The idea behind general labeling is that you can decide to abstain from all GMOs if you so wish. Almost no one is qualified to determine which GMOs are ok based on sepcific changes to the DNA.

The idea behind the objection to that is that "Contains GMOs" actually tells you very, very little. It doesn't tell you what was modified, what the modifications are, or what they do.

No, I was responding to the grandparent saying that labeling GMOs was pointless. It is not pointless to those who wish to avoid them altogether. You don't need to know what was changed if you main concern is the binary question of whether it is a GMO or not.

It is also no true that it tells you very very little. It tells you that there are transgenic modifications to the product's genes. That's not "very very little".

You and I will simply have to agree to differ on this subject. I don't agree that "there are transgenic modifications to the product's genes" is a substantive information gain.

To put it in more concrete terms, unless P(bad|GMO) >> P(bad), the information gained by a generic GMO label is at best minimal. At that point a "contains GMO" label isn't much more useful than a "contains baryonic matter" label.

In anecdotal terms, suppose I'm mildly allergic to a particular cultivar of apples, but some apples are okay. Saying that a product contains apples doesn't help me know whether it's safe for me to eat. This hypothetically allergic me would need to know that it contains red delicious apples, or granny smith apples.

Some GMOs simply add vitamins. Those are likely to be safer than GMOs that increase herbicidal resistance, which are in turn likely to be safer than GMOs that introduce pesticides. If a subset of the population is sensitive to Bt toxin, they need to know what kind of GMO is in a product, not just that something has GMO (as Bt, according to other comments in the thread, can be used even on organic-labeled foods).

> Some GMOs simply add vitamins

Are you saying there are genetic modifications that do _absolutely nothing_ but add vitamins to food? I not an expert, but that's not my understanding of how DNA works.

Golden rice is a GMO that has been modified to induce production of beta-carotene in the endosperm.

I think you misunderstood my question. I understand that there are GMOs that have increased vitamin quantities. What I'm asking is, is it known that the newly introduced genes do absolutely nothing other than increase beta-carotene? Don't most, if not all, genes have a multitude of effects, some obvious and some subtle, and many often unknown or not understood?

Well, increasing the beta-carotene also makes the rice kinda orange-y and obviously it costs some energy from the rest of the plant. Though that's maybe not quite what you mean.

Lots of genes only seem to do one thing. HERC2 seems to only affect eye color. If you're asking if it's possible that maybe we don't have a 100% perfect understanding of genetics, then of course it's possible. It's always possible there's something we don't know. Science does not deal in perfect certainties.

Would I be correct is following your logic to the implication that there's a significant possibility for effects we didn't anticipate and don't understand in genetic engineering? Of course that's possible. That's why GMOs are tested.

Is it possible that there's some obscure, subtle side-effect we won't notice for a long time to come? Yes. Is it likely? As near as we can tell, no. Can this doubt ever be fully assuaged by science? Not reasonably on anything more complex than the simplest of yeasts.

Is this a special threat, uniquely applicable only to GMOs? No. The same potential is present - even greater, due to number of mutations - in selective breeding.

Yes but why? Why not put this effort towards simply reintroducing biodiversity to our crops??

How do you counter the very obvious profit motive here? "Gee Beta Carotene I Understand That's Good For Your Health, I'll Pay A Premium For That". How do you prevent that profit motive from minimizing unprofitable research into long-term health impacts? Face it, there will NEVER be a money motive to really figure this stuff out, that's why we're only finding out about BPAs now: there's just zero money in doing anything but the minimum due-diligence, as forced on you by the FDA, which is already bought out anyway!

It's like the nuke argument. Sure GMOs are potentially fantastic but as a race, or at least this capitalist version of a race, humans seem to be incapable of managing technology this fearsome.

To help support your position, corn has been modified to produce vitamin C. Vitamin A typically comes from genetically modified soy. Riboflavin mostly comes from genetically modified microorganisms.

These additions are a concern to the gmo free vitamin consumers. Both https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/05/03/vitamins-n... and http://www.non-gmoreport.com/articles/oct08/vitamins_gmo_cha... make this claim - both sides. I'll accept it as true.

People are qualified to choose who they trust to say that a particular GMO is ok. Then they can avoid that GMO. You know; exactly like how we handle everything else that we are not expert in.

Fair enough, I missed the "vendor" mention in the parent's comment. But my main point was to address the fact that labels with just "GMO" are pointless, which is certainly not the case.

They are pointless from a rational/scientific perspective, as they add no usable information w.r.t. safety or nutrition. Identifying strains specifically would satisfy both the scientific interest (quantifying safety) and the anti-GMO interest (feeling good about being non-GMO).

> as they add no usable information w.r.t. safety or nutrition.

That is where the disagreement lies. It is not clear to everyone that all current and future GMOs are safe. To patronize and label skeptics as unscientific is intellectually dishonest and a form of orwellian groupthink. There are plenty of people in the industry that claim that GMOs are not very well tested. There is no scientific reason to believe that a dangerous GMO could not be inadvertently created. A degenerate case would be to insert pufferfish toxin genes into a tomato. Obviously no one would do that intentionally, but a much more subtle issue could be carried over in a more seemingly benign gene transfer. To claim that we understand everything that genes do is a utter lie. They are orders of magnitude more complex than software, and yet we introduce bugs into software all the time.

There is also lot of money and political interest behind making GMO critics look bad. There is nothing unscientific about questioning the safety of a complex engineered product that we ingest. Just look at the recent Soylent fiasco, which is a much simpler to understand product than GMOs.

We are not talking about flat earth or reptilian overlords here. This is a totally legitimate thing to question, and decide to opt-out on until there is more time and data available.

There's no reason to believe that a dangerous plant could not be inadvertently created through regular breeding, either. In fact, we know with 100% certainty that this has occurred.

There is excellent reason to be skeptical of everything here. GMOs are not special. Given that we know the worst has occurred with non-GMOs, one would expect intense skepticism of non-GMO breeding.

How much data would satisfy you?

To claim that selective breeding and transgenic modifications are the same is disingenuous.

I'm saying that selective breeding has literally produced a toxic potato: http://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/the-case-of-the-poison-pota...

And of course I won't claim they're the same thing. They're two different ways to the same goal, though.

How much time and data would convince you? You say you want to opt out until there is more. How much more?

Different people have different standards. All I ask for is a simple label on the food. I'm not asking to ban anything or add more rigor to the FDA process or for anyone to change their practices. A simple label. It is utterly bizarre to me that anyone finds this offensive.

This is all I want, a label I'm happy to ignore. Then this silly debate can go away.

Sure, but the label tells us nothing unless it identifies the particular strain(s) that have been modified. Simple "GMO" vs. "non-GMO" labels are anti-informative. They have net negative utility as they don't tell us whether something is safe or dangerous, they just muddy a discussion that could be perfectly clear.

IMO anti-GMO advocates should be pushing for more specific strain/cultivar labels on food, not just a useless label that says "produced with genetic engineering." Then pro-GMO, tentatively accepting, and anti-GMO groups can all be satisfied.

I submit that the "GMO"/"GMO-free" labeling serves precisely the intended purpose. If you believe that all GMOs are unsafe and evil, then what more could people possibly need to know?

But it's rationally unsound and unscientific to argue that all GMOs are unsafe and evil. So if anti-GMO people want to stop people from eating/producing GMOs, they should find less opposition to specific labeling than to generic labeling. Otherwise it's too easy to paint them as uninformed.

I think you're right that the intended purpose of generic GMO labels is to muddy the issue and spread uncertainty, which is exactly what they do. I am arguing that this strategy is counterproductive in the long-term, both to the anti-GMO cause and to society's health and informational well-being.

99.9% of consumers would have no idea what to do with that information and most products would contain several strains of each ingredient anyway.

99.9% of consumers don't know what to do with current ingredient lists except be vaguely confused by the long list of scary-sounding chemicals. We should probably still keep those.

Those ingredient lists are often used by people with allergies. So, they are useful to a wide swath of people.

Potatoes are members of the nightshade family, along with tomatoes and peppers and a few others. Of course selective breeding can produce toxic potatoes if you don't test for the levels of the toxin they're already known to produce. Also, the claim that there's a lot more risk and uncertainty with conventional breeding doesn't stand up, because GMO crops build on top of conventional breeding and inherit its risks too, and because it's nowhere near as clean, simple and interaction-free as you might naively expect.

You're right! GMOs don't start from fresh crops from the wild. They start with existing strains. In that sense, they inherit old risks.

What they don't do is continue adding on the risks from the process of selective breeding itself. I don't expect that direct genetic engineering is clean, simple, and interaction-free. I just expect that it has a somewhat easier time targeting specific changes than barnyard breeding by light of Uranium.