Genetically Engineered Foods Edge Closer To Dinner Plate, FDA To Develop GE Rules
FrankenChicken moved closer to your dinner table after the FDA announced they're going to begin developing the procedures and guidelines that will allow farmers to genetically engineer animals to have more desirable traits and then sell them to you in the supermarket. For instance, featherless chicken or faster-growing fish. They will not require food to be labeled as genetically modified as long as there's no change in the final product, a move Consumers Union called "incomprehensible."
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Comments:
@NotYou007: I see your point, but where does it say that the companies aren't going to keep the extra profits.
...OK, I was trying for a witty retort, but the irony in the posted text can't be bested.
I guess I will have to switch to 100% organic food. (Organic labeling requires non-GM ingredients).
Ben, everyone, Congressman Dennis Kucinich has introduced three bills that relate to GMO safety and labelling.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who is not blindly afraid of all things genetically altered. Genetically altered food has saved more human lives than any other human invention in history. And the testing and regulations are already more strict than most people seem to assume.
@NotYou007: Selection of desirable traits and selective breeding is not the same thing as genetic engineering.
On the one hand, I'm really strongly FOR GMO foods and crops. With exploding populations and limited crop space, not to mention the inherent difficulties in crop growing brought about by global warming, GMO seems to be the next step we need to take to keep from all starving to death.
That being said, the government and food manufacturers have proven again and again that they have no real interest in protecting consumers from bad products. So long as most of the products are safe, they don't care. Recalls of bad or dangerous products only occur once a bunch of people are sick and/or dead, and they are usually poorly executed even then.
We can't go ahead without fixing this.
@Dobernala: How do you figure? The traits are genes and the selective breeding is engineering, just a much clumsier, more inexact version of it.
@NotYou007: But Kirk Cameron told me that the human hand was intelligently designed to fit the banana. How could we have had hands before the banana then?
This reminds me of the old ""KFC" is called that b/c they don't serve chicken, but instead a beak less gigantic breasted organism" myths/emails that were whizzing around the interwebs a few years back. What got me was people believed it was real. If this is nothing more than circumventing selective breeding, then I have no problem. If you start adding in stuff from other beasts, then I worry some, but until then, I'm cool.
Apparently, the chickens in the photo have also been engineered to excrete buffalo wing sauce through their skin so they arrive pre-basted.
Seriously though, I will consider it a success if I can go the rest of my life without ever seeing a featherless chicken ever, ever again.
@incognit000: I find some fault with your premise. Look at what happens when a recall/scare goes on. People flock away from that brand/store in droves, and rarely return. If you want to claim that people are greedy, then it would logically follow that they want to keep customers to make more money. Recalls/scares are horrible for a company.
That is why I said call it what you want. Why does a bird need to grow feathers if we are just going to eat it? Remove the feathers and that makes things go a lot faster. I can't see how this would alter the taste of the bird. Same as for growing a seedless melon or grape. Things are still being altered. I understand what you are saying, I just don't really care how it is done.
Those that truly oppose it can still get their free range chickens and all that other stuff from their health food stores. Just don't protest outside of my local food store with your stupid mask and pictuers and tell me it's not natural cause I don't care and it might help save millions of people one day, which it can do, even at this time I'm all for it. I'm not for the idiots that protest positive change though.
Eric, you are welcome to consume what you choose. I don't have that choice, because the FDA doesn't (currently) require labelling of lots of things:
Irradiation of food
Bovine growth hormone in milk and milk products
Meat or milk from cloned animals
GMO foods
Many people confuse the argument of whether these products should be in our food supply with the separate argument of should foods be labelled.
To have information about what we consume seems a rather basic consumer right.
The separate issue of 'are these types of food safe' I don't think can be resolved - yet. First of all science is often clouded by corporate interest, 2nd, these high-tech type of foods have not been in our food supply long enough. Let's see what happens to the children of mothers who consumed cloned beef and foods with altered DNA. Let's see what happens in 3 or 4 generations.
How long did it take for science to realize that giving women hormone replacement therapy for menopause led to a rise in breast cancer. 20 years? 30 years?
I think the jury is still out on high-tech foods, and labelling is just a basic right we should demand.
@Dobernala: Well, they are more or less the same in that you end up with more desirable traits, but you may have introduced unknowns into the mix.
Genetically engineered though? It just reminds me of Asimov's populations eating only yeast and algae products. Science + food = sci-fi super sludge in my mind. Totally unreasonable connection, but Blegh anyway.
FrankenChicken is the perfect name for a Japanese specialty restaurant. I'd eat there.
@LastVigilante:
I wish I could post a clip, but the Squidbillies episode "Wing Nut" is about that exact thing.
"At last - the ultimate party platter. 50 flightless but delicious wings. Crisp legs of celery. Bowels BURSTING with blue cheese! Now, sublime creature, defecate your own to-go box!"
@Git Em SteveDave loves this guy-->:
I was waiting for someone to mention that and Kirk, he is just an idiot fundie and nothing more. Would love to watch him or anyone else attempt to eat a real wild banana. Those things are nasty on the inside.
Does FrankenChicken taste more like Franken or more like Chicken? I'd protest, too, if it tastes like Franken.
/shudder
I'm not against altering food as long as it is clearly labeled. Then *I* will make the decision if I want to eat it.
ok, I'm not against altering food, but the featherless chickens are sad. That's just cruel. I know we're going to eat them eventually, but birds have feathers for reasons other than flying. Their feathers keep them warm and cool, they keep them protected from other birds, etc. This goes too far!!
I'm all for genetically engineering foods, much as I am for irradiating meats. Despite this, I still figure it can't hurt if it the products are labeled as such. Frankly I would probably specifically try to choose them over the unlabeled products.
Having been on a research team in this exact field for the USDA, I can vouch for how thoroughly the GMO crop sources are tested before they are ever allowed to be commercially used.
But that's not the point here, from what I gather; the point isn't that GMO are wrong at all (as well pointed out already to all fruit eaters, insulin users, environmental cleanup supporters, etc...)but moreover that they should be labeled as such. But again, that would mean that almost anything that you can buy in a supermarket needs some kind of tag on it. Everything has been selectively bread for our consumption up to this point. There is nothing we eat that hasn't been, including your precious heirloom anything or organic anything.
An example is organic corn: You think that's the corn that natives were planting hundreds of years ago in the US?
I'm all for safety, I'm all for intelligent labeling, but the alarmists that clamor about these issues needlessly are wasting a lot of breath for no real reason.
"Incomprehensible" does not even begin to describe it. I like my food "natural" for lack of a better term, not "man-altered".
Where exactly did this not labeling stuff come from? The end result is not the same if the food is genetically modified, no matter how "small" that modification is.
@NotYou007: There are a lot of practices that companies partake in that increase food supply, but do it at a cost. Consider the food that is given to cattle that are raised only to be slaughtered and fed to us. The food basically consists of whatever the folks working at the plant can find lying around, mostly old cow parts. It's because of practices like this that we start to see things like mad cow disease.
Who knows what can come up from genetic engineering of food? True, it could help solve the world hunger issue, but there are likely many downfalls that we haven't even yet considered.
@NotYou007: There is no problem with the food supply. In fact we have more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet. The problem is not quantity it's distribution.
Anyways, if they want to make GMOs and you want to eat it that's fine. The big debate here is that it should be labeled as such. There's no harm in putting a line by the nutrition info that says that the food is genetically modified. People (like yourself) will still eat it and those of us that choose not to eat it will have that option.
If you want to know what is in your food...
...grow it yourself.
Plant a garden, raise some chickens... if you live in the city, form a co-op and buy a small piece of land somewhere and share the duties.
Now I'm on my way home to a dinner of chicken and mushrooms made with what I bought at Wal*Mart (excuse me, I meant Walmart*) last night.
God, look at those chickens. LOOK AT THOSE CHICKENS. Their meat can only taste like sadness.
I'm for this. I just hope my chicken still has the nutritional value and hormones it had before GE.
I detest genetically modified foods. The very concept disgusts me.
A GMO potato known as New Leaf that was used to make french fries in the 90's is classified by our government as a pesticide. Franken-farmers are throwing GM wheat into their fields, with herbicides and pesticides built into their genetic coding, uncaring of the fact that plants, grasses in particular, can crossbreed insanely easily, thus putting native plants at huge risk. Modifying other vegetables to fight off bacteria and fungus has only lead to the creation of superbugs which are killing more and more people every year.
Don't get me started on the animals. Bad enough chickens are currently stuffed four to a cage, their beaks torn off so they don't kill each other, and stacked 10-20 cages high. Now they want to make them naked, with even more freakishly large legs and thighs so that every minute that they are alive is pure pain and torture. Oh, and I bet they can do even more amazing things with cows stuffed into feedlots.
*shudders*
I am not a vegetarian. But, I am a consumer. It is my right to choose which companies to support, based on how well they interpret my values and morals. I should have the right to know which companies are destroying the environment, poisoning the gene pool with unstable aberrations, and torturing livings things to line their own pockets.
The only reason this has not happened yet is because of Big Food. If you think these companies are looking out for anybody but their own pockets, you are delusional. They don't want to feed the world. They want to profit off of it. Quite frankly, if their franken-food kills you, poisons the water you drink, and results in strange and horrifying complications due to mishandled genetic engineering, they'll still laugh all the way to the bank, not caring one bit about what they've done.
So, until our government and Big Food stop lying in the same bed, it's farmers' markets and local farms for me.
@SkokieGuy: There's little reason to demand labeling of the things that you mention. It's a free market, and if there are enough people who *really want* non-GMO foods, some company will cater to them. As it is, a minority of people care about eating organic foods. And yet there are companies that sell clearly-labeled organic foods to the people who want them.
When GMO foods become the norm, it's a pretty safe bet that somebody will be there to cash in on people who are afraid of GMO foods. Those companies will clearly label their foods as NON-GMO so that you can easily spot them on the shelf, because they WANT YOUR MONEY.
I am not opposed to genetic modification in theory, but as others have pointed out, some earlier efforts in this area have been dubious at best. And yeah, large agribusiness is not looking out for your personal health any more than Chef Boyardee is. I buy organic/free range when I can anyway, so this is just one more reason to keep that up.
@processfive: You couldn't be more wrong. Regular food sales are growing about 2% - 3% per year. Organic food sales are growing 17% - 20% per year. [www.msnbc.msn.com]
And regarding labeling, there has been tremendous lobbying on behalf of corporations who fear labelling.
[www.nytimes.com]
There is lots of reason to demand labelling. If consumers do not know what they are buying, then the market is not free.
GMO foods are already the norm. There are GMO ingredients in about 80% off all processed foods. But I guess you didn't know that, BECAUSE THEY AREN"T LABELED.
Why are you against providing information? The downside is?
That picture is plucked up, man.
I would have no problem eating cloned meat. In fact, I can't wait for them to do it so I could actually afford a good steak. It seems lately it's either tough, or fatty.
@SkokieGuy: I don't believe they should put a "cloned" label on cloned meat. That would insinuate that it was different or inferior in some way, which it's been proven that it is not.
Most of the arguments have been made. Selective breeding is simply a chaotic clusterfuck of random gene swapping. Good thing selective breeding has never bitten us in the ass cough*killerbees*cough. Keep in mind that as societies advance in science life spans increase this includes our food practices. Before the Industrial Revolution, the average life span was about thirty-five to forty years, so if your against progress and the possibility we may get cancer at 40 from a genetically modified chicken go eat your scrawny disease ridden chicken and leave me the super nutritious honey bbq lactating featherless uber-chicken.
I don't think you folks realize that humans have been genetically engineering for thousands of years. That cow wasn't always the same cow we know today, and that sheep wasn't always the sheep we know of today. That is how the term "artificial selection" comes into play. We humans have allowed for cows to breed with the desirable traits that we want in order for them to be so delicious and succulent.
Genetically produce is just a step above that, we are actually modifying its DNA in order to have even more desirable traits for our consumption. Is it strait up evolution? I don't know, that is a question for an evolutionary biologist to answer.
for more information on how artificial selection works, search "Carl Sagan evolution" on youtube
Those chickens are absolutely adorable!!!! Do they have to use sunscreen? Can they be housebroken???
I CAN HAS NEKKID CHIKIN!!!! ME WANTS!!
@Ingenium: I love Sagan! I watched all of the cosmos. I wonder if they have put the cosmos on dvd yet?
@Dobernala: Selection of desirable traits and selective breeding is not the same thing as genetic engineering.
In fact they're exactly the same. DNA is DNA, and it doesn't matter if it comes randomly through mutation or via exogenous sequences from another organism.
Even in the wild gene transfer isn't strictly vertical.
Bananas are already cloned, plants have been genetically engineered since the 7,000-9,000BC, animals have genetically engineered themselves since they began choosing mates. Getting upset over this is like getting upset because animals since the beginning of time have killed each other to determine who is the strongest and gets to mate.
I wonder how many people complaining about this would happily take a vaccine that alters your DNA to cure Alzheimers or cancer or any other disease?
@SkokieGuy:Why are you against providing information? The downside is?
While we're at it, produce should be labeled with the race of the person who harvested it. I mean, I'm no racist, but shouldn't people have a right to know whether their lettuce was picked by some sweaty Mexican or a down-home, corn-fed, wholesome, caucasian Nebraska youth?
Sure, it doesn't make any difference to the end product, but how can the market be free if the consumer doesn't have the information to avoid unwanted racial contact?
Why are you against providing information? The downside is [what]?
Define "no change in the final product". Mystery meat can taste like chicken, look like chicken, and smell like chicken and also have some mysterious "harmless" chemical that later causes a mass (insert horrible disease) outbreak. And come on people, do you honestly think it is going to LOWER prices significantly??? 99% of any cost savings will boost their profit margins, either by raising the cost of natural food in response to demand for real food, or by maximizing the costs of GM food as to still elict demand from the people who really don't care.
A chicken lives just over 40 days before it's killed and made into food for us. Why does a chicken need feathers for 40 plus days when it is only going to become food? Everytime you consume chicken you are pretty much eating a baby chicken. A chicken is able to live a good 15 to 20yrs but we give them a whooping 40 plus days, then off to the chopping block.
Call it what you want. Im glad to be vegetarian.
I don't fear altering food products, I fear creating unintended consequences. I honestly have less fear of modifying the genetic code of animals as I do injecting them with hormones. Eating a fish that's been genetically modified to grow twice as fast isn't going to affect me when it's dead and cooked. Eating a fish pumped full of estrogen will give me manboobs.
@crashfrog: This is the most patently stupid ad hominen attack I've read in a long while. This is The Consumerist, who here would be against supplying consumers with information?
We should respect the lives of the creatures we end up eating. Anyone who has pets will tell you they have emotions. . Birds like pretty feathers otherwise they wouldn't have them. Lets let them live well and with dignity. They aren't machines. They give up there lives for us.
Sorry their not there.
@anonymousryan: This is The Consumerist, who here would be against supplying consumers with information?
You tell me. Explain to me why the market should supply one kind of information and not the other, if in neither case it actually makes a difference in the food.
Either way, it's pandering to prejudice. I don't think that's something the government should require companies to do.
Call it what you want. I will glady eat genetically engineered chicken or fish. The banana that so many people enjoy today didn't happen just by accident and a lot of what we eat today is already genetically altered so I could care less. If it will help increase the food supply, lower prices and help feed the hungry then more power to them.