[rajacat]

What do you mean by "elitist"? Are you sure you're using the word properly?

[JerryM]

What do you mean by "elitist"? Are you sure you're using the word properly?

By 'elitist', I mean that if you have a refrigerator, a store that has food you can buy food from at any time, a roof over your head to keep your refrigerator within, and ad nauseam,  that maybe one just might be putting too much emphasis on labels and farming modifications.

Have you ever been so laughingly hungry that you could eat the ass out of a dead horse and not care?

Millions of people live that, for real, every single minute of every single day.

Discounting that is elitist.

Do you understand the word?

[werd]

Of course I own stock. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5pA32cD1DM

 I wonder what he would have said about the current state of our Lakes and Rivers due to the dependency use of herbicides and fertilizers? Its too bad he is not around to see none of Monsanto's potential he aspires too as has been realized. Only to continue functioning in a realm of Big Corporate farming aimed at maximizing profits. This is the type of stuff I was talking about, creating a Smoke N Mirrors front. Trying to look good while acting like a Big Corp would. They need to quit suing on their patents and quit developing GMO farming tech for Ethanol. All that land could be used to farm for the needy... right? That is what you are saying right? Well its not happening

[JerryM]

Ignorance is bliss, werd. Rock On. 

[rajacat]

By 'elitist', I mean that if you have a refrigerator, a store that has food you can buy food from at any time, a roof over your head to keep your refrigerator within, and ad nauseam,  that maybe one just might be putting too much emphasis on labels and farming modifications.

Have you ever been so laughingly hungry that you could eat the ass out of a dead horse and not care?

Millions of people live that, for real, every single minute of every single day.

Discounting that is elitist.

Do you understand the word?

Whose discounting that?
You still don't understand the word.
 Now if one doesn't appreciate or care that millions of people are on the edge of starvation  then using the word "callous" would be better usage.
www.dictionary.com/browse/callous
insensitive; indifferent; unsympathetic: They have a callous attitude toward the sufferings of others. 3. having a callus; indurated, as parts of the skin exposed to friction. verb (used with or without object)


Elitist | Define Elitist at Dictionary.com
www.dictionary.com/browse/elitist
Elitist definition, (of a person or class of persons) considered superior by others or by themselves, as in intellect, talent, power, wealth, or position in society: elitist ...

Sorry for being "elitist".

[JerryM]

No need to apologize. 

There are starving people that don't give one tiny shit about labeling, or how food is grown. They are hungry.

Judging them (or their will) is elitist, by your own definitions.

Please, broaden your perspective. Not by your vocabulary, but by your understanding.

[werd]

What do you mean by "elitist"? Are you sure you're using the word properly?

He thinks that since I don't hold a fairy tale perception of Monsanto and GMOs I don't understand famine. Or what it's like to be hungry. That is his logic. He thinks Norman Borlaug's work in India is a mirror image of Monsanto's great claim to feeding the hungry. It hasn't occurred to him Monsanto is not about to start acting like Norman Borlaug in the 60s. The whole reason there is famine is because the entire wealth of the world are held in Corporations like Monsanto. They ain't about to start handing out the wealth. Monsanto is looking at being bought for about $50,000,000,000. I doubt it will happen. Why would it? life's great at the top looking down at all the starving people.

[JerryM]

Okay.

I just submitted your thoughts herein to the Nobel Committee, werd. 

I mean really, fuck that guy Norman Borlaug, right? What the fuck does a Nobel Laureate know compared to you? You clearly are smarter than him, and can provide the world food solution for the next century.

Thank you. You are my everlasting hero.

[werd]

WTF does Norman Borlaug, the poor, GMO science, your misunderstanding of Nobel prizes,  have to do with fricken Labeling? Answer that! Make it clear, quit beating around the bush.   

[JerryM]

WTF does Norman Borlaug, the poor, GMO science, your misunderstanding of Nobel prizes,  have to do with fricken Labeling? Answer that! Make it clear, quit beating around the bush.   

NOTHING!!!! 

[werd]

NOTHING!!!!

  k I get it 

[rajacat]

WTF does Norman Borlaug, the poor, GMO science, your misunderstanding of Nobel prizes,  have to do with fricken Labeling? Answer that! Make it clear, quit beating around the bush.   

[JerryM]

k I get it 

The truly sad part is that you do not. 

[werd]

The truly sad part is that you do not. 

Just a couple of more generic GE memes and references to starving kids. Then I'm sure I would have got it. You gave up too quick.

[Johnny2Bad]

What happens when the pests develop resistance to Roundup? Could we see the huge Roundup enabled monocrops[sic] fail within a relatively short period of time? If 90% of corn, wheat and soy crops are "protected" by Roundup and they all fail; that would be a catastrophe of global proportions.
 The monocrops[sic] lack the natural diversity and natural selection that protects them from mass failures of this scale.
A healthy crop should have some plants die of pests so that the others that have a natural immunity thrive and
 natural selection can run its course. We should work with nature and encourage this natural weeding out process.

For starters, there is no GMO wheat and for technical reasons, there is little chance there will be.

I know nothing of Soy; that is a crop that is essentially non-existant in Canada and as an ingredient is only found in factory foods imported from the US, which is rarer than you might think. They do sell Soy milk here, but I don't drink it.

"Roundup" is a trade mark for a broad leaf herbicide whose patent expired years ago (in 2000) ... the proper term today is Glyphosate.

As a broad-leaf herbicide, if not applied in the stage where your unwanted plants ... we generally call these "weeds" ... are grown to the point where they exhibit leaves, it does nothing. There is little chance that weeds will become resistant due to how it works ... it looks to the weed as an amino acid necessary for growth, and then interferes with that plant's uptake of essential nutrients in a process that would normally involve the desired (to the weed) amino acid.

It is fairly weak ... you can use it on your lawn and it won't kill the grass because a blade of grass doesn't present enough leaf surface area, while a dandelion, for example, does.

It can only be used during an active growth stage, which is why the wanted crop ... say, Soybeans ... must be resistant to Glyphosate, otherwise it too would be killed.

Since it takes Genetic Science to create the Glyphosate-resistant food crop, I would have thought it obvious that the weeds aren't going to lab-engineer themselves.

The data on toxicity is weak when indicated, and not indicated enough that the positive results may simply be experimental error. In other words if we here on Audio Circle were to begin our own study on Glyphosate, the chances are that we will get a result that is indistinguishable from random chance. Thus, most scientists and Government Agencies (I mean even the Germans say that " ... the available data is contradictory ..." and " ... far from being convincing ...") are slowly coming to the conclusion that it's harmless to humans, if only because if it were harmful, it would show up as such in the thousands of studies so far with far more consistency.

The elusive toxicity conclusion is despite that it is easily the most commonly used herbicide in North American agriculture and the second most widely used in people's homes and yards.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but my personal experience is something that is truly toxic is a lot easier to find than Glyphosate seems to be, especially when it's been used in the tonnage it has been, over so many decades. I'm retired and almost dead from natural causes, and Monsanto first brought it to market when I was a High School student.

I do understand why industry doesn't want labeling. For starters, the GMO universe is a bazillion times bigger than Monsanto and Roundup, yet we debate as if it were the only GMO example on Earth. Far from it.

Secondly, the ordinary consumer knows nothing, or next-to-nothing, of what GMO means, what foods are affected, and what benefits it provides beyond the negative association with the growth of the Factory Farm ( a trend that goes back 100 years) and the profits of a handful of evil corporations. So the chances the significance of a label will be mis-interpreted is high.

I do not blame those who work to create suspicion and fear in the consumers' mind ... that is how advocacy works. Without fear there is no human reaction ... practically every single TV ad starts by fear-mongering, followed by a solution that just happens to cost money. There is almost no other effective means to get people to fall off their wallets. I get that.

I personally don't see a need for it, but I am equally confident that if mandatory GMO labeling were to arrive, the sheer number of GMO labeled foods, and the kinds of foods they are ... from frozen pizzas to half the fresh fruit and vegetables in the outside aisles ... will just result in consumers either educating themselves or ignoring the label. Of course, we should not forget that it will raise the cost of food when providers are forced to comply, but that doesn't affect me because there is no push for labelling where I live.

[FullRangeMan]

Norman were a fervent transgenic defender, when in my country to visit large farmers and advertise Monsanto products he said the future farming is in the hands of the new technologies(guess GMO).

[Johnny2Bad]

I wonder what he would have said about the current state of our Lakes and Rivers due to the dependency use of herbicides and fertilizers? Its too bad he is not around to see none of Monsanto's potential he aspires too as has been realized. Only to continue functioning in a realm of Big Corporate farming aimed at maximizing profits. This is the type of stuff I was talking about, creating a Smoke N Mirrors front. Trying to look good while acting like a Big Corp would. They need to quit suing on their patents and quit developing GMO farming tech for Ethanol. All that land could be used to farm for the needy... right? That is what you are saying right? Well its not happening

I do not believe Monsanto is interested much in selling Roundup. They had a good run, the patents ran out almost twenty years ago, and the majority of the Glyphosate sold in the world today isn't from a can labeled Monsanto.

They are, however, interested in selling seed stock of Glyphosate-resistant food crops.

I have no idea what the "state of our lakes and rivers" has to do with Roundup / Glyphosate.

Algae blooms and the like are a result of fertilizers, not the application of Glyphosate, which decays to nothing within 2 to 140 days (depending on a lot of different factors) and doesn't runoff easily in the first place (stays in soil). The alternative to Glyphosate is harsher pesticides that do remain in the environment. I definitely prefer the GMO crop and Glyphosate to the non-GMO crop and large scale application of pesticides, some of which are water-soluable.

Remember, six million people die every year today of Malaria, because we humans could not be trusted to apply the safest pesticide to humans the world has ever known in quantities that killed insect pests adequately but did not poison the environment. We could be eradicating Zika today if we hadn't blown it when we had the tools to do so. But Noooooooo. We had to indiscriminately apply it in does of "if some is good, 400 times too much ought to be about right".

[werd]

I personally don't see a need for it, but I am equally confident that if mandatory GMO labeling were to arrive, the sheer number of GMO labeled foods, and the kinds of foods they are ... from frozen pizzas to half the fresh fruit and vegetables in the outside aisles ... will just result in consumers either educating themselves or ignoring the label. Of course, we should not forget that it will raise the cost of food when providers are forced to comply, but that doesn't affect me because there is no push for labelling where I live.

I get the lethargy it is basically how i felt. That complacency is left over from a time when government was in control of industry through regulation. Although a lot of the regulations are still there the departments are so underfunded that it basically acts like there is no regulation until a problem is presented to them. Usually from the public. The public not knowing or understanding GMOs is not a reason to not-label. The reason behind labelling is to educate the public how food is processed right from start to finish. That is not being taught in schools (at all) unless you take some type of AGRO course. This entire sector of information is missing from the public. With this entire new form of Lab GMOs coming I am saying now is the time to start becoming informed where are food is coming from and how it was conceived.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/food-safety-workers-among-hardest-hit-by-harper-budget-cuts/article4099513/

The first thing i thought when i read about labelling was tobacco labelling. Necessary but really on our food labels? That is not the type of labelling unless you want to include diseases like diabetes, then it might be time to illustrate diabetes on high sugar content food. Labelling does not even have to be on the label. It can appear as scanning bar code readable by personnel phone or tablet at the end of the aisle.

Its time to start labelling and quite worrying about the pocket books of Multi National Corps. They can not charge any more for food its already too high. They will have to assume the cost if we make them do it.

[werd]

Johnny2bad

Everything you said is valid. I started off exactly the same way. Except what kept bothering me was I could not find one. I mean one good reason to not-label when I started looking into it. The reasons I get always ends up me feeling sorry for companies like Dow or Monsanto. Then I wake up and I think. WTF was I just thinking?!

Screw Monsanto and their cohorts. They can afford all of this and with a track record like Monsanto it is literally insane to not label.

[werd]

I do not believe Monsanto is interested much in selling Roundup. They had a good run, the patents ran out almost twenty years ago, and the majority of the Glyphosate sold in the world today isn't from a can labeled Monsanto.

They are, however, interested in selling seed stock of Glyphosate-resistant food crops.

I have no idea what the "state of our lakes and rivers" has to do with Roundup / Glyphosate.

Algae blooms and the like are a result of fertilizers, not the application of Glyphosate, which decays to nothing within 2 to 140 days (depending on a lot of different factors) and doesn't runoff easily in the first place (stays in soil). The alternative to Glyphosate is harsher pesticides that do remain in the environment. I definitely prefer the GMO crop and Glyphosate to the non-GMO crop and large scale application of pesticides, some of which are water-soluable.

Remember, six million people die every year today of Malaria, because we humans could not be trusted to apply the safest pesticide to humans the world has ever known in quantities that killed insect pests adequately but did not poison the environment. We could be eradicating Zika today if we hadn't blown it when we had the tools to do so. But Noooooooo. We had to indiscriminately apply it in does of "if some is good, 400 times too much ought to be about right".

Lakes and rivers are continually hammered by farming chemicals. That is obvious and well known. Where it comes from are the run-offs into rivers. Although there is less erosion due to tillage there is flattening and removal of natural barriers that causes huge spring run offs and flooding. Especially by Corporate farming.  There is a ton of erosion as the moving water takes the soil and chemicals with it and ends up in our rivers or lakes. So where we save on no tillage erosion it just ends up getting spent on run off erosion. Some years are worse than others.

I admit I was somewhat misleading about roundup in the lakes and rivers but we know there are tons of fertilizers. So it is safe to assume there are contaminants left behind also. It would be good to know what is in our lakes but that data is not there. Either by not looking for it or left unreported there is a lack of info on contaminants.

This is the Web page for the Consortium on Lake Winnipeg. Here is the what got me looking around for any info on what the Gov might know about contaminants in their Websites.  I could not find anything anywhere. Go to bottom of page and read about contaminants.

http://www.lakewinnipegresearch.org/aboutscience.html