At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you’re being fed fiction

I think it is a noble cause. You are correct in that it means the price of some of the food groups increases dramatically, so many people are left out of regularly consuming it. I believe that 50/60 years ago, people did not expect to eat meat/fish every night due to the price.

I would like to know why you think farm-to-table is inherently unsustainable? Many farmers in the Highlands of Scotland make a good living selling superior beef to restaurants and butchers in the UK. They do this without regular factory farming methods. Is it less efficient compared to clearing thousands of acres in order to grow a single product which is fed government subsidised corn? Pound for pound, absolutely. Which is why some people decide to eat meat less regularly, but eat the best when they do.

In this case, the problem is that there's a huge difference between public perception and reality. For instance, you talk about herbicides: A modern GMO actually lets you use LESS herbicides and insecticides, and often far less dangerous ones than many that are OK for labeled organic crops, and happen to be far more toxic.

As far as updates on the field producing toxins, GMOs are actually more controlled, genetically speaking, than something that doesn't come from big agribusiness. I can irradiate my seeds to create mutations to use then on traditional breeding, and call myself organic afterwards!

As far as growing well in an area or not, that's why there is testing. Selling a seed that yields poorly to a region would lead to a major economic damage to whichever company is selling those seeds, so everything we can find at a seed store from a major manufacturer, whether GMO or not, will have more than enough agronomic information to make a farmer's decision easy. And besides, I don't know how many farmers you've talked to, but they tend to be a pretty conservative bunch, as far as making sure that they don't bet a lot of hectares on tech that they haven't tested first in a smaller part of their fields, and only plant everywhere if they expect a significant profit. When yields are already very good, and grain is cheap, expensive seeds just sell less across the board.

You don't get much opposition to GMOs among farmers: they just go with what is more profitable for them. Same thing for industrial companies that use the GMOs products to feed cattle or make biodiesel. It all comes down to people that are afraid of what they don't understand, and just choose to be afraid in ways that work well with their political affiliations.

If we were REALLY afraid of food being dangerous, and with untested genetics, we'd actually ban the organics, because there's a lot more genetic variation that is unaccounted for in traditional farming products than in something that comes from agribusiness.

There are two reasons I've seen for objecting to GMO, one unreasonable and one reasonable.

The unreasonable objection, which is probably the most common, is based on the belief that there is something inherently dangerous about GMO.

The reasonable objection is based on the belief that there is nothing wrong with GMO itself since it is just another tool and so whether it is good or bad in a particular instance depends on the user rather than the tool, but many (most?) of the current users do not have the inclination and/or wisdom to only use it for good.

Many of the interests of food producers (I'm including everyone in the chain before the food actually reaches the eater) are not aligned with the interests of food eaters. For instance a producer of a vegetable might prioritize uniformity of size and shape and predictable growing rates over taste and nutrition, because the former directly affect how effectively he can automate production. As an eater, I care a lot more about nutrition and taste than I care about having all of my vegetables be the same size and shape.

We've seen what happens when food manufacturer interests get too far out of alignment with what is healthy and nutritious--just look at all the health issues we have in the US that are reasonably attributable to our poor national eating habits.

> GMO seems like a great idea -- modern human medicine seems to include techniques that are similar to or just-short-of "GMO."

Medicine is highly regulated. You can't just make a new medicine and start selling it. Not so with food.

For a worst case scenario from an eater point of view, suppose you've got organism X and organism Y. These are very different, and cannot be crossbred. Suppose that Y produces something that has health benefits, but that some people are allergic to. X does not produce this substance.

A person allergic to that substance has a simple strategy for staying safe: do not eat Y.

With GMO, in theory some X manufacturer could modify X to include the genes from Y that produce that substance. For most people this would be a benefit--they are now getting that healthy substance from Y when they consume X.

For our person allergic to that substance, this sucks.

Now our allergic eater has to worry about both X and Y. And since GMO foods do not have to be labeled currently, he cannot simply avoid GMO X. He now has to avoid all foods with X. (And if our allergic eater is particularly unlucky, the maker of GMO X does not announce they are doing this, and so the allergic eater first finds out about it the hard way).

Manufacturers like to tout health benefits. For our poor allergic eater, those genes from Y for that substance he is allergic to might end up being put in all kinds of foods.

My opinion is that we should go ahead with GMO, but not blindly. As a first step, it needs to be labeled, and longer term we need to develop some regulations to make sure it is used safely and wisely.

I think golden rice has been around for at least 20 yrs now.[0] Also serious question, What evidence do we have for "toxic in very subtle ways"? I wasn't aware that this actually exists.

[0] http://www.goldenrice.org/

I don't agree that the cost of food reflects how often we should eat it.

See: seafood, rare spices, berries, nuts.