alt Hacker NewsThe Economist tries hard to normalize GMO food, without ever raising the issues and addressing them.
Whatever one thinks of that issue, this technique is deception: It decieves people into thinking that it's normal, that there are no issues; it makes it easy to just follow, hard to question. People follow norms, and that's how you convice them to put aside their concerns.
> Over thousands of years of domestication, humans have moulded fruit to their liking. ... As Pairwise’s blackberries and cherries show, advances in gene editing are allowing fruits to be altered in new ways. crispr, the most popular such technique at the moment ...
> The European Union’s Parliament and Council, the bloc’s governing body, reached a provisional deal in December to “simplify” the process for marketing plants bred through new genomic techniques, such as by scrapping the need to label them any differently from conventional ones. That seems an appropriately fruitful approach.
But there is this interesting tidbit, purely from the money-making perspective:
> ... unlike existing genetically modified crops, those made using crispr do not require dna from a foreign organism to be inserted—a practice that experience shows puts customers off.
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Your comment presupposes the benefits of GMO agriculture are outweighed by the costs. If we make assertions, we should back them up.
> The Economist tries hard to normalize GMO food, without ever raising the issues and addressing them.
And you also did not raise any issue, just asserted that there are some. GMO is amazing.
>Whatever one thinks of that issue, this technique is deception: It decieves people into thinking that it's normal, that there are no issues; it makes it easy to just follow, hard to question. People follow norms, and that's how you convice them to put aside their concerns.
Should every article about vaccines also include a disclaimer about how some people think they cause autism?
I could agree to a point, the most commonly planted GMO crops are Roundup-Ready grains and soy, which encourage spraying even more atrazine on fields[1]. That does of course also mean increased yields, but the tradeoff is not unambiguously good. However the varieties discussed in this article clearly don't have that problem, knocking out genes to emphasize desirable characteristics seems much more appealing, though I suppose I'd rather see increasing nutrient density over making seeds less chewy, even if that meant adding DNA from other plants[2].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_tomato#Biotechnology