01-17-2014, 06:15 AM
quote:
Originally posted by Permie
Ah, someone who is also of a scientific mindset!
What is your feeling on the chasm between biocide compounds that go through animal testing then at least three rounds of human clinical trials and, once approved, are only given by people with many years of training, and biocide compounds that are now produced by our food due to genetic modification that only go through animal studies and are released, unlabeled, to the general populace?
Are you ok with that enormous divergence and if so, why? Thank you.
Yes, I am. The people who set up the system of approvals/denials of release of these compounds have forgotten more than you or I will ever know about the specific compounds involved and their likelihood of causing significant harm. I choose to trust their expertise - while recognizing that they are not perfect. Neither am I.
By analogy: You indicated in an earlier post you were moving your family to Hawaii. How do you propose to get here? Fly in an airplane? If so, you have chosen to trust the expertise of the engineers that designed that airplane, the maintenance staff who repair it, the pilot at the controls, and the air traffic control system that dictates everything about that flight. None of whom are perfect - planes crash, people die. But you have chosen to trust that imperfect system.
Hundreds of millions of people have consumed GMO products in what probably amounts to billions of individual exposure incidents - with exactly zero deaths or injuries associated with those exposures. Yet you choose to obsess on the threat posed by those products - likely because of a very sophisticated marketing program produced by the organic food industry. An industry whose foods have no demonstrable evidence that consumption of their products leads to better health outcomes for those consumers.
I find that to be both naive and irrational. But, that's your choice - you can do whatever you want::: until it inflicts restrictions on what I choose to grow, what I choose to consume (and the costs associated with its production), and what otherwise legal farming and gardening chemicals and practices I choose to employ on my land. And that's where I object.
And, to stay on topic, having Sen. Ruderman, whose primary business is thoroughly invested in the organic food industry's organic marketing campaign, use his position as a state senator to further that marketing effort while wrapping himself is self-righteous denials of a conflict is insulting to the informed voters of this island.