It annoys me that fruit/vegs has to "look good". Anyone that has grown their own carrots know that the results you get are far from the "ideal carrot" :')
That being said, I believe GMO food is the future. It's safe and environmentally friendly: we can use far less land and water to produce larger amounts of crops.
The "ugly vegetable" movement is slowly picking up (or maybe just in my social circle). Like you I grew up with a garden and it never dawned on me until college that people shun "ugly" produce.
I also believe in the promise of GMO food. Unfortunately the business practices of the main players get wrapped in with junk science for many in the anti-GMO crowed. It becomes an involved process to convince someone I don't think that someone's business practices are ethical while I admire the science they do, and isn't always received well.
I think were shooting ourselves in the foot. We did the same with antibiotics. Disease gets worse and we make super bugs and are more and more reliant on our defenses. Eventually GMO will be the same thing. You won't be able to grow nonGMO crops because we have weaponized the crop killers to such a high degree.
News flash : “nonGMO” crops are already genetically modified from wild plants, just through a more painstaking process of cross breeding and artificial selection over random mutations. This is already happening and would happen anyway.
This is disingenuous. Will cold climates somehow adapt to better kill cold-hardy GMO potatoes? The same mechanics behind antibiotic resistance don't apply universally to what we use GMO for.
They don't get worse. The antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" are not actually super in any other way. They just have a resistance to antibiotics. In other ways, they are just normal bugs, not super.
Just like vaccinations make people immune to certain diseases, but doesn't give us any other superpowers.
There is a problem though, GMO and agricultural research in general is oriented towards making produce survive better the transportation, have better yields, look better in the shelves so that they are sold more easily, etc. The goal is to improve the industrial processes, but there is little regard for the actual nutritional value of the food and the health implications.
I fear that with GMO we're going to go much farther and more quickly in that direction than we've been able so far using only "traditional" selective breeding. And that's already had a big impact on fruits and vegetable which have now less vitamins and minerals than varieties that used to be grown a few decades ago.
> That being said, I believe GMO food is the future. It's safe and environmentally friendly
There is nothing in GMO technology that prevents making an unsafe or environmentally unfriendly GMO food.
It's just a tool, one that gives food makers power to produce a wider variety of new foods more rapidly than they could with non-GMO techniques. Whether they use it to produce safe foods or dangerous foods is up to each food maker.
> Anyone that has grown their own carrots know that the results you get are far from the "ideal carrot" :')
To get good carrots, make sure you are digging/disturbing at least 8 inches of soil so that the carrots can easily grow downwards. Otherwise, when they face resistance, they will fatten and sprout other carrot limbs, etc.
There's at least one startup trying to take advantage of the ugly produce gap. I've only received one box so far, but it was all great produce and some of it quite hard to figure out what made it imperfect.
Seems interesting but as with a lot of things, it doesn't deliver to my city. I really would like a platform to "watch" certain startups and get notified when they come to my city. Yes I could sign up for their newsletter but I don't care to get all the spam until they do come to my city.
Carrots are an interesting one. In rural America, where I grew up in the midwest, it used to be that you could fill an entire truck bed for $10 US with the "ugly" carrots from farmers who had large rejection stocks. No idea if this is still done today but I have no reason to believe it isn't.
We used to do the same thing with the drop apples that fell off the trees before they were picked. If you picked ALL of them, to clean up, we used to get them for $1 per 100 lb grain bag. Some of them were mush or partly rotted, or just ugly, but who really cares, when they're going to be mostly pig food? There were always enough nice apples to save out a couple bags for freezing or making pies or applesauce.
If your goal is environmental health, using less land, less water, then you're better off tackling the larger cause: animal production. It dwarfs crops by those metrics.
> I don't think this is meant to affect how apples look initially, only once they've been bitten into/cut so that the white part is open to the air.
I know, my point was that so far my experience with apples made to be better commercially fail when it comes to taste. I wonder if this will be different.
Here is a nice 2013 article about a man who hunts old and abandoned orchards for old heirloom apple varieties. It also explains about the genetics of apples.
If you like the apples made by a particular tree, and you want to make more trees just like it, you have to clone it: Snip off a shoot from the original tree, graft it onto a living rootstock, and let it grow. This is how apple varieties come into existence. Every McIntosh is a graft of the original tree that John McIntosh discovered on his Ontario farm in 1811, or a graft of a graft. Every Granny Smith stems from the chance seedling spotted by Maria Ann Smith in her Australian compost pile in the mid-1800s.
It was a bit shocking to me when I first walked into an American super market to see tomatoes all the same big size and shining red color. This is in sharp contrast to what we get in India - they come in all sizes and different shades of orange, green and red.
Even though the American ones were instantly attractive, it slowly dawned on me that perhaps something is wrong. Now I appreciate the Indian vegetables a lot more.
Put the information on the package. Let consumers decide, irrational or not, there's a market for nonGMO. If you want to supplant that market with GM foods, do it through informing consumers not blending in with food they already trust. The labeling games producer's play with our food is really unfortunate.
Problem with that is it sounds scary. Some big companies already are and hide the text on the bags, but your average consumer sees it and thinks it’s full of chemicals.
Personally, I’d rather eat a gm crop that’s been altered to resist insects than eat an organic crop that’s been sprayed with organic pesticides such as (the now not used) rotenone.
I don't understand why you're being downvoted. Usually people rave about how the free market is the solution to all problems. You can't have a free market in which you can make rational decisions without adequate information. If one actor can lie or hide facts then it ceases to be a free market.
Didn't the big companies already fight down a labeling law? Maybe it's in my jurisdiction, but they want to shove their GMO stuff down the public's throat without the public having a say.
That's why people distrust GMO - the companies that distribute don't want informed choice going on.
I'll buy a bag or two, just to encourage research into what benefits these types of genetic modification techniques can bring to market. I hope their business results are as successful as their produce results seems to be.
You guys are freaking out about apples, but I'm excited for the application of (the concept of) silencing towards humans. I don't think* it quite works this way & I'm sure biologics are similar, but it would be amazing if you could do the same thing for humans. Imagine doing that for people who have psoriasis. Would be amazing if the body took to that & could continue producing cells that react properly.
It is happening. Hemophilia being cured at Marin Bio [1].
There are a bunch of therapies where Cas9 is being used by to therapeutically knock out or repair particular proteins. Indications currently targeted at Intellia: ATTR, Hepatitis B, AATD, PH-1, etc. [2].
Readit News
That being said, I believe GMO food is the future. It's safe and environmentally friendly: we can use far less land and water to produce larger amounts of crops.
I also believe in the promise of GMO food. Unfortunately the business practices of the main players get wrapped in with junk science for many in the anti-GMO crowed. It becomes an involved process to convince someone I don't think that someone's business practices are ethical while I admire the science they do, and isn't always received well.
They don't get worse. The antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" are not actually super in any other way. They just have a resistance to antibiotics. In other ways, they are just normal bugs, not super.
Just like vaccinations make people immune to certain diseases, but doesn't give us any other superpowers.
I fear that with GMO we're going to go much farther and more quickly in that direction than we've been able so far using only "traditional" selective breeding. And that's already had a big impact on fruits and vegetable which have now less vitamins and minerals than varieties that used to be grown a few decades ago.
"Brown" is a sign of aging. And generally, fruit and vegetable nutritional content declines with aging.
So, by hindering these apples' browning, is this essentially facilitating their selling us a less nutritious product?
There is nothing in GMO technology that prevents making an unsafe or environmentally unfriendly GMO food.
It's just a tool, one that gives food makers power to produce a wider variety of new foods more rapidly than they could with non-GMO techniques. Whether they use it to produce safe foods or dangerous foods is up to each food maker.
To get good carrots, make sure you are digging/disturbing at least 8 inches of soil so that the carrots can easily grow downwards. Otherwise, when they face resistance, they will fatten and sprout other carrot limbs, etc.
https://www.imperfectproduce.com/
Lemon juice used to be the trick, but if this does the trick then cool.
I know, my point was that so far my experience with apples made to be better commercially fail when it comes to taste. I wonder if this will be different.
A lot of the commercial varieties have lineages that are high in sugar.
Here is a nice 2013 article about a man who hunts old and abandoned orchards for old heirloom apple varieties. It also explains about the genetics of apples.
If you like the apples made by a particular tree, and you want to make more trees just like it, you have to clone it: Snip off a shoot from the original tree, graft it onto a living rootstock, and let it grow. This is how apple varieties come into existence. Every McIntosh is a graft of the original tree that John McIntosh discovered on his Ontario farm in 1811, or a graft of a graft. Every Granny Smith stems from the chance seedling spotted by Maria Ann Smith in her Australian compost pile in the mid-1800s.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/04/heritage-appl...
Even though the American ones were instantly attractive, it slowly dawned on me that perhaps something is wrong. Now I appreciate the Indian vegetables a lot more.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-why-cut-a...
Personally, I’d rather eat a gm crop that’s been altered to resist insects than eat an organic crop that’s been sprayed with organic pesticides such as (the now not used) rotenone.
That's why people distrust GMO - the companies that distribute don't want informed choice going on.
There are a bunch of therapies where Cas9 is being used by to therapeutically knock out or repair particular proteins. Indications currently targeted at Intellia: ATTR, Hepatitis B, AATD, PH-1, etc. [2].
[1] http://investors.biomarin.com/2017-07-11-BioMarins-Investiga...
[2] http://www.intelliatx.com/pipeline/