431–440 of 474 posts
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My culture doesn’t consume insects and we don’t intend to start.
but you do eat spaghetti allo scoglio, huh?
Not to forget also that the island that invented delicious maggoty cheese aka "casu marzu" also belongs to Italy.
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But then again services represents 73% of European jobs according to Wikipedia HN crowd is by large pro tech and "progress" with little to no concern about ethics, culture and other issues, reading this thread is a prime example of it actually
Sure, but 'jobs' are not everything, they are just one measure and if you look at what is listed under 'services' then you'll find that a lot of those services are actually in support of the other 27% of the jobs.
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There are incentives. Selfishness isn't everyone's driving factor, unlike what extremely selfish people want you to believe. Plenty of people believe in morals and other reasons to help their neighbor at their own expense, and these feelings seem to follow a high level of education and awareness of your fellow human beings.
As long as you don't think that just because someone doesn't agree with your way of helping fellow human beings, they are necessarily uneducated or heartless. As an example, just in the last six months or so, I took considerable time and effort out of my day to help absolute strangers in two different occasions to change their flat tires. Both times I was soaked through in sweat by the time I was done, but I was happ…
I'm not calling you prejudiced, to be clear, but your example of "we should all rely on each other to help out" is exactly what racists use to justify cutting welfare and saying communities and churches should handle it, for example, with the dogwhistle that only those "deserving" will get assistance. But "welfare queens" who dare to be Black? No support for them!
This is comical. Even when ignoring any ethical reasons. I'd would dare guess that climate change will make farming animals much less feasible in many parts of Italy in the very near future. Lab-grown meat will become the only option for cash-strapped locals who want to cook (and thus preserve) local cusine meat dishes. Meat from livestock will have become too expensive for most people by then. I.e. when that happens…
How much do you know about Italian farming? It is very different from US. Consumption is also declining due to demographics
I helped him out quite a bit when he launched it which included taking a detailed look at each producer that he ultimately selected.
I lived in Veneto on a farm for almost a year in 2008/2009.
So I would say I have above average knowledge about farming in this country.
If and when lab grown meat will be a thing for the masses, Italy will follow suit because "Italy would not be able to oppose the sale of synthetic meat produced within the EU when it does gain EU approval, because of the free movement of goods and services." Furthermore governments change and legislation follows them. Anyway, people will decide which kind of meat they prefer. Taste, cost, availability, etc. Italy did…
> Italy would not be able to oppose the sale of synthetic meat produced within the EU when it does gain EU approval, because of the free movement of goods and services. I'm not a EU expert, but I think freedom of movement means you can't ban based on country of origin, not that you can't ban a product generally.
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I don't understand this need to push eating insects onto people. The "intellectual" point of view makes it even funnier. Food is not just the sum of proteins and carbohydrates. It is wrong on so many levels to suggest that because insects are protein rich then they must be good. I was honestly shocked by Americans not being aware of the quality of their food - it's horrible. Even in Whole Foods, or more expensive sup…
Jokes a bit on you, though, for I'm no American, and I certainly value good cuisine. But reflexively excluding insects from your meal options just because they "look scary" is just... not that smart. I suppose you eat shrimps just as fine as anyone, don't you?
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> Long-term tasty tomatos are a good thing but what about impossibility to breed my own tomato seeds if GMO will win 100% of the market? That is a great question and a very valid concern. Because there are two things at odds with each other: - We don't really want GMO plants (or even animals and fish) to interbreed with non-GMP plants/animals because wide-spread effects on the ecosystem could be disastrous. We've liv…
You are talking some decent ideas but I do not agree on the Heracleum mantegazzianum point (we use to call it borschevik). 1. Any invasive specie known today is about transporting an organism, evolutionally willing to live from one place to another. GMO organism aren't evolutionally willing to live, they just genetically willing to give us better tomatoes. 2. Absence of non-GMO is not a problem at all if I still have…
Evolution doesn't have a concept of will. It does have the concept of survival. Survival of the fittest (yes, I know it's a simplification).
Nearly every species is invasive given lack of external controls. For example, Sweden needs to kill 100 000 (yes, one hundred thousand) of moose every year because their natural predator, the wolf, has been exterminated, and moose have become invasive.
If your pest-resistant, herbicide-resistant tomato that is also more adaptable to varying soil conditions is able to reproduce and hybridize, it will "willingly" take over any local plants not because it has the "will", but because it has the capacity.
It will just as "willingly" take over, say, wheat, if the field is contaminated with its seeds.
We use herbicides in our fields not because our plants have "no will to live", but because other plants will just take over given half the chance.
> I do not believe that all plants harvested from GMO are _really_ sterile. Since they use to have a reproductive system so all kinds of mutations are possible if something with CRISPR/Cas9 goes wrong
All GMO products (both plants and animals) are required to be sterile because impact on ecosystem is very hard to estimate if they aren't. And yes, it's not 100% fool-proof, and quite a concern
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> Long-term tasty tomatos are a good thing but what about impossibility to breed my own tomato seeds if GMO will win 100% of the market? That is a great question and a very valid concern. Because there are two things at odds with each other: - We don't really want GMO plants (or even animals and fish) to interbreed with non-GMP plants/animals because wide-spread effects on the ecosystem could be disastrous. We've liv…
Or we could just use the damn anti-trust regulations on the books to actually keep markets open and competitive. There doesn't have to be a worry that Monsanto will lock down seeds if they get split into different companies and some of those companies continue to sell seeds that aren't locked down. I think any market segment without at least 10 comparably sized companies AND the option to just not transact with ANY o…
We could argue whether it's too long, but it's a complex topic I don't know nearly enough.
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> We need to fully understand its safety, nutritional content, and long-term health effects. This is the same "reasoning" that ultimately led to ban on most GMO foods like actual long-term tasty tomatos. For some reason we demand significantly stricter controls over anything "lab-grown" than on anything "natural". Note: I'm not calling for lax controls. I'm callling for controls that are not more stringent than those…
> For some reason we demand significantly stricter controls over anything "lab-grown" than on anything "natural". Because we overall know the natural products, how they are to handle and how they interact with each other. And yet we still have many problems from poor handling and still unknown interactions and also new "optimizations" coming from the business-side. And GMO&lab-grown is this, just worst, it's unknown…
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Bad? Apart from your own moral opinion, how is killing bad? Why is killing a plant better than an animal? Because their chemistry includes some sort of pain hormone? So do some plants. This is not an argument either of us can win, because it’s a morality question to which there can be many answers. I simply don’t see how eating only plants is more moral. For all we know free grazing animals that we eat are way more h…
Dude. Because plants don't have a central nervous system. Animals do. Plants don't feel pain. Animals do. It's not hard.