Would you eat...

[Aught3]

Hi everyone,
I've got a uni project on at the moment and I'm hoping you can all help me out.
I want to get some perspectives on what people think about genetically modified (GM) foods. The reason I ask is my project involves designing a transgenic crop and one of the factors I have to take into account is public perception. As I'm now way out of touch with what the public thinks I thought I would ask. I realise that by asking on this forum I will bias the results as I think everyone here is probably above average in intelligence. But hopefully I will get more thoughtful responses and not too many knee-jerk rejections (though it's ok if that's what you think - I just want some variety). If you have or are working towards some sort of biology degree can you please put that in your answer - just so I know.

Ok I want to ask a series of questions if and you say 'yes, I would eat that' you can go onto the next one, if you say no, could you please post which one it is and try to explain why, thanks!

Would you eat...
1. A wild berry known to be completely harmless
2. A crop which has been selectively bred over millennia e.g. rice
3. An old hybrid/polyploid also bred over millennia e.g. wheat
4. A vegetable known to have a spontaneous mutation e.g. everything
5. A recent hybrid/polyploid specifically generated by humans as a food crop e.g. any Brassica vegetable such as cauliflower
6. A fruit that has been specifically mutagenised (e.g. using colbolt 60) to produce novel mutations and traits e.g. some pear cultivars

The rest of the examples would all be considered GM food.

7. A vegetable with a specifically deleted gene
8. A fruit with an antisense or RNAi sequence added to turn off another gene e.g. FlavR SavR tomatoes
9. A cis-genic vegetable e.g. some potato cultivars (this is where the added gene comes from another plant)
10. A crop with herbicide or insect resistance gene added e.g. B.t. corn (where the gene originally came from a bacterium)
11. A crop which has been modified with numerous genes to increase nutrition e.g. Golden rice (gene products are consumed and confer health benefits)
12. A crop which has multiple inserted genes to confer some benefit to plant growth e.g. my maize project (gene product will be consumed but has no health benefits to the consumer)

I've tried to put them in order of what I think would be most off-putting to consumers, but if you think differently could you please tell me which ones you would swap around.
If you're confused by any of the categories I'd be happy to explain further.

Thanks for your time,
-A3

 

[ImprobableJoe]

I would probably eat all of them. I'm not really sure how dissolved GM molecules in my intestines would be significantly different than other dissolved chemicals that my body deals with every day.

 

[infrared]

I don't like 12, why would I eat anything without benefit, and should number eleven be in a better position?

 

[GegoXAREN]

There is nothing wrong with geneticly altered foods...
We have, over the centuries done that, look at weet for example...

 

[Whisperelmwood]

Another boring response, but Yes to all. GM foods don't bother me, and in a lot of cases, I think it's a damn fine idea (specifically in helping to solve food crisis...is..is... yeah, I don't know the word >> )

 

[King of NH]

I agree with ImprobableJoe. I fail to see how GM food (unless you mean made by General Motors, in which case, fuck off, I'm not even going to smell it) will be any different in my stomach than any other food. I am convince of the safety of GM crops and would really need evidence on what 'mutagen' people are saying is bad for me.

I do have a preference though. I like the flavor of some wild game because it is wild and has a nature like appeal. I could be happily fooled with this, though. My second reason to prefer non-GM crops is that we do not know how some of these crops will react to the ecosystems should they escape. This is the big one for me. I think it's morally wrong to put our planet at even more risk than it is now when we understand we may be doing so. But again, an easy fix. GM crops should be able to be engineered 'ala Jurassic Park' to be unable to survive in the wild by removing the ability to synthesize certain vitamins.

 

[edib0y]

Pretty much all of them. If I have a choice between non-GM and GM, I probably would choose non-GM, unless 11th or something like that. Still, this is answer to world's food problem, and i hate those dumb "we don't fully understand effects of genetically modified food on health" people. Of course, we could go wrong and accidentally do something we didn't intend to do, like make it poisonous, but we could detect that, and it can also happen trough old-school selection breeding...

 

[Ozymandyus]

I would move 10 down to 12 personally, just because pesticides IN the food you eat/created by the food you eat seems a little dangerous. I know it would be highly tested and safe and wouldnt be the sort of pesticides that interfere with human biological pathways, but I think the public perception of it might still be cautious (though we already have food like that).

I would eat any of those products as I'm a big fan of GM foods... My only concern would be that new crops would be rigorously tested for unintended consequences before being put in wide circulation. Our current food supply is basically the most tested consumable in history, both ecologically and in terms of side effects of consumption... and we know that it is safe because it has been tested on millions of people.

People are so cautious about new scientific advancements like GM because it seems So similar to drugs and such that are often just minor adjustments to natural chemicals in the body. We know from experience how many dangerous side affects these alterations can have. The difference between that and the alterations made to our food supply are not immediately obvious to those not in the know, and they can be understandable concerned. We keep finding out about drugs or inventions that have unintended consequences such as cancer years and years after its already in wide circulation.

As long as GM can be properly branded as something that is a very different from medicine and we can look at the danger as the infintesimally small danger it is.... I don't see how people couldn't jump all over it. Compared to shooting new frequencies of high energy radiation all through the atmosphere like we do every time there are new wireless advancements... it is pretty darn safe (Not that I'm worried about wireless stuff, just saying.)

Sorry that this was so long, and not all useful information. Sometimes I just don't stop talking.

 

[Aught3]

^lol that was rather rambly

Well thanks so much to everyone who has responded, I wasn't sure if everyone would be ok with GM foods but that seems to be the case.

With regard to number 10 the idea was to think of a crop which only had one alteration with a gene that came from a very different species. Perhaps insecticide wasn't the best example, but thanks for the feedback.
btw, the insecticide is totally safe for humans (actually any animal with an acidic stomach) and the crops often end up with lower insecticide concentrations than normal crops. Why? Because the farmers don't need to spray them as often.

 

[Tails_155]

I do love pears

 

[Varistra]

My post will be a bit boring but I think I would eat them all. I do not see a reason not to.

Varistra

 

[Armondikov]

I'd probably eat all of them too. Although I'd be slightly concerned about no. 10, but only to the same degree that I'm concerned about plants that have been covered in pesticides in a normal way. Though when you think about it, GM crops probably undergo much more rigourous testing than their "natural" counterparts so should be safer.

I think you have some very biased results now. I think most knee-jerk reactions do come from ignorance of the subject and basically anyone replying to this thread probably isn't fully ignorant of the subject. Once you start to explain the specifics of the process - like RNAi that you mentioned in no. 8 and getting people to realise that it's really no different to altering genomes by "natural" means - the knee-jerking trails off a bit.

 

[Aught3]

^Ok, well I'm thinking now I might post it on some other sites to see if I can get some different responses.

Number 10 seems to need some changing, I'll think up a different example.

I seem to recall a thread back on the old site (it seems so long ago) were the consensus seemed to be that genetically modifing human would be the right way to go, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that everyone is ok with eating it.

Any suggestion for sites with lower....average education levels than this one?

 

[Armondikov]

Suggestions? I'd be tempted to say Conservapedia if you really want severely below average scientific knowledge, but you can't tell who's a parodist on there so your results would be even less meaningless.

I've been forwarded plenty of emails from the psycology department at my university asking for questionaires to be answered. So, providing you can set on up online (it's called survey monkey or something like that) you could just ask around to see if you can get it sent out to various departmental mailing lists. Then you could organise it less by "intelligence" and more by speciality. So you'd see if Biology students are less put off by GM than humanities students who probably know bugger all about genetic modification.

And then it'd be really interesting to see how results change based on how you worded the questions.

 

[Spase]

Suggestions? I'd be tempted to say Conservapedia if you really want severely below average scientific knowledge, but you can't tell who's a parodist on there so your results would be even less meaningless.

Sadly liberals seem to often be more afraid of GM crops than conservatives.

I would eat anything the FDA says is okay. In most cases I'd trust something was fine even without FDA approval assuming I read what they'd done and it seemed reasonable.

That said, the only thing that might make me pause to consider would be the legal practices of the company that developed the crop and the kinds of effects the crop can have when/if it spreads to the wild population. Certain lawsuits by Monsanto for instance are deplorable and their general operation is just slimy.

I'm guessing that the meta information wasn't really something you were interested in us taking into account though. I'm a bioinformatics major.

And if you want to find people who are irrationally afraid of foods look up high fructose corn syrup, find a forum with people talking about it's evils and post the survey there >.< (pet peeve of mine..)

 

[Aught3]

High fructose corn syrup is evil!
Well maybe not evil, but I don't eat any foods that have it.

 

[another_mutant]

infrared -
Several mutations might not have an effect on you, but do increase the yield of the plant, allowing more people to be fed from the same amount of land. The items from 10 might also qualify under 12, since they allow more of the crop to be harvested.
So you might eat those because more people can.

 

[Brunks]

I think I'd even prefer eating GM food, what with the tight regulations and reduced ammount of pestecides.
Who knows, it might even grant me superpowers~!

 

[TheSelfishMeme]

Yes to all. The vast majority of foods that are mutated (naturally or GM wise) are as safe as the norm.

 

[Spase]

High fructose corn syrup is evil!
Well maybe not evil, but I don't eat any foods that have it.

Reeeeeally?

I found a good article arguing that it isn't any worse for you than table sugar. I don't watch TV so I heard about the whole thing a little late in the game and went around reading what people were writing about it online and I'm pretty sure I'm on the side of "HFCS is no worse for you than regular sugar cane derived sugar... which isn't good for you either in the quantities people eat it in."

I base my belief mostly on the fact that the websites I found saying it was bad had some incredible misinformation in them and the websites saying it's no worse for you than sucrose were well reasoned and didn't have any information that directly contradicted reality as I understand it. The metabolic pathways for fructose are well characterized and I'm reasonably sure they don't act as gateways to hell

You may very well know something I don't though.. like I said.. I did some reading, but it was like.. an afternoon of browsing various articles, not a real research effort.