Why You Shouldn't Eat Organic

I have written about organic and GMO foods a few times, dispelling some common myths and misconceptions.  As a result, I have thought long and hard about some of the consequences of people being fooled into this fad.

The population of the world is steadily increasing.  It is true that in some countries, including the U.S. and China, birthrates have dipped below sustainable levels, which will result in population decline as certain groups start passing away.  The rest of the world is making up for this though, and the estimated world population growth over the next 20 or 30 years is enormous.  Now, contrary to the claims of overpopulation activists from the middle of last century onward, there is still plenty of unused arable land (land that can support crop growth).  In fact, the U.S. government is actually paying some people who own farmland not to farm it, to avoid economic problems related to overproduction.  The U.S. produces 5 times the food that it eats, with 3 parts of that being exported and one part just being wasted.  More population dense areas like China and India are certainly more vulnerable to resource problems related to overpopulation, but there is no sign they are even approaching that, and China is already starting to see a declining population due to regulations on reproduction and certain traditions that have synergized to create a very male-heavy population.  What all of this means is that there is enough land to produce orders of magnitude more food than the current human population consumes.  In short, world overpopulation is unlikely to be an issue any time soon.

That said, there are still problems with food production, and the primary one is getting food where it is needed.  There are places in the world with localized resource problems, notably in Africa, where people live in or near deserts, where conditions are not favorable for traditional food crops.  The dry heat in some areas makes large yield farming almost impossible, and even some of the more humid areas just don't have good enough soil to grow sufficient food to support a significant population.  In some of these areas, we mitigate this by shipping food.  This is incredibly expensive and inefficient.  It would be much better to grow the food locally than to ship it thousands of miles.  Unfortunately, traditional food crops just cannot handle the conditions.

In addition to this, most farming techniques, including both organic farming and industrial farming are environmentally damaging.  Industrial farming tends to put chemicals into the environment in ways that are destructive.  Farm runoff can cause all sorts of disruptions to local environments, and it can even contaminate water tables.  Many people who understand this turn to organic foods, which are fertilized with manure and other natural products and thus don't contribute to this chemical runoff.  This carries its own problems though.  Organic farming still tears up the soil, disrupting surface ground ecosystems for many organisms, and they do it worse than industrial farming, because traditional organic farming requires a lower crop density, which means more land must be damaged to grow the same amounts of food.  Organic farming also tends to be much more labor intensive, which ultimately consumes more energy, and there is still potential for diseased organic fertilizers to contaminate ground water when not composted correctly before use.  The lower yield density of organic farming also means that it is significantly harder and requires much more land to produce enough food for everyone.  There are alternative organic farming techniques with some potential to compete with industrial farming, but they are not mainstream enough to see the necessary automation to actually make it compete.  Even it we did get it to this point though, industrial farming has more room for progress than organic farming.  (I should express my opinion here that the best solution would be to mix the best of industrial farming and organic farming to create a type of farming superior to both in nearly every way.)

The reason you should not eat organic, at least for now, is that it takes away potential research funding from the more promising industrial farming.  Think about people in India, where populations are still growing rapidly, in 20 or 30 years.  Will organic farming even be able to support the population?  What about in Africa, where this is already a problem, due to poor farming conditions?  Purely organic techniques are not going to be able keep up with need in some places where food is already hard to grow.  I agree that modern industrial farming needs reform, but going to pure organic farming is going to make the most pressing problems worse sooner.  The environment can handle a bit more damage at the hands of poor industrial farming techniques.  People are already dying due to lack of food, and industrial farming has better promise for fixing that than organic, at least right now.

I want to add non-GMO foods to that though, and I honestly think this is more pressing.  In certain parts of Africa, there is only so much you can do to improve crop yields.  There are places that are just plain hostile to nearly all known food crops.  There is one exception: Certain GMO foods have been engineered to be able to grow well there.  Now, there is a whole political problem surrounding this, where companies like Monsanto are essentially holding African farmers hostage through gene patents, with a great deal of deliberate help from the U.S. government.  This definitely needs to be fixed.  This article is not about the politics though.  It is about necessity.  Genetic engineering carries great potential for solving most, if not all, of our food problems, at far lower risk than selective breeding methods that have been used for thousands of years to engineer all of the plants that we currently consume.  In theory, we could use selective breeding to create crop varieties that can handle certain harsh conditions.  This would likely take between fifty and hundreds of years.  Honestly, the risk in doing this is already extremely low, but the process is far less predictable and controllable than genetic engineering, which means the risk is still higher, and the process is much slower.  In other words, the risk involved with selective breeding and GMO are both negligible, with the first being slightly higher.  The real question is, how can we produce enough food where it is needed?  Organic farming is not the answer.  In some ways it can help, but if the crop is not suited to the environment, the only solution is to change the environment, and we are talking about places where air conditioned greenhouses are just not feasible right now.  We need crops that are suited to certain harsh environments, and if we wait fifty to a hundred years, tens of thousands of people will starve to death in the mean time.  We don't have time for that!

The solution is genetically engineered food crops that are better suited to harsh conditions.  Genetic engineering does some pretty cool things for us, starting with being able to grow foods in climates that most plants can't survive in and being able to grow food crops in poor soil.  We already have varieties that can grow in some of the harsher African climates and soils.  They are currently being used to create a dependency on imports from Western civilization, but they do exist.  There are also colder climates that could benefit from this though.  While very few plants can grow on tundra, it should not be terribly difficult to genetically engineer crops that can take advantage of the longer days in the Alaskan summer to produce yields many times faster than in more temperate climates, which is important because Alaskan summers are also shorter.  This also applies to southern Canada, the Nordic countries, and the northern parts of Russia.  Otherwise stated, this could dramatically increase the amount of farmable land in the world, as well as allowing more food to be grown locally.  If this does not sound like a great plan, also consider that more locally grown food means less transportation, which currently means lower CO2 emissions from trucks, boats, and planes used in transport, and more sustainable energy usage over the long term.  And this is totally ignoring the potential of using genetic engineering to improve flavor of fruits and vegetables, improve their nutritional value, and so on (Monsanto is already working on these), which could reduce the amount of food needed, further optimizing food production.  It is also ignoring the potential of genetic engineering to create more efficient crops that reduce the need for techniques and chemicals that are environmentally harmful.

The fact is, we need GMO, and we need the high crop densities of industrial farming.  Yeah, there are parts of organic farming that we should integrate into industrial farming, but funding organic farming is not going to encourage the progress we need.  Instead, it will encourage more industrial farmers to convert more efficient lands into lower efficiency organic farms to benefit from the higher prices they can charge, and it will encourage organic farming to stagnate (which it largely has been doing since its inception).  In other words, it will make things worse and encourage regression into less efficient and more harmful farming techniques.  And funding non-GMO food producers will reduce the funding going into improving crops to require less damaging farming techniques and producing the larger yields we need where we need them.

The only valid justification for buying organic and non-GMO is to avoid giving money to manipulative and unethical companies like Monsanto.  When we do that though, we are being environmentally irresponsible and withholding funding needed to improve the ability of agriculture to feed everyone who needs it in the most efficient and sustainable way.  The solution to Monsanto and similar companies is not to buy products from companies that are using inferior farming techniques with no desire for progress.  The solution to the political problems associated with food production is through political means.  If you find Monsanto's business practices to be unethical, vote for representatives that will make them illegal.  Write your current representatives and share your concerns.  Share your position with others, and encourage them to do the same.  People have been buying organic and non-GMO foods for decades now, and it has not made any difference.  Instead it is just trading one evil for another, and it is not even actually getting rid of the first evil.

Organic and non-GMO are not healthier than industrial farming products.  They are not less damaging to the environment.  Buying them does not make companies like Monsanto improve their ethics.  Organic and non-GMO are a step backward in farming technology, and we need to accept that before we can move forward.  When people fund these movements by buying organic and non-GMO foods, they deny needed funding for real progress.  It is true that there are a lot of problems with how food is currently produced, but the solution is not to fund even worse techniques.

Responsible buying habits don't include spending more money on inferior products to make a political statement that could be made more effectively through voting habits and writing letters to our representatives.  The solution is to make sure the funding is available to improve our current best, and then put political pressure on farmers and companies to use that funding to do it!

Are GMO's radioactive?

I was under the impression that most people have at least a basic understanding of radiation.  It looks like I was sadly wrong, though I suppose the necessity of a YouTube video explaining what radiation is in the first place should have been a dead giveaway.  Yesterday I wrote a blog post on why saying that GMOs are carcinogens is just plain wrong.  Well, today one of anti-GMO people in the YouTube discussion asked if GMOs are tested for radiation.  This displays an extreme lack of understanding of radiation and a disturbing lack of willingness to spend 5 minutes Googling something to get even the most basic information before making rather absurd claims about it.  So, for those who actually care about being right, it is time for a discussion on radiation.

The simple answer to the question "Are GMOs radioactive?" is no.  The reaction you are likely to get from pretty much any scientist who knows anything about radiation, when you ask this question is, "Wait, what the heck are you talking about?"

The long answer starts with the question: How do things become radioactive?  First though, perhaps we should look at what radiation is in the first place.

Technically, radiation is any kind of electromagnetic energy that that is moving through space.  This includes things like radio waves, visible light, certain forms of heat, as well as UV from the sun, x-rays, and gamma rays.  It also traditionally includes certain other types of particles flung through space at extremely high speeds.  When people talk about dangerous radiation, they are usually talking about a few specific kinds.  There are three kinds of radiation that are generally emitted by radioactive particles.  Alpha radiation is the least dangerous, at least in most circumstances.  Alpha radiation is when a radioactive atom ejects two protons bound together as helium, at extremely high speeds.  This helium nucleus has enough energy to do a great deal of damage, but it is not generally dangerous to humans, because it cannot penetrate the skin.  Ingested, however, it could do substantial damage.  The second type of radiation is beta radiation, which is just an electron or positron ejected at high speed.  This is generally considered more dangerous, because it can penetrate skin, but it generally does less damage than alpha radiation.  If a beta decay produces a positron, however, when the positron meets with an electron, they will destroy each other, potentially releasing more dangerous radiation.  The last type of radiation is gamma radiation.  This is just a form of electromagnetic radiation (much like radio waves or visible light), except that it carries far more energy.  Gamma radiation is considered the most dangerous form of radiation, because it can penetrate all the way through the body easily, and it can damage DNA, potentially causing cancer.  Keep in mind though, it takes a lot of radiation of any kind to do significant damage.  One or two or even a few hundred atoms won't do enough damage to detect.

One more thing that is important to keep in mind is that gamma radiation is not some rare thing that we only see from radioactive substances.  Stars and black holes that are many of light years away are producing large amounts of gamma radiation, and very small amounts of that are constantly passing through Earth and through us.  There are also other kinds of less well understood radiation in the form of energetic particles from space, called cosmic radiation, that can occasionally interact with DNA, also potentially causing cancer.  There is no way to prevent this, though, so we don't generally worry to much about it, and there really is not that much reaching Earth.  Most cases of cancer are due to either consuming non-radioactive carcinogens or just normal random mistakes that occur in cells all the time.

So now that we know more about radiation, how do things become radioactive?  Just like calling an object carcinogenic, technically calling an object radioactive is wrong.  Atoms are radioactive.  It is common to call objects containing large numbers of radioactive atoms radioactive though.  How does an atom become radioactive?  It is complicated, and it requires a lot of energy.  One of the simplest radioactive atoms is hydrogen-3, also known as tritium, and it is used in hydrogen bombs.  The thing that makes it unique is that it has 2 neutrons and only 1 proton, and having significantly more neutrons (twice as many, here) than protons makes atoms unstable (too few neutrons can also cause instability).  It decays into helium-2 (which is stable; that means it is not radioactive) via beta decay, emitting an electron and an electron anti-neutrino (which we won't worry about, because it does not interact much with ordinary matter).  Most hydrogen-3 is produced in nuclear reactors, but it can also be extracted from sea water.  It is not very common, but it is constantly being produced in oceans when hydrogen in water is hit by certain kinds of cosmic radiation, adding a neutron to the more common hydrogen-2 (which has 1 neutron).  In nuclear reactors it is produced the same way, by radiation (usually energetic neutrons) that is emitted from the nuclear reactions that produce energy used to generate electricity.  Tritium is safe enough that it is used to make glow-in-the-dark key chains in many places in the world (this is illegal in the U.S., not for safety reasons, but because tritium is also used in hydrogen bombs).  More dangerous radioactive elements are generally heavy elements, which are primarily produced in super novas of stars.  Regular stars cannot create elements heavier than about iron.  Not all heavy elements are naturally radioactive, though a few have radioactive isotopes (an isotope is defined by its number of neutrons, so hydrogen-3 is a different isotope of hydrogen from hydrogen-2).  In nature, radioactive elements tend to decay until they become stable elements (or isotopes), but some take millions of years to do this.   Uranium is probably one of the most well known radioactive elements, but Radium was one of the first discovered.  Radioactive elements can be created in labs, but it takes enormous amounts of energy.  Naturally occurring radioactive elements are rare, but they can be found in some places.  What it comes down to though is that radioactive elements require huge amounts of energy to make, and they can only be made in large quantities in nuclear reactors and exploding stars.

What about GMOs?  How could they become radioactive?  The uneducated masses that claim GMOs are radioactive seem to believe that GMOs just magically become radioactive, because they are GMOs.  This is completely false.  Changing an organisms DNA will not make that organism suddenly radioactive.  Some may believe that GMOs can produce radioactive substances, but given the energy required for humans to deliberately make them, it seems incredibly unlikely.  Further though, we have never observed an organism that could do this, and if we had, we would certainly be using it to make reactor fuel or even to turn lead to gold.  If messing with atoms was that easy, alchemists would have figured this one out hundreds of years ago.  In addition, the amount of energy required for a plant to create significant amounts of radioactive atoms is more than any plant has ever collected (even those ancient Redwoods in California would fail this one).  The fact is, it is practically impossible.  The last problem with GMOs producing radioactive atoms is that if they produced enough to be harmful to humans, they would destroy themselves long before they were ready to harvest.  It is just not feasible to claim that GMOs can create radioactive atoms.

If GMOs cannot create radioactive atoms though, perhaps there are other ways they could acquire them.  This is true, there are other ways.  The most likely way would be for humans to deliberately put them there, but there is no reason for any for-profit company to deliberately kill off their paying customers, and besides, it would be extremely expensive to put enough in to be dangerous.  Is it possible it could be happening accidentally?  No here too.  Modern genetic modification processes work by taking genes (which are just sections of DNA; no radioactive atoms there) from a donor plant and inserting them into the subject plant.  This process does not involved enough energy to make radioactive atoms, and it does not involve the use of any radioactive materials, so there is no chance for the resulting GMOs to be radioactive.  What about the old technique of bombarding cells with radiation to cause random mutations?  This technique probably could create radioactive isotopes, depending on the type of radiation used, but there is no way it could produce more than a very small amount.  The problem we have here is that radiation kills things in large amounts, and if you are merely trying to mutate a cell by modifying its DNA you really don't want to kill it.  The odds of making more than a few radioactive atoms doing this is extremely low.  In fact, it is so low that many companies use irradiation to sterilize chicken eggs before sending them to the retail stores (this is enough radiation to kill stuff, since the goal is to kill bacteria).  If there are not enough radioactive atoms in those to be harmful, there certainly won't be in a few plant cells or even a whole seed.  Even if there was though, unless the plant is producing radioactive atoms (which it cannot), any radioactive atoms will almost certainly not end up in the edible part of the plant, and _even if they did,_ they would be so diluted that there would not be enough to be dangerous.

There is one other way GMO plants could acquire radioactive atoms, but it is not unique to GMOs.  If there are already radioactive isotopes of atoms that are normally absorbed by a plant in the soil it is growing in, then that plant would very likely absorb those atoms along with the non-radioactive isotopes of it.  It does not matter if a plant is GMO or not for this to occur though; it will happen with any kind of plant.  In theory, this could result in food that is radioactive enough to be harmful, but there is still one problem.  If the plant absorbs enough radioactive atoms to harm a human, the radiation will also harm the plant, and probably far more severely than a human.  Radiation does its damage in several ways, but the most dangerous is by damaging DNA.  This is nothing like adding a gene to a cell though.  Radiation has a lot of energy, which means that it could heat a very small part of a strand of DNA, causing a break that prevents it from being read properly.  This would likely result in mutant proteins being created, which could tell a cell to multiply uncontrollably, resulting in cancer.  Thankfully, most DNA damage just results in the death of the cell, eliminating any further potential for damage.  High concentrations of radiation don't just damage DNA though.  It can kill a lot of cells, which is what causes radiation sickness.  Now, think about a corn plant.  It has a lot less mass than a person.  So a safe amount of radiation for a person could harm a corn plant.  Enough radiation to cause significant harm to a person would harm the corn plant even more, and since plant cells generally divide a lot faster than human cells, the effect would be further amplified (because the damaged DNA is reproduced more).  In other words, enough radiation to seriously harm a human would almost certainly kill the corn plant long before it produced any corn.  Even if it didn't though, the severe DNA damage would probably mutate the corn plant enough that it would be extremely obvious that something is very wrong with it.

What it all comes down to is that even the old method of genetic modification does not make something radioactive enough to have any more impact than naturally occurring radiation coming from the stars and from space.  Plants cannot make radioactive atoms.  If plants were picking up radioactive atoms from their farm lands (it would not matter if they would GMO plants or not), if it were amounts harmful to humans, it would kill or otherwise destroy the plants before any food was produced.  And even if a for-profit company was stupid enough to make their GMO seeds radioactive, most of the radioactive atoms would be left in the roots and lower stem of the plant, and anything that did get to the edible part would emit less dangerous radiation than the sky (from stars and blackholes and such).

Like I said, the short answer is no, GMOs are not radioactive.

Are GMOs carcinogenic?

In a recent debate in the comments of a YouTube video, I discovered something that is somewhat disturbing: A vast majority of people who claim that GMOs are carcinogenic don't actually know what "carcinogenic" means, and the evidence seems to indicate that they also don't know what "GMO" means either.  This includes at least one person who claims to have a degree in biology with a basic understanding of genetics (a claim that I do not believe).  Perhaps if I explain what these terms mean, it will help people to understand why it is absurd to claim that GMOs are carcinogenic.

The start with, what is a GMO?  Based on my experience, most lay people believe that a GMO is some kind of molecule or other thing that can be in their food.  GMO actually stands for Genetically Modified Organism.  An organism is something alive, like a plant, an animal, a bacteria, or pretty much anything else that is alive.  When we talk about GMOs in the context of food, we are generally talking about plants.  So ,GMO corns does not have GMOs in it, it is a GMO.  A GMO is merely an organism that has had its DNA changed in some way.  When we talk about GMO plants, we are generally talking about plants that had their DNA changed deliberately and directly by humans, but technically every plant, animal, and other living creature on Earth has arisen from millions of years of natural genetic modification, and a vast majority of the plants and animals that humans eat have had their genes deliberately changed though selective breeding.  Every GMO is just a regular organism that has had its DNA changed in some way that could have also happened naturally given the right conditions.

Creating GMOs is a complex process that does something simple.  There are several techniques for doing it, but there is one modern technique that is used for making pretty much all GMO food plants.  This technique starts by taking a plant with a specific desired trait and experimenting to figure out what gene in that plant causes the desired trait.  The most well known trait used in GMOs is resistance to a specific herbicide.  Another valuable trait might be more efficient nutrient use, which would be helpful in places with poor soil.  Once the gene is isolated, it is removed from the plant and injected into the cells of a plant that genetic engineers want to give the trait.  Genes can do a number of different things, but the most well known things genes can do is create proteins.  So a gene that makes a plant pesticide resistant might create proteins that break down the molecules of the pesticide before it can damage cells.  While it is theoretically possible that a gene from a plant could produce something that is toxic to humans, it is incredibly unlikely if that gene was taken from a plant that does not already product toxins that affect humans.

Now we should make sure we understand what "carcinogenic" actually means.  Google defines it as "having the potential to cause cancer."  It defines "carcinogen" as "a substance capable of causing cancer in living tissue."  Essentially, a carcinogen is a chemical compound or element that can pass into a cell membrane and damage the DNA inside the cell in ways that cause the cell to become cancerous.

So, what about GMOs being carcinogenic?  The first think to keep in mind is that technically carcinogens are compounds.  Compounds are molecules made up of atoms.  There are also a few carcinogenic elements, but they are rare in nature, so you don't generally find them without looking.  Nothing larger than a molecule can technically be carcinogenic itself, though we typically refer to objects containing carcinogenic molecules as carcinogenic themselves.  Technically though, it is not the tobacco itself that is carcinogenic, but rather it is the nicotine molecules (and a few other things) that are in the plant that are carcinogenic.  In theory, we could breed a strain of tobacco without nicotine (and the other things), and it would still be tobacco, but it would not be carcinogenic, because it does not contain any carcinogens.

Now, this brings us to GMOs.  The only way we can call GMOs carcinogenic is if they contain carcinogenic molecules.  Non-GMO corn does not contain any carcinogens, so it is not carcinogenic.  GMO corn cannot be inherently carcinogenic, because the genes we added are not carcinogenic (genes are just short pieces of DNA, and DNA is not carcinogenic, so genes cannot be).  What about the plant that we took the genes from, when we made the GMO corn?  Honestly, I cannot say, because I don't know what that plant was, but it is very unlikely any company would risk getting fined or shut down for knowingly taking such a risk, and since most plants don't contain carcinogens, it is safe to assume that if plants resistant to a particular herbicide exist, there are probably plenty of non-carcinogenic options.  (Keep in mind, these companies want your money, and if you die from cancer because their product is carcinogenic, they are not going to make as much money from you.)  Additionally, if a gene that is known to make a plant herbicide resistant is put into a non-carcinogenic plant, even if the original plant did produce carcinogenic compounds, the new GMO plant is extremely unlikely to produce carcinogens, because the genes that caused the original plant to produce them were not put into the new plant.  In fact, because most carcinogenic compounds produced by plants are fairly complex molecules, it is almost certain they are produced by a chain of processes, and reproducing the entire chain of processes in another plant would likely require a lot more than just one or two genes.  Making a non-carcinogenic plant produce carcinogens using genetic engineering would require deliberately doing lots of very expensive experiments to isolate all of potentially hundreds of genes involved in the process of producing that carcinogen, and there is no reason any for-profit company would spend that much money just to kill off its own customers.

To take this one step further though, there are a few processes that are far more likely to produce carcinogenic plants.  The first one produced pretty much every carcinogenic plant known to man, and that process is natural selection.  Tobacco was not invented by humans.  It evolved the ability to produce nicotine though natural selection (though humans did use selective breeding to increase its nicotine production, but Native Americans were smoking it in religious rituals long before that).  The second one, which is linked to natural selection, is radiation exposure, which can "damage" DNA.  This damage modifies the DNA in a much less predictable way than modern genetic modification techniques (and was actually used in early genetic engineering study).  This could cause a plant to produce carcinogens, but it would likely take hundreds or thousands of specific modification events for this to happen (and this is probably how tobacco evolved the ability to produce nicotine, over millions of years).  Given that a vast majority of plants on Earth don't produce carcinogens though (over millions of years of chances), it seems that the probability of millions of years of cosmic radiation resulting in a carcinogenic plant is also incredibly small.  Another process that is more likely to create a carcinogenic plant than genetic engineering is selective breeding.  Just the process of reproduction is rife with potential error.  Genes can get damaged, split and put back together wrong, or just end up with a bad combination.  This could create carcinogenic plants from non-carcinogenic plants, but again, after millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of deliberate selective breeding by humans, you would expect to see at least one food crop that produces carcinogens if this was at all likely.  So far, the only carcinogenic plants bred by humans appear to be the ones that we deliberately bred to produce carcinogens (like tobacco), and even those seem to have been made carcinogenic by nature long before humans discovered them.

What it comes down to is that GMOs are not inherently carcinogenic, and the modern processes used to make them would require deliberately spending millions of dollars and many years of work to make them carcinogenic.  No one with those resources is going to go to that much effort, especially not for-profit companies that have a vested interest in the survival of their customers.  Monsanto might be unethical, but they are not stupid.

Lastly, the FDA mandates that all GMOs be carefully tested for carcinogens.  They are also tested for other toxic compounds, though those are just as unlikely as carcinogenic compounds if both plants are not already toxic.  Note that the FDA does not require this testing for non-GMO plants, including plants produced using selective breeding, which means that there are good odds that GMO plants are actually safer than non-GMO plants.

If you want to stick to buying non-GMO foods because you don't want to support Monsanto and the way they abuse gene patents, fine.  That is a real thing, though perhaps not as bad as it used to be.  If you are buying into the claims that GMOs are carcinogenic or otherwise toxic though, you are wasting your money.  The only way any plant can be carcinogenic is if that plant produces carcinogenic compounds, and there is no evidence that any GMO does that, the probability of a GMO doing that without someone spending tons of money to make it do that on purpose is almost nothing, and even if they did, the mandatory and extensive testing required by the FDA would have found problems long before now.  The fact is, GMOs are not carcinogenic, and not even one carcinogenic GMO has been produced.  Don't waste your money on GMOs for your health, because it won't make any difference.  If you want to buy GMOs, do it because you don't want to support unethical companies, because otherwise you are not helping anyone.



(I should add, supposedly there is evidence that glyphosate,  the compound used in Monsanto's Roundup herbicide that the Roundup Ready line of GMO crops is used with, may be carcinogenic.  This does not make the crops carcinogenic themselves, though trace amounts of herbicide remaining on the crops could be hazardous.  It is important to realize that this is still better than the seriously toxic herbicides that were used before Roundup replaced them.  The best solution to this potential problem, however, is not to buy non-GMO foods that have probably been covered in those more dangerous herbicides.  The best solution is to wash your produce before eating it, something that has been recommended for over a century.)

How about "all safe?"

Organic, all natural, non-GMO...  These terms are all associated with safer, more wholesome products.  Enough of the general public wants foods and cosmetics in these categories that they have gained a fairly large market share.  The one thing these share in common is that they are no more safe or harmful than industrial, synthetic, and GMO products.

Organic foods have repeatedly been compared to industrial foods with no evidence that they are any safer or more healthful.  The biggest benefit of organic farming is that it is not as susceptible to fertilizer run off as industrial farming is.  Poorly done, however, organic farming can be as bad for the environment as industrial farming.  Likewise, done well, industrial farming can be as good for the environment as organic farming.  In reference to the products though, there is no significant difference.

"All natural" is an extremely overused term in retail.  It turns out that a vast majority of "all natural" products contain as least one synthetic ingredient.  The term is not currently even regulated.  I could claim that petroleum jelly is all natural, justified by the fact that the crude oil from which it is made got there through natural means.  Even if it was well regulated, however, it would say little about the safety or healthfulness of the products.  Black Widow spider venom is very literally all natural, however it is often deadly.  Unroasted cashews contain a deadly, all natural poison.  Caffeine is naturally found in coffee and tea, and yet it is still harmful when used excessively.  Fugu, otherwise known as blowfish, contains a deadly neurotoxin that will cause the victim to suffocate to death while totally coherent.  Again, it is all natural.  Even glucose, the primary (and "all natural") form of energy used by humans, can be extremely harmful in large amounts or in moderate amount for a long period of time.  "All natural" may have some meaning, but that meaning makes no reference to safety or health.

GMO is perhaps the least well understood of this list.  Many people view GMO products as the spawn of Satan.  GMO foods are seen as totally unpredictable, and opponents believe that they can cause anything from cancer to actual genetic modification in humans.  None of these claims are true, and in fact, it is highly probable that GMO foods are safer than non-GMO alternatives.  Direct genetic modification is highly targeted, while traditional selective breeding is subject to all manner of random genetic modifications.  In addition, GMO foods are regulated far better than non-GMO foods.  Where non-GMO foods may have undetected traces of harmful substances, GMO foods have been extremely extensively tested to ensure that they contain nothing unsafe.  The only serious worry about GMO foods is deliberate malicious modifications, however, keep in mind that we are talking about for-profit companies who profit more from healthy customers (who maybe eat a bit more than is healthy), not some evil organization bent on the destruction of the human race.  Besides, even deliberately evil modifications would still have to go through the same rigorous FDA mandated safety testing.

Instead of advocating for all of these questionable labels that involve more work and expense for the same quality of product, maybe we should be advocating for "all safe" products.  It does not matter so much if the product is organic, all natural, or non-GMO.  Nearly all of the concerns with these things come down to safety.  So instead of attacking these things, where all evidence indicates that they have little role in whether a product is safe or not, we should be attacking any product that has not been proven safe.  What would happen if we held non-GMO foods to the same strict standards we hold GMO foods to (besides making them more expensive)?  I can tell you what: We would quit getting contaminated batches of tomatoes in the U.S..  We would not have to worry so much about whether our beef is infected with mad cow disease.  While the testing might be more expensive, the total cost would eventually decrease, because we would not keep doing things of questionable value that ultimately increase costs.  The best part, though, is that our food, and many other products, would actually be safer, instead of being imaginary safer like our organic, all natural, and non-GMO products.


(Just for the record, I am not opposed to organic farming.  Some forms of organic farming can produce higher crop yields in less space, in less time, with less work than industrial farming.  I advocate research on combining best methods of both to produce a truly and clearly superior farming method.)

Patentable Genetics

The U.S. government will allow you to patent almost anything, with very few exceptions.  You cannot patent food recipes.  You cannot patent mathematical algorithms, unless of course, you call them computer programs (which are nothing more than mathematical algorithms).  You cannot patent things that have already been patented.  You can patent things that have been done before, so long as no one catches you, and even if they do, there is no accountability.  Someone even patented the act of "exercising" a cat using a laser pointer to entertain it.  There are some pretty absurd things you can patent.  Genetics happens to be one of them.

Genetics should not be patentable.  First, genetic material is little more than a mathematical algorithm using a different form of math than traditional arithmetic.  Second, genetic material used to grow food (vegetables or animals) is nothing more than a recipe for creating food.  Neither of these things are legally patentable.  So, why are genetically engineered or even just selectively bread seeds patentable?  Personally, I think it is because our government is run by uneducated politicians (by uneducated I mean, they have almost no education in anything relevant to their job; an education in politics is little more than learning how to get into office; it does not teach anything about the real world problems you will have to deal with once you get there).  Really though, I do not care why.  I want to discuss why genetics should not be patentable.

For a patent to be enforceable, there are some requirements.  The first requirement is that the patented thing be easily distinguishable from similar things.  If someone invents a flint lock made from tool steel, and someone else makes one from spring steel, they cannot both patent their inventions, because they are almost impossible to distinguish from each other.  Any case of patent violation could claim that the stolen design was the one from the other guy, and while it is possible to test the metals, the cost would be very high.  Genetics has an even worse problem.  Compared to testing genes, testing metals is trivial.  It can cost hundreds or millions of dollars to check a sample of genetic material to see if it matches a specific sequence.  The problem is aggravated by the fact that most people do not have the ability to do this.  This brings me to the biggest problem with not being easily distinguishable.  What happens if someone gives me a bag of seeds, where they may be patented genetic material in some of the seeds?  If those patented seeds were not obtained directly from the patent owner (for instance, a friend gives me a bag of popcorn kernels where some of the seeds are from special Monsanto corn he grew), then it would be illegal for me to plant and grow those seeds.  Here is the problem: I now want to grow my own popcorn.  I could go to the store and buy seeds, or I could use the bag of seeds my friend gave me.  If I choose the later, I am legally obligated to pick through the seeds, removing the Monsanto seeds from my planting stock.  The cost of the genetic profiling required to separate the seeds is absurd.  Even most very rich people would not be able to afford it.  Because the patented material is not easily distinguishable from similar things, it is absurd to expect anyone to honor it.  Worse, if my friend neglected to tell me about the Monsanto corn, I could be breaking the law without any way of knowing.  So that sounds pretty bad, but it keeps going.  Let's say the bag did not actually have any Monsanto corn.  My friend grew some heirloom variety of corn that is so old it is not patentable.  So, I grow some of the seeds in my backyard.  From my harvest, I set aside some of the seeds to grow the next batch and so on.  It may sound like I am safe, but I am not.  What if my neighbor bought some Monsanto corn and grew it in their backyard?  Now, some of my corn is probably going get pollinated from the Monsanto corn.  The resulting seeds are now a cross between my heirloom variety and the Monsanto stuff.  At least half of the seeds pollinated with the Monsanto pollen probably have the patented Monsanto genes.  It is now illegal for me to plant those seeds, even though I may not have a clue that they contain patented material, and there is no reasonable way for me to tell that they have patented material in them.  And, the government still expects me to honor Monsanto's patent.  Thankfully, it is going to be extremely difficult for Monsanto to catch and prosecute me, because the cost for them to discover my patent infringement is very high.  Still, using law to define ethics is a rather tyrannical practice (in fact, it is exactly how tyrants work).

The second problem is obviousness.  This requirement is that things that are either obvious or common knowledge cannot be patented.  This one gets really hairy.  This is also a part of patent law.  Legally, a thing that is obvious or common knowledge cannot be patented (it still happens all the time though).  If something is common knowledge, it is subject something called "prior art."  Prior art is anything that has already been done.  If you sue me for infringing your patent, I can get your patent invalidated by showing that you were not the first person to come up with the idea.  Note that it does not have to be me that invented it first.  If I can show that anyone came up with the idea before you, your patent is invalid.  The idea with these is that if someone else could easily come up with the same idea, then you should not be able to have a monopoly on it.  Now, applied to genetics, this can be used to show how absurd it is to patent genes.  First, all genetics were created by one of two things.  The first is God.  If God created all genetics, then it is pretty much all prior art.  Nothing built on these genetics would be patentable because it has pretty much all been done (Monsanto looks for useful sequences in existing organisms and puts them into other organisms; no original genetic code is created).  The second is random chance.  If random chance created genetics, then I would argue that it must be obvious.  If it is obvious, it is legally unpatentable.  In this case, it is still also all prior art.  So, this argument may seem weak.  It is in some ways, but it still has the law behind it.  Prior art is legally acceptable evidence that a patent is invalid.  So, legally if I can find each genetic sequence used in a Monsanto seed in something else that has existed since before Monsanto created the genetics for the seed, I should be absolved of any wrong doing.  The problem is that Monsanto has the means to prove that I have used their seeds, but I do not have the means to show prior art, entirely because I cannot afford the massive genetic profiling that would be required to do this.  In other words, I am automatically guilty of patent infringement unless I can afford to prove innocence.  Further, Monsanto has no accountability.  If I do manage to prove the existence of prior art, they do not have to pay my research costs or even pay damages for the costs of the law suit.  They also do not have to compensate their customers who paid premium prices because Monsanto's invalid patent protected the company from competition.  They loose their patent, but they should never have had it in the first place, and they still did benefit from it.  Note that this does not only apply to genetics.  This lack of accountability applies to all types of patents.  In genetics, however, the high cost of proving innocence makes it far worse.

Now, let's take this one step further, into the absurd.  Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a device to make the arduous task of separating cotton fibers from the seeds much easier and faster.  Now, who would he have sued if nature had randomly created a cotton gin?  Let's say that a combination of a lightning strike, a falling tree, and the perfect position of iron ore and water managed to create a cotton gin without any human intervention.  Who would he sue?  We do not have to worry about this because it will never occur.  If the combination of random natural events could create a cotton gin, it would not be patentable, because it would be obvious.  Ideas like dams, which have been built by beavers for millenia or burning wood for heat, which has been done by lightning for even longer, are not patentable because they are obvious.  One consequence of this is that humans have learned from nature to do these things, as soon as we developed sufficient technology to do it.  Now, some might say that genetics is different, because it is so difficult.  I would argue that at one time, building a dam was an insurmountable task for humans.  We had to develop the appropriate tools before we could build dams.  Genetics is not any different.  Unlike the cotton gin, nature routinely combines and alters genes to create new varieties of organisms.  In fact, nature can alter individual genes and even small parts of genes.  We do not have a clue how small parts of genes interact to develop different life forms.  Even Monsanto can do nothing more than search of gene sequences that do things and hope that inserting them in the right place will add the desired traits to their plants.  Essentially, modern genetic engineering is nothing more that reverse engineering things nature has created, and trying to combine the "code" differently to get desired results.  There is no invention going on here.  It is all prior art.  As with the dam, we are just adapting things nature has created to do what we want.  Just because the tools for doing this were invented recently does not change the fact that we are doing nothing more than combining prior art in rather obvious ways. For instance, is it something novel to make a crop resistant to herbicides so that higher doses can be used to destroy weeds, given that the technology to do so exists?  Is it novel to use genetic engineering to improve the taste, texture, or nutrition of food, given that the technology to do so exists?  How many people have wished that some healthy food was better tasting?  How many people have wished the junk food was healthier?  If these are not obvious things to do with new tools capable of doing them, I do not know what is.  So, now for the hundred dollar question: If nature manages to randomly produce something that Monsanto has patented, who does Monsanto sue?  Nature will never randomly create a cotton gin, because it is too complex for natural processes to produce.  Genes are not too complex for nature to produce (right, a seed is, evidently, less complex than a cotton gin; take that, opponents to natural selection).  In fact, it is extremely probable that nature has produced "Roundup Ready" varieties of many plants throughout the millions of years it has been playing with genetics.  Evidence has even been found that ancient ancestors of wheat, corn, and many other grains were much more nutritious than modern varieties (in fact, some evidence support the theory that the "grain" classification of food plants contains exclusively human created plant varieties; otherwise stated, all plants classified as grains are man made, thus the entire classification itself may have been created through human intervention).

Anyhow, allowing genetics to be patented is absurd.  There are at least two legal reasons genes should not be patentable.  There are multiple ethical reasons they should not be patentable, including the fact that it is impossible for most people to distinguish the difference between patented genetic material and public domain genetic material.  It is like making laws against certain types of speech but not telling the people exactly what it is that is illegal to say (throughout history, tyrants have done this and similar things).  Also, the transfer of genetic material is such an easy process that it is almost impossible to tell whether or not it has even occurred.  Making arbitrary laws that are impossible to determine if they have actually been broken or not is the hallmark of an oppressive government.  While this is not criminal law (which would allow the government to punish people on charges that are impossible to verify), it is still wrong.  Technically speaking, if I used traditional plant breeding techniques to create an herbicide resistant variety of corn or rice, and if the random combinations of genetic material created in the process managed to match the genetic code of Monsanto's Roundup Ready variety of the same plant, I could be sued for patent infringement, even though I used a completely different technique without any means of comparing the two products.  This is ethically wrong!  This is actually not just a problem with genetic patents.  It is not horribly uncommon for two people to invent the same thing around the same time.  When this happens, the person that gets the patent papers in first wins.  This is extremely unfair to the other person, especially when the cost of inventing is high.  With genetics though, this is aggravated by the fact that most people do not have the means to tell when they are violating patents or not.  Plant husbandry can take years to create what genetic engineering can do in months.  The cost for both is ultimately very high.  It is also uncommon for either to be used in a way that is really novel.  Probably the most novel use of plants is using tobacco to produce cancer cells used to illicit an immune response.  Nothing Monsanto, or any other plant producer, does with genetic engineering or even selective breeding is novel.  Outside the realm of food, flowers are often bread for specific colors or scents.  This is not novel.  People like pretty and good smelling flowers.  Within the realm of food, plants are engineered or bread for size, texture, nutrient content, flavor, and even aesthetic (colors, size, etc...).  These things are also not even remotely novel.  People have been successfully breeding food plants to favor one or more of these traits for thousands of years.  It is neither new nor novel.  Novelty is a legal requirement of patents.  There may be some things that can be done with genetics that nature has not done and that has some novel unique use.  Until at least one of these things is discovered, genetics should not be patentable at all.

Ultimately, gene patents are unethical.  They amount to little more than a way for companies to sue people without much risk of those people being able to prove their innocence.  Gene patents give great power to large corporations with a lot of resources at the cost of small businesses and individuals.  It is a manifestation of a common form of government oppression and tyranny.  Gene patents should be abolished.

IGMO?

What is Indirect Genetically Modified Organisms?  Well, it is a term I just invented, but it is a process that was invented millenia ago.  Nearly all of the food that we eat is, technically, genetically modified.  Now, the term GMO, used in a legal sense, means an organism that is the consequence of directly manipulating the DNA of another organism.  Most GMO used currently modifies plants to make them resistant to strong herbicides, so that the herbicides can be used to kill potentially harmful weeds without harming the main crop.  The main argument against direct genetic modification is that the consequences of directly altering DNA are not well understood.  In theory, it is possible that a single very minor change to DNA could cause the production of a toxic substance in a plant or animal, that could make it unfit for human consumption.  While there are regulations in place requiring extensive testing, it is impossible to comprehensively test to ensure that nothing harmful is being distributed to the public.

Indirect Genetically Modified Organisms use a less intrusive method for altering DNA.  In fact, when the process was invented, DNA had not even been discovered.  Today we call this process "selective breeding" or "animal husbandry."  It takes advantage of the ideas behind natural selection to modify an organism to be what we want or need.  This takes longer than direct genetic modification, but it is also more reliable and predictable.  The interesting part is, nearly everything we eat is IGMO!  Cows, pigs, and chickens did not magically start out as domesticated farm animals.  Non-IGMO turkeys are scrawny, with tough meat.  There is evidence that wheat did not even start out as a grain (it would have been similar to amaranth and other pseudo-grains).  In fact, it is possible that the true grains in general are entirely man made.  Similarly, most vegetables and fruits we eat are the result of thousands of years of IGMO.

Is there anything we eat that is not IGMO?  Probably.  Most foods that are not deliberately cultivated by man are probably not IGMO, though it is almost certain that we have had some impact on them (through our impact on the environment).  Most fish are probably not IGMO, though, we do not know if previous civilizations might have practiced some kind of selective breeding with fish that were then let back into the wild.  Also, some fungi, like truffles, are still gathered in the wild, which means that they are probably not IGMO either (it is possible, however, that liberal gathering of easily visible truffles may have unintentionally caused genetic selections that resulted in making them extremely difficult to find; that said, pigs like truffles too, so it is equally likely that wild pigs caused this trait).

I would say that it is almost certain that man has had some kind of genetic influence on pretty much all food that we eat.  I would not use the term IGMO to refer to foods that have not been intentionally modified though.  So foods that have only been genetically modified as a side effect of our environmental impact or gathering patterns would not be IGMO, but foods that we have deliberately selected for specific traits would be IGMO.

Anyhow, the point of all of this is: There is very little food that we eat that has not been deliberately genetically modified by humans.  The means of genetic modification are varied, and it is possible that some are safer than others, but it is all still genetic modification.  I am not saying that we should not be skeptical of direct genetic modification used in the food industry, and there are plenty of reasons to oppose it besides potential toxin risk (for instance, some U.S. companies donate GMO seeds to 3rd world farmers to get them dependent on the better growth properties of the seeds, then stop donating and use patent law to extort money out them).  What I am saying is, fearing GMO for its own sake is absurd, because nearly everything we eat is some kind of GMO.