Re:Chipotle Says Adios to GMOs, as Food Industry Strips Away...
by yourapostasy on Tuesday April 28, 2015 @10:23AM
(#9452548)
Not ignoring the benefits to GMO, but how can I be sure any long-term health risks are aggressively watched for by the Cargill's and Monsanto's of the world? The US and EU are reasonably good at food safety, but managing food-related health risks is much more complexly difficult, and few in the lay public even appreciate the distinction.
Will the producers spend the budget to proactively and aggressively seek to test for health failure modes once the product is accepted by regulatory bodies and even consumers? No.
Even if they happen to find suggestions of a potential defect, will they pursue those hints with well-funded efforts for timely conclusions? No.
If long-term harm is found, will they continue to sell the product unless forced to retract by regulatory action or consumer backlash? Yes.
Let me put it another way. Say there is a $10B annual profit on $100B annual revenue for just one GMO product. It is all on the line, including the hefty annual bonuses contingent upon that profit, by the personal action of the executive board upon the results of a study that isn't well-publicized, but internal scientists say the study's conclusion of a strongly-suggested causal link are legit. Through inaction, "we need to study this more before taking drastic steps", yet another profitable quarter and bonuses are assured. What do you reasonably expect to happen in the real world?
The historical record conclusively shows the food industry as a whole does not work with extremely long-term (decades) health issues. They generally leave that up to the medical industry, which introduces an entirely different set of problems. It is only recently that the lipid hypothesis is coming under much more rigorous scrutiny. We continue to flood our supply chains with simple carbohydrates, even after ample evidence showing how they play a large role in harming our bodies when consumed in large quantities over decades-long periods.
Understand I'm not claiming this is by malicious action. This is simply what happens under our current incentive structures and our current civilization's culturally-driven risk assessment mechanisms. As a species so far, we're pretty good at responding to fast-acting risks on short timelines, but as the risks' effects become more diffuse to detect over longer timelines, our capacity to respond, especially through committee-heavy organizations, is sharply diminished.
Stepping back for perspective, this is actually somewhat a good problem to face. This signals our tool usage has gotten complex enough that we are facing increasingly longer timespans of effects, meaning over successive generations we are gradually building up surplus productive capacity to fund increasingly sophisticated and/or complex tools to address ever more complex problem spaces.
Will the producers spend the budget to proactively and aggressively seek to test for health failure modes once the product is accepted by regulatory bodies and even consumers? No.
Even if they happen to find suggestions of a potential defect, will they pursue those hints with well-funded efforts for timely conclusions? No.
If long-term harm is found, will they continue to sell the product unless forced to retract by regulatory action or consumer backlash? Yes.
Let me put it another way. Say there is a $10B annual profit on $100B annual revenue for just one GMO product. It is all on the line, including the hefty annual bonuses contingent upon that profit, by the personal action of the executive board upon the results of a study that isn't well-publicized, but internal scientists say the study's conclusion of a strongly-suggested causal link are legit. Through inaction, "we need to study this more before taking drastic steps", yet another profitable quarter and bonuses are assured. What do you reasonably expect to happen in the real world?
The historical record conclusively shows the food industry as a whole does not work with extremely long-term (decades) health issues. They generally leave that up to the medical industry, which introduces an entirely different set of problems. It is only recently that the lipid hypothesis is coming under much more rigorous scrutiny. We continue to flood our supply chains with simple carbohydrates, even after ample evidence showing how they play a large role in harming our bodies when consumed in large quantities over decades-long periods.
Understand I'm not claiming this is by malicious action. This is simply what happens under our current incentive structures and our current civilization's culturally-driven risk assessment mechanisms. As a species so far, we're pretty good at responding to fast-acting risks on short timelines, but as the risks' effects become more diffuse to detect over longer timelines, our capacity to respond, especially through committee-heavy organizations, is sharply diminished.
Stepping back for perspective, this is actually somewhat a good problem to face. This signals our tool usage has gotten complex enough that we are facing increasingly longer timespans of effects, meaning over successive generations we are gradually building up surplus productive capacity to fund increasingly sophisticated and/or complex tools to address ever more complex problem spaces.