca be believed, an I have no reason to believe it can’t.