Take a look at the cow: four little bitty legs attached to a bag of delicious meat. The cow cannot exist in nature. It doesn't have to, since when nature comes close to our delicious meat we kill it.

umm, yes it can http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bos

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs

and Aurochs originated in India, where cultural tradition prohibits using them for meat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_in_religion

The cow was possibly revered because the largely pastoral Vedic people and subsequent generations relied heavily on it for dairy products and for tilling the fields, and on cow dung as a source of fuel, fertilizer, and psilocybin mushrooms which naturally grow out of the animal's own excrement.

You would think that "this GM crop will allow us to feed millions of otherwise starving children" would be a good enough argument for most people.

Obviously similar arguments apply to our lack of real knowledge of the side-effects of pharmaceuticals and vaccination programs even after substantial testing, but there's an argument that the rewards for developing cures for disease are worth risking the side effects in a way that increased crop yields aren't. Moreover drugs tend to directly affect the individuals taking them, whereas 'enhanced' crops and their non-sterile wind-blown pollen affect an entire ecosystem.

Then again the alternatives seem to be less-than-risk-free pesticides anyway...

Folks cross-breed, look for, and induce mutants (via radiation and other means) for exactly the same purposes as they use gene-splicing.

It would take longer to get round-up resist corn via cross-breeding, but folks would be trying to do it if they didn't have gene techniques.

I'll do my best. Is "GM Bananas or starving children" a false dichotomy? If the world had no bananas, couldn't we use the plantations to grow something else?

There's no shortage of food or food-bearing land in the world today. The remaining problems are purely political problems of distribution and corruption and economic problems of perverted incentives (food aid crowding out regional and local farming).

Sure. But it's a false dichotomy. The world is full of bananas, we are just running out a single (albeit very commercially profitable) clone variety.

I would not be surprised if we argue about GM, even on this excellent candidate, until all bananas have been wiped out. Sadly, everybody looses that way, but we're really good at arguing.

While GM foods are very far from the reputation nuclear power in America has the framework is set so one public scare will deter people from trusting GM foods for a very long time. Almost all grocery stores now carry 'organic' foods that are aggressively marketed.

For people to adopt GM foods they have to be introduced slowly. Take a look at Butter and Margarine: http://www.margarine.org/historyofmargarine.html "1902 - Amendments to the Federal Margarine Act raised the tax on colored margarine five-fold, but decreased licensing fees for white margarine. But demand for colored margarine remained so strong, that bootleg colored margarine flourished."

So yes while arguing about which replacement is best will delay the process ultimately public opinion will determine the fate of GM bananas.