industryterm:modified food

Compelling Photos Reveal the Legacy of America’s Most Hated Corporation - Feature Shoot
▻http://www.featureshoot.com/2014/09/compelling-photos-reveal-legacy-americas-hated-corporation

http://www.featureshoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Mathieu_Asselin_04.jpg

For nearly 40 years, while producing the now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. Thousands of pages of Monsanto documents – many emblazoned with warnings such as “CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy” – show that for decades, the corporate giant concealed what it did and what it knew.

Over the past five years, photographer Mathieu Asselin has devoted his life to researching and documenting the controversial history of Monsanto, a leading American corporation manufacturing agricultural chemicals and genetically modified food products. For Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation, he has traveled throughout the country, from the PCB-contaminated creeks of Anniston, Alabama to the hazardous waste sites of Sauget, Illinois, photographing the landscapes and persons devastated by exposure Monsanto’s toxic products and the company’s monopoly on seeds. Included in Asselin’s dark portrait of Monsanto are objects collected by the photographer himself: vintage advertisements, memorabilia, and newspaper clippings.

In its 113 year history, Monsanto has manufactured everything from plastic to the now-banned Agent Orange, an herbicide used to destroy a large area of jungle during the Vietnam War. Agent Orange has since been found to cause miscarriages and birth defects in the children of Vietnam veterans. Today, Monsanto is a main producer of the herbicide glyphosate, which goes by the brand-name Roundup, and bovine growth hormone, both which have raised ethical and environmental concerns relating to the welfare of animals, humans, and the environment. We spoke to Asselin about his project as well as Monsanto’s past, present, and future.

#monsanto #photographie

The War on Genetically-Modified-Food Critics | naked capitalism
▻http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/02/war-genetically-modified-food-critics.html

Since when is the safety of genetically modified food considered “settled science” on a par with the reality of evolution? That was the question that jumped to mind when I saw the cover of the March 2015 #National_Geographic and the lead article, “Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?”

The cover title: “The War on Science.” The image: a movie set of a fake moon landing. Superimposed: a list of irrational battles being waged by “science doubters” against an implied scientific consensus:

“Climate change does not exist.”

“Evolution never happened.”

“The moon landing was faked.”

“Vaccinations can lead to autism.”

“Genetically modified food is evil.” WHAT?

#manipulation #ogm

Experts have severely underestimated the risks of genetically modified food, says a group of researchers lead by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
▻https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/genetically-modified-organisms-risk-global-ruin-says-black-swan-author-e8836

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One of the arguments that genetically modified crops are safe is that it is no more unnatural than the selective farming that people have been doing for generations. However, Taleb and co argue that this kind of farming is different from the current practice because any mistake in the form of a harmful variation will almost certainly be localised and die out as a result. This is the natural process of selection.

Over many generations, humans have chosen and adapted biological organisms that are relatively safe for consumption, even though there are many organisms that are not safe, including parts of and varieties of the crops that we do cultivate.

By contrast, genetic engineering works in a very different way. This process introduces rapid changes on a global scale. But selection cannot operate on this scale, they argue.

“There is no comparison between tinkering with the selective breeding of genetic components of organisms that have previously undergone extensive histories of selection and the top-down engineering of taking a gene from a fish and putting it into a tomato,” they argue. “Saying that such a product is natural misses the process of natural selection by which things become “natural.””

The potential impact of genetically modified organisms on human health is even more worrying. Taleb and co say that the current mechanism for determining whether or not the genetic engineering of particular protein into a plant is safe is woefully inadequate.

The #FDA currently does this by considering the existing knowledge of risks associated with that protein. “The number of ways such an evaluation can be an error is large,” they say.

That’s because proteins in living organisms are part of complex chemical networks. In general, the effect of a new protein on this network is difficult to predict even though the purpose of introducing it is to strongly impact the chemical functions of the plant, for example, by modifying its resistance to other chemicals such as herbicides or pesticides.

Even more serious is the introduction of monocultures— the use of single crops over large areas. This dramatically increases the likelihood that the entire crop might fail due to the action of some invasive species, disease or change in the environment.

When harm is localised, it can be used as part of the learning process to prevent the same set of circumstances occurring again. Global harm is different. “We should exert the precautionary principle here because we do not want to discover errors after considerable and irreversible environmental and health damage,” conclude Taleb and co.

#OGM