What is your opinion on GMO foods and irradiation food treatment?

[General Zod]

I'm okay with GMOs, but shit like pumping chicken full of growth hormones is nasty. The meat takes on this gross super soft texture where you can poke a finger through the breast.

[Flagg]

I'm okay with GMOs, but shit like pumping chicken full of growth hormones is nasty. The meat takes on this gross super soft texture where you can poke a finger through the breast.

Wow. I've never heard someone complain about meat being "too tender" before.

[General Zod]

I'm okay with GMOs, but shit like pumping chicken full of growth hormones is nasty. The meat takes on this gross super soft texture where you can poke a finger through the breast.

Wow. I've never heard someone complain about meat being "too tender" before.

There's tender, and then there's "so soft you have to wonder how the chicken doesn't dissolve into a gelatinous goop while it's still alive."

[Broomstick]

Had a customer who rolled up to my register with about 5 kilos of pork ribs, a dozen bottles of marinade and BBQ sauce, several bags of charcoal, the legal maximum amount of beer permitted for one transaction, fireworks, and ammunition.

Dude, are you trying to be a stereotype, or does it just come natural?

I'm sure, between the alcohol and the gunpowder, nothing could possibly go wrong.

Of course, I rang him up and wished him a happy and safe holiday.

[Elheru Aran]

I'm okay with GMOs, but shit like pumping chicken full of growth hormones is nasty. The meat takes on this gross super soft texture where you can poke a finger through the breast.

Wow. I've never heard someone complain about meat being "too tender" before.

There's tender, and then there's "so soft you have to wonder how the chicken doesn't dissolve into a gelatinous goop while it's still alive."

You sure that's the growth hormones? Because frequently they plump up the meat by pumping it full of saline or meat-juice after they butcher the bird. You can tell when you cook it, all the water comes out in the pan, your meat never browns particularly well.

Broom, did you mean to post that here?

[Broomstick]

No, I did not. Obviously, I brain-farted and thought I was in the venting thread. I think I'm more tired than I realized. I could trying fixing it... or just call it quits before I fuck it up worse. Sorry.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Actual biologist in the house. Hello.

With respect to irradiated foods... what's the fucking problem? Gamma radiation (which is what they use) has no lasting effects on what it contacts other than the initial DNA damage. The photons run roughshod through the DNA, and it is done. You irradiate the meat, thus slaughtering ALL the bacteria and fungi, but the meat is fine. It's DNA was in the process of degrading anyway, even if it was not already cooked--which it was--which denatures the DNA in any case.

As for GMOs... Lets pretend (this is pretend, it is not actually real) that it is somehow qualitatively different from selective breeding, and thus cannot be directly compared. Even though they can be, and in terms of scale and scope of change, it is WAY more efficient and less random to directly insert what you want into a genome than to wait on chance mutations... There has never been any evidence of harm in any paper that has not been retracted by the journal it was published in on grounds of massive research incompetence/dishonesty, and the benefits are rather large. Don't want to spray pesticides because they harm bees and other beneficial insects? Why hello there BT corn that produces a toxin that is practically inert in humans but lethal for insects that eat the plant! How are you!? Wow! You might not increase yield per hectare by very much, but you sure as hell decrease the cost of producing that same yield! Woooo! Concerned about drought? Why hello various drought resistant crops that survive on less water, and these DO increase yield per hectare! Huzzah! The benefits are huge, in other words, and given our population growth trajectories, we are going to need to produce something like 50% more food in the next few decades, and we will need to leverage every bit of technology we can get unless we want to level the amazon and convert it to rice production.

[AniThyng]

Yes, it's hilarious when I run into some anti-GMO woo-woo type who wants their organic chicken but claims to detest "game meat". Honey (it's usually a woman), that "organic chicken" you praise is one of the most modified organisms on Earth! If you want "natural" fowl you need to go out the woods and fields and shoot a duck or pheasant which will NOT have undergone countless generations of controlled breeding for the characteristics humans want in a bird.

At the risk of being off topic, why is it usually a woman that buys into this kind of woo?

[Broomstick]

Cultural factors.

Partly, women still bear more responsibility for food shopping and cooking in our society. Women may be more vulnerable to picking up woo due to less exposure to critical thinking/science in their backgrounds. Probably a bunch of other factors I'm not thinking of right now.

There are a bunch of other predictions you can make regarding shopping habits and things like gender, age, ethnicity, and so forth. The marketing industry spends billions on discovering them.

A lot of it is a fear of contamination of one sort or another. Some of it is reasonable: ground meat packages tend to leak and should be kept separate from other foods for health reasons. Others are a bit less rational: the insistence that absolutely no non-food items should ever go into a bag with food items no matter how well sealed the packages even if when you get home they're going to be in proximity. So... you can NOT put plastic forks in the same bag as bananas with these folks. Never mind forks, which you will use to eat food, are in a cardboard box and you're going to peel the bananas before you eat them. (The extreme version of this is most likely in black women, particularly middle-aged and older, followed by elderly Asian women).

Now, when men have the no-GMO or all-organic or similar food woo-woo then tend to be much more "scientific" about it, talking about studies or level of contamination in fairly precise terms. Women tend towards more "it's dangerous! It will give you cancer/poison your kids/cause disease!" Men tend to focus on optimizing health, women are more fearful of "poison" in their children's food. Likewise, women tend to focus much more on "best-buy" and expiration dates than men do. So it wasn't surprising to me that it was a woman who was worried about how fresh a container of salt was and when it would expire. It was surprising to me that someone would think that way, but if you had told me someone did I would have guessed it was a woman doing that.

Of course, these are very much generalizations, there are all sorts of exceptions, so consider it a bit of a trend but not hard and fast rules.

There is also a class thing going on as well - the truly poor, the destitute, aren't terribly fussy about their food (absent an actual medical problem) When you aren't sure you have enough money to buy enough food you tend to not care if the carrots are organic or not. The less educated likewise. You have to have a certain level of wealth and security in life to start worrying about these things unless there has been a very targeted campaign to make you aware of it. Hence, Whole Foods marketing towards middle-class to upper-class suburbanites/urban people. They have the money and leisure to worry about these things more, while the folks on food stamps struggling to pay the rent shop at Aldi's (Which, by the way, also has organic food offerings these days).

[Simon_Jester]

I'm still learning to cope with people whose mindset towards 'exotic' food treatments and medical treatments is "THERE IS A RISK!" or"IT IS A CONTAMINANT!"and not "there is absolutely zero reason to expect this 'contaminant' to be harmful" or "the risk is 1 in X, you take greater risks by forgetting to take your afternoon walk."

[CetaMan]

I tend to be okay with it, there are some interesting connotations you can make about ethics, but pointing to selective breeding for thousands of years tends to make most of the points irrational or opinion-based more then anything else. In the end it is used to feed millions of people who would otherwise face starvation, malnutrition or other factors, and thus is a net positive.

[Highlord Laan]

Hell if I know, it all tastes like chicken...

Except the chicken of course.

Serious question: what does the chicken taste like?

Humans. Well, according to Eddie Izzard, anyway.

[FireNexus]

Actual biologist in the house. Hello.

With respect to irradiated foods... what's the fucking problem? Gamma radiation (which is what they use) has no lasting effects on what it contacts other than the initial DNA damage. The photons run roughshod through the DNA, and it is done. You irradiate the meat, thus slaughtering ALL the bacteria and fungi, but the meat is fine. It's DNA was in the process of degrading anyway, even if it was not already cooked--which it was--which denatures the DNA in any case.

As for GMOs... Lets pretend (this is pretend, it is not actually real) that it is somehow qualitatively different from selective breeding, and thus cannot be directly compared. Even though they can be, and in terms of scale and scope of change, it is WAY more efficient and less random to directly insert what you want into a genome than to wait on chance mutations... There has never been any evidence of harm in any paper that has not been retracted by the journal it was published in on grounds of massive research incompetence/dishonesty, and the benefits are rather large. Don't want to spray pesticides because they harm bees and other beneficial insects? Why hello there BT corn that produces a toxin that is practically inert in humans but lethal for insects that eat the plant! How are you!? Wow! You might not increase yield per hectare by very much, but you sure as hell decrease the cost of producing that same yield! Woooo! Concerned about drought? Why hello various drought resistant crops that survive on less water, and these DO increase yield per hectare! Huzzah! The benefits are huge, in other words, and given our population growth trajectories, we are going to need to produce something like 50% more food in the next few decades, and we will need to leverage every bit of technology we can get unless we want to level the amazon and convert it to rice production.

Can the level of radiation used cause chemical changes that might affect flavor? Oxidizing fats or destroying volatiles? I could see it affecting flavor this way, but only subtly. Also anything where the taste requires some level of microbial activity.

[Lagmonster]

Given my employer and my peers, I run into antis all the goddamn day. 99% of them don't care about the food supply, aren't educated about agri-science, and don't have viable ideas; they're anti-corporation or anti-capitalism, and claiming that a corporation is engaging in mad science and poisoning people is an effective way to damage corporations.

And an uncomfortable number of conversations with these types go like this: "GMOs are bad, but me and my friends run a totally trustworthy and safe and healthy organic farm and sell our produce at a local market, here's a flyer." In other words, they want you to distrust all the food that they or their friends aren't selling. They aren't dishonest, but they're still just in marketing.

[Elheru Aran]

I doubt anybody is going to be nuking, for example, blue cheese on a regular basis. Cheese -requires- a certain level of microbial activity to form IIRC. Perhaps when they're packaging it for sale on the other hand, I suppose, when they might want it to not have MORE activity.

Above a certain price point though you're never going to see much more artificial fucking with food than we already have, at least until we're at a level where we can create steaks out of thin air or something. The whole idea of 'nice' or expensive food is that you're buying it for specific qualities, which are typically nursed along carefully by the cooks/chefs till it reaches the point where you eat it. They can afford to pay for the pleasure of a placebo-effect superior flavor.

Mass market generic stuff for the peons? Nobody cares if it gets a few seconds of radiation here and there.

[Exonerate]

As for GMOs... Lets pretend (this is pretend, it is not actually real) that it is somehow qualitatively different from selective breeding, and thus cannot be directly compared. Even though they can be, and in terms of scale and scope of change, it is WAY more efficient and less random to directly insert what you want into a genome than to wait on chance mutations...

So, how would one go about selectively breeding BT corn anyways?

[Alyrium Denryle]

As for GMOs... Lets pretend (this is pretend, it is not actually real) that it is somehow qualitatively different from selective breeding, and thus cannot be directly compared. Even though they can be, and in terms of scale and scope of change, it is WAY more efficient and less random to directly insert what you want into a genome than to wait on chance mutations...

So, how would one go about selectively breeding BT corn anyways?

You wouldn't. What you would do is selectively breed Bacillus thuringensis to move away from its typical free-living-in-soil life cycle toward using crop plants as hosts, likely through inoculating them into hydroponically grown plants and applying selective pressure. But why bother when you can move the gene that codes for its δ-endotoxins over to your target plant? When produced by the plant itself, it is target-specific and won't harm non-target organisms (even if it was not target specific anyway due to its biochemistry), and practically inert in people and livestock.

Can the level of radiation used cause chemical changes that might affect flavor? Oxidizing fats or destroying volatiles? I could see it affecting flavor this way, but only subtly. Also anything where the taste requires some level of microbial activity.

Not as far as I know, the amount of radiation required to do that would be... rather large. Damage would have to be done on a macroscopic scale to cause flavor changes like that.You would have to apply enough gamma radiation to start physically cooking the food, and at that point you have (pardon the expression) overdone it.