General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why Organic Can't Fulfill Our Food Supply Ideals [View all]hunter
(38,383 posts)I don't use them in my house or in my garden.
Farmworkers are especially hard hit. I wouldn't be shocked if there's a relationship between gang violence and exposure to certain pesticides in utero. But try to get funding for those sorts of studies... it's like getting studies for medical marijuana funded. Giant corporations are not going to do it. Expensive prescription pills and farming-products-for-brain-damaged-corporate-stooges are very profitable, people growing some unpatented variety of plant well adapted to their local environment and trading seeds is not.
I may be the most skeptical cynical son of a bitch (hi mom!) you'll ever meet, and I have a thorough background in evolutionary and environmental biology. Sure 95% of marketing is bullshit, but that applies to all marketing, including the marketing for GMOs.
The sheep-like bleats of GMOs Good, Organics BAAAAD! or the equally ridiculous opposite, Organics Good, GMOs BAAAAD! are damaging to rational discussion, and true "red herrings."
Want to know the reason I dislike GMO's? It's pretty much the same reason I loathe any patents on life. Marketing machines and giant corporations destroy diversity. "Heritage" breeds of plants and animals are lost, and with them traits that might have proven very useful someday as earth's climate becomes increasingly unstable.
Equally valuable human community traditions are also lost.
Places like Kansas slowly become wastelands in every sense; culturally, intellectually, and genetically. I'm not singling Kansas out, vast swaths of my home state of California suffer similar plagues of corporate disseminated ignorance.