Anyone interested in GMO Foods in our supermarket.

I don't think that I could butcher any animal.

Honeybee, the study I referenced above and that Meezersfive also linked to indicated that even pigs fed non-GMO feed did have some incidence of stomach inflammation, but it was significantly less. I'm sure that factory-raised/feedlot pigs are reacting to stress just as other animals do.

By the way, Ernie, this is from a beef industry site (http://factsaboutbeef.com/tag/factory-farming/) "The truth about factory farming, or cattle feedlots, is that feedyards are made up of caring, professional people including cowboys, veterinarians and animal nutritionists who make sure cattle receive the best care possible on a daily basis, and that includes ensuring they receive a proper, nutritious and balanced diet." Most places seem to use those terms interchangeably.

I agree that we eat far too much meat, although I'd never give it up entirely.

YankeeCat, we've raised lambs and goats and currently raise chickens; that does involve butchering. DH also hunts deer on our property. I know that some people can handle that and others can't, but you can always take your animal to a slaughterhouse so you don't have to do the deed yourself. And at least you know that he or she has had a good life and has been fed on a diet you're comfortable with.

This message was edited Jun 14, 2013 9:33 AM

You'd be surprised what you can do if you are hungry enough. Thankfully, I am not that hungry. Yet.

My neighbor raised meat rabbits for his family, and finally quit after butchering 3,000 rabbits. He just couldn't face butchering anymore.

I remember my grandma chopping the heads off chickens, and they'd run headless around the yard. At least today the few farmers that raise pastured chickens put them upside down in a metal funnel and slit their throats. Quick, and humane.

I've learned a lot about butchering venison from a friend who shares the meat with me, but the deer are already dead and gutted when I see them.

Rising creek ,Greenhouse Gal, Honeybee and WR Ranch all have the same thing in common. Hot air so listen only to Bernie he knows.

Thanks for the kind advice, eweed.

Yes GHG Bernie rules

Greenhouse,

In the real world, Factory Farming generally refers to an operation that Produces, Raises, Fattens and Markets animals, generally Pigs or Chickens, on an assembly line basis under close confinement from start to finish.

Feed Lots are places where mostly Beef Cattle that are born and raised on farms and ranches are placed to be fattened and finished by feeding them grain. Grass fed beef has yellow fat, which is not as attractive to customers. When they leave the feedlot, the meat is more tender from the fat marbling, and more attractive because the fat is whiter.

There is no law against mingling and mangling the meaning of words, but in real life a Feed Lot serves a very different purpose than a Factory Farm.

I do not believe you have quoted PETA yet, and i am sure they have lots of good stuff for you to use as talking points, too.

Ernie

Ernie, that was from an industry site so it's as "real world" as it gets. Or at least if they're confused no wonder others see the two terms as essentially synonymous.

But let's get back to the original topic of GMOs. This isn't getting us anywhere. Thanks.

Original topic on this thread is wheat.

The title is "Anyone interested in GMO Foods in our supermarket" but it's true that the main question posted by Behillman was about GMO wheat, which gave rise to a general discussion about GMOs in our food.

Greenhouse,

Every industry have a few careless or foolish people that mangle or misuse words, and the reason we have dictionaries is to clarify and maintain what words mean.

So, finding one example does not change the definition. Look up the words in the dictionary and you will see the correct meaning.

Ernie

I'm not concerned about this; it was a side issue. Whether it's feedlots or factory farming these animals are stressed, and that was the point. I don't care to argue it with you. You have your opinion and I have mine. I'm okay with you having your opinion but you keep attacking me and making accusations such as that I'm living in a fantasy world. That's inappropriate.

Back to our regularly scheduled programs! And please let's discuss this with mutual respect.

>> Bottom line, there is not enough real estate in the USA to pasture all the animals on farms across the country.

I think that's a key point. The question shouldn't be solely whether there are downsides to modern agriculture. We should also give some thought to what the alternatives would have as unintended consequences:
- more expensive food?
- less food production?
- broke famers?
- lower profits for stockholders of agribusinesses?
- forced redcution in world population?
- foced chnages in diets in wealthy countries? Forced how?

I think it's hilarious that someone as demented as the Unabomber made the clearest stement about that I've heard. He wanted us to use MUCH less technology - so much that we were not stressed by trying to live in ways that our evolution had not prepared us for. Like the people who point out that wheat may have some downsides.

He not only realized that doing away with as much technology as he wnated to dump would require a lasrge decrease in the population iof every country, but ALSO that there were not going to be enough volunteers for euthanasia to make his suggestions workable.

A bigger tragedy is that there are not even enough volunteers to chnage their lifestyle that some avoidable resource depletion can be avoided.

Perhaps one downside of the "lasissez faire" econiomic philosophy is that it assumes an open system, where there are always new land and markets to expand into, and raw material resources are always available for the taking. Our planet is heading twoard being a closed system, where everyone's effluent is in everyione else's face, and we are comepting for scarce resourfces

For a few decades i hoped that space stations and space colonies would teach us how we HAVE to live in a closed system. No, in the short term you can always make more money by ignoring all long-term consequences, using resoruces at the lowest cost you can drive them down to, and polluting and sleazing around laws as much as your lawyers can get away with.

(Despite the Club of Rome, every ecosystem experiences population growth until something is limitng. After a period of increased competition, there are some winners and some losers. At this time it looks like climate change will be the biggest spiked boot, rather than other kinds of pollution or material resource depletion (like oil and coal) I would hate to see rats, cockroaches, kudzu and cactus as the population winners, and humans as the losers. For people to avoid that paradigm would requrie us to act smarter than we do, at the macroeconomic, political and international levels.)

Maybe that's still a little alarmist, but let's see how it looks in another 50 years. I think that's about 1/2% of the time since we first developed agriculture - like one tick of a clock. Alien archeeologists might do some digging and conclude that we MIGHT have adapted to agriculture, given enough time, but we invented industry and that killed us off "right away".

I assume that when humans experience "increased competition" for food, water and resoruces, we'll probably compete with tanks and jets and IEDs.

Then H bombs.

Then rocks and sticks.

I do hope that's TOO alarmist.

>> no one is discussing mycotoxin levels as a possible factor in inflammation - not even Monsanto's scientists.

My guess (hope) is that those "in the biz" know and agree that the levels seen, "below offical limits" are not only frequently seen in comemrical practice, but (somehow) "know" that they don't cause kinds of stomach inflamation that no one was checking for when they set the standards.

That kind of question would be worth studying: IS such inflamation common? What USUALLY causes variations in it (mycotoxins? moldy stale fodder? random elements that were NOt specifically controlled?)

If it were only of scientitific interest, I would say "test their hypothesis" which was that CRY proteins CAN inflame mamalian guts, as they do insects' guts. THAT might lead to information that would prompt usefull actions.

Like maybe only certain of them irritate mamalians sotmachs. Genengineer those OUT of GM crops! Or maybe when you find the exact causative agent and use concentrations where you can really SEE the results (like a dose-effect curve that doesn't take 27 weeks to run), you might find out that, ooppss, yes those ARE toxic and a long term downside IS plausible.

I'm sorry I'm not researching delta-endotoxins vs beta-exotoxins in Bt baccilus and GM corn - which ones are CRY protiens? Which was the experimental toxin in whole bacterial cyst crystals (if I recall) that the misquoted "causes leukemia" study looked at?

>> I don't think that I could butcher any animal.
>> You'd be surprised what you can do if you are hungry enough. Thankfully, I am not that hungry. Yet.

I know what you both mean. For me, some of both. I had to kill a lot of mice and some rats doing cancer research. It's icky and preyed on my mind, but I could do it.

I felt worse about giving lab mice murine leukemia or repeated painful injections, than for breaking their necks. Compared to causing them pain, rooting around inside their bodies after death was easier.

I've also worked in an animal room for cancer reasearch / Nutrition and Food Science, and some rats had tumors that made up more than half their body weight. Some died because the tumors were too big to let them reach the water bottle.

Despite a lot of sympathy for lab animals, my theory was that cancer research was worth some animal pain. Once I answered the phone when a patient's husband was trying to reach her clinician to ask for the pain meds that some pharmacist had questioned as being "too strong to give to ANYONE". Despite those, they later had to cut her spine to deal with the pain (before she died anyway).

That's my answer to PETA, my version of human-chauvinism. Science and medicine are slowly finding cures, and that's worth doing.

People have survived for thousands of years, growing & gathering foods & meat. Are you saying that we can't survive without the Big Corporations & the Feed Lots. Are you saying that we are not capable of feeding ourselves? If that is the case, then the World Powers have finally gotten to us & made us believe their lies. Don't fall for those lies. They have put most of our land into Parks, & Soil Bank. They pay farmers not to grow crops. So don't try to fool me or most of the gardners on this forum. We are growing our gardens & raising li vestock.

Behillman,

I'm sure that farmers can feed themselves. However, they also have to feed the city dwellers. And factory workers, and office workers, and doctors and nurses.

>> People have survived for thousands of years, growing & gathering foods & meat. Are you saying that we can't survive without the Big Corporations & the Feed Lots.

What is the world population now, around 7 billion? Increasing by around one billion per decade? Very rough numbers, but you would be right, IF the Unabomber had his way, and (for example) everyone but the farmers volunteered to be plowd under for fertilizer (or have no babies and give up meat and processed food).

Maybe we could dump modern agriculture if we had five times as many famrers, froze the world population where it is, redcued meat intake by a facotr of 5. But we might have to turn a lot of parks and forests into famrs, if the soil and climate where the forests were would support crops.

And the rpoblem is, how to convice people to do things they don't wnat to do, if they don't even wnat to pay for "non-GMO food" labels?

I'll be back Monday.

As I posted earlier, Charlotte, NC has 750,000 people.
Do you have any idea how much food that takes for just 1 day ?

All farm land in parks & soil banks. You gotta be kidding. It is planted road to road, I don't care where you go. I've traveled all over the Central US around harvest time, from Minnesota to Tennessee & west to Missouri, back through Iowa. There is no land sitting empty unless it is very poor ground that would only erode & not grow crops.

Parks are there to appease city dwellers. They need places to walk their dog. Probably wouldn't work to have a corn field in the middle of a city.

I have read repeatedly that there is plenty of food, and plenty of land to grow food, but the problem is that the distribution sources aren't in place to make sure that it's delivered where it's needed. But sure, population growth is a huge problem. As is our habit of trying to "reclaim" lands in the desert or in other inhospitable places using artificial and unsustainable means, which results in populations growing to take advantage of this new environment and then suffering from famine and/or drought when the ecosystem crashes because that level of production isn't possible over a longer term. But the long-term results of GMO food and what it may do to our health and reproductive systems may be the new plague which ends up reducing the population. I hope not, but we won't know for a couple of generations.

I would feel a lot better about GMO food if it was served exclusively in the Monsanto Executive dining room!

As to food production - there would be more actual food produced if "we" didn't use ethanol as a fuel and wheat and corn as cat litters. etc. not to mention the amount of grain needed to raise meat. *raising hand as guilty of all three*

I saw this product recently on kickstarter (or one of the other crowd sourcing places) and thought it was a brilliant idea even though the actual item is selling for $250 and out of reach of many people. Could be fairly easily made for much less by using this sellers instructions. The finished barrel that I saw for sale added worms to the mix and composted household veggie scraps in the center tube.

Another item from the people who sell sell the mushroom kits in a box, http://www.backtotheroots.com/blog/59 , is an aquaponics setup that uses an aquarium to grow lettuce http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2142509221/home-aquaponics-kit-self-cleaning-fish-tank-that-g . I'm thinking about making my own to put on my desk at work.

This family provides everything they eat on 1/5 acre http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qVK_JRL_jo.

I'm not sure when it comes to agriculture that "bigger is always better".

This message was edited Jun 15, 2013 8:45 PM

If I understood this article correctly, parts of Canada are on their way to becoming GE-free zones

http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2013/06/11/the-gene-revolution-with-dr-thierry-vrain-gmo-free-langley-shines/#comments

They have concluded:

Thanks for posting that, Honeybee. Hadn't seen it.

Changing gears a little. Here's pictures of a real farm.
http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1313397/
Go down to post on June 18.

Very nice farm, gorgeous pictures, but I'm not sure why you've posted it here.

from Real farmacy.com is a list of Monsanto owned "Food Producers. I will print only a few, Aunt Jemima,Banquet,Best Foods,Betty Crocker,Bisquick, Campbells, Capri Sun,Carnation,Chef Boyardee,CocaCola,DuncanHines,FritoLay,GeneralMills,HealthyChoice. Many more but I can't list them all.

Most prepared foods and mixes have some GMO ingredients. GMO corn and soy are in almost everything. Makes it hard to avoid them if you'd like to. Trader Joe's doesn't use GMO in anything with their own name on it, and there's also the GMO-Free Project which labels foods that are totally clear of GMOs. Whole Foods plans to go GMO-free as soon as they can find sufficient sources for conventionally-grown ingredients. People seem to be becoming more and more aware of this issue. Even though Proposition 37 failed in California, it brought a lot of attention to the problem and that has helped.

Weed Killer Glyphosate Found in Human Urine Across Europe:

http://www.cornucopia.org/2013/06/weed-killer-glyphosate-found-in-human-urine-across-europe/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=weed-killer-glyphosate-found-in-human-urine-across-Europe

This is the main reason I want GMOs listed on the label - because I AM NOT A WEED!

"More detail of the samples used: “Urine samples were collected from volunteers in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Macedonia, Malta, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and the UK. A total of 80/182 samples tested were found to contain glyphosate. Volunteers were all city-dwellers and included vegetarian and non-vegetarian diets. No two samples were tested from the same household. The samples were analysed by Dr Hoppe at Medical Laboratory Bremen in Germany.””"

At this point, I would say this points out that a large study is needed. Only 182 samples were tested by one doc. Not enough evidence to prove the seriousness of the issue.

HONEYBEE,

I am sure you folk that have been concerned about Roundup will now be reassured and pleased to see the empirical evidence that we have all been waiting for. This proves that Glysophate has done no documented harm to the half of the population of Europe that have it in their bloodstream and Urine. Surely if it was harmful it would be known by now.

This is the first solid evidence that i have seen in all the posts concerning this matter.
Thanks for sharing the information.

Ernie

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/business/us-approves-a-label-for-meat-from-animals-fed-a-diet-free-of-gene-modified-products.html?_r=1&

U.S. Approves a Label for Meat From Animals Fed a Diet Free of Gene-Modified Products

Yes, I saw that. There's more than one way to skin a cat, huh? I'm sure Monsanto and Syngenta are beside themselves!

Just a "CLAIM"? How about a "GUARANTEE"?

Ernie

I found this on the Internet: http://www.undergroundhealth.com/chemtrails-kill-crops/

That's truly creepy...

new thread for slow dial-uppers?

Good idea, bluespiral. I thought of moving it the vegetable forum but I'm not sure which require a subscription and which don't, so I left it here:

http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1320255/