301–310 of 337 posts
I'd like somebody in the space to explain why the FDA samples are more representative of the overall food supply than the random samples from food stores. There may be a good reason. There may be reasons why in some locations, food has higher traces than the FDA sees. How about (for instance) if its imported? Not that its good, but it would help explain I rather think that even though the FDA samples test ok, There i…
how could someone run these tests at home? does it require expensive equipment?
Alternatively, for ~$50 there are many core facilities at universities and elsewhere that'll happily run whatever sample you send them and email you back the results.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a separate comment, since it's a bit of a digression- the Green Revolution has not been all good. High yield agriculture has an -I believe- uncontroversial effect on the environment, including habitat loss and reduced crop biodiversity, but apparently also carbon emissions (because it relies on fossil fuels). There's a discussion of the environmental impacts on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolu…
"Rural Kansas is dying. I drove 1,800 miles to find out why" https://newfoodeconomy.org/rural-kansas-depopulation-commodi...
In that 110 years ago was "earlier", that's true. But why not say that, unless the purpose is to mislead?
And to the commenters saying "there is no evidence that GMO foods are harmful" or "non-USDA organic food is causing harm", you have to wonder at where does the burden of proof really lie in case of things that I am ingesting?
>Shortly thereafter, a string of studies and reviews indicated that glyphosate should probably be further studied, and in March of 2015, the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization declared glyphosate a “probable carcinogen.” That is outdated. In 2016, the Joint WHO/FAO "Meeting concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet." http://www.who.int…
The Guardian ran an interesting article when the IARC report came out exploring how two reasonable groups looking at the same data could both come to different conclusions: https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2015/m...
From the article: “All of the official samples passed the test and were within the legal limits of glyphosate residue. But those off-the-record, unofficial samples, though done with the same equipment and tested by the same chemists, showed glyphosate. That’s right. The chemists found glyphosate residue on just about everything: crackers, granola, cornmeal, honey, oatmeal, baby food, and even corn. Their surreptitiou…
I'm no fan of toxic chemicals in our food and I don't trust the government or corporations to do enough to protect it, but it seems fair to me to say that a PhD in philosophy and a master's in physics are not particularly relevant to claiming expertise in evaluating toxicological claims.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In college, I did a deep dive into GMO safety research for journal club back when the Seralini "GMOs cause cancer in mice" paper hit (2010 or thereabouts) and found quite a counterexample to your rule: bogus (obviously p-hacked) science from Seralini and an aggressive misinformation campaign from Greenpeace to convince people that Monsanto was using terminator genes (bio-DRM) against poor farmers when the truth had b…
>> Blind opposition to industrial progress -- which is what you are suggesting -- carried by the rising tide of public opinion will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid. What damage will be caused by people using their phones less for fear of getting cancer? What about GMOs? What is the harm in not using them? The EU has mostly banned them and it doesn't look to be sufferi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could flip the original sentence as: "Blind faith in industrial progress..carried by the tide of public policy..is causing and will continue to cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid."
Yes it will be paid back. By generations to come. While the corporations who invented/introduced/pushed the stuff and got governments to support them by adjusting laws to allow doing it keep flourishing...
This reminds me of the Long Now Foundation [0]. At least there is hope, that there are people aware of the need for long-term sustainable thinking, and are actively promoting it.
"Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed - some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries." Stewart Brand
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> the green revolution (as I understand it[1], partly using GMOs to increase food production, especially in developing countries) is often described as saving a billion lives. This argument is moot, industrialisation saved those lives, not GMO, GMO only provides a 5% increase to crops in the developed world. Tractors, fertilizers and proper agricultural techniques saved the developed world (just like it did in the cu…
Furthermore, currently, world-wide more people die from the "side effects" of too much food; not enough is not the challenge. We have the food. It's just "unevenly distributed." Furthermore, my sense is, the argument for the world needing GMOs is based on the animal protein heavy diet. Such animals are resource / feed intensive. Shift the diet to less meats and more plants and the fact is you feed more. I'm not here…