182. Pop Culture Petri Dish: Future Food!

Many cromulent points. As laymen, the concept seems innocuous enough to us, but all the things you bring up are totally valid and shed new light on the topic. Like, to a layman who just reads articles, it feels pretty silly to get upset about altering foods to improve their yield...but you're right, corporate control of things like CRISPR could make that a naively optimistic view. Thanks for the input!

Small Beans

First gen replicators needing us to fill the capsules I can deal with. When I can order the capsules off Amazon I’m in!

Did you literally just say GMOs are the same thing as plant hybridization? Yes, yes you did (around the 20 minute mark). PLEASE DON'T SAY THAT ANYMORE! Frankly it is such a blunder I think you should actually offer a correction. It is a gross mischaracterization of both processes, as well as of the valid concerns of people who would prefer to avoid GMOs but often aren't even given the choice (i.e. the decades-long campaigns to prevent meaningful product labelling, which amounted to involuntary mass experimental product-health/safety trials--it seems weird that that doesn't seem to ring any ethical alarm bells for you). Are some people's fears about GMOs overblown? For sure they are. Are there absolutely no practical or possible safety concerns worth taking seriously? Obviously there are those too, and it does your audience a huge disservice to handwave novel transgenic organism creation away as being basically the same thing as breeding maize into table-corn over thousands of years. Are GMOs "the answer" to feeding the world? I don't think that's a given at all. Designed in the right ways and for the right reasons they could absolutely be a useful tool toward creating more and better food with much less input, but now ask yourself who is ACTUALLY creating GMOs and what are their ACTUAL aims? Contra the CRISPR-utopians, it's not like there are a bunch of garage-agronomists out there cooking up miracle-crops out of nothing. Is Monsanto's corporate reason-for-being to feed the world with minimal environmental impact, or is it to maximize short-term quarterly profits? Would the giant agritech companies be likely to put a lot of effort into design a super-tolerant water-efficient pest-resistant extra-nutritious crop that can be bought once and grow anywhere, or would they rather work toward creating something that's fragile enough to require fertilizers and pesticides and a new batch of seeds every year, all of which the same companies would also happily sell you forever or else you can just starve? (You guys even brushed up against this point around the 35 minute mark, but then disappointly bounced off it again.) There's nothing inherently awful about GMOs, but there's nothing inherently wonderful about them either, it depends entirely on what qualities they're being designed for (and as long as there are available alternatives it only seems fair that people should be able to make an informed choice about what they eat). In this late-stage capitalist world, it seems extremely naive to assume (and dangerous to imply) that those qualities are necessarily aligned in any way with the overall public good. (See also <a href="http://longnow.org/seminars/02009/may/05/deep-agriculture/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://longnow.org/seminars/02009/may/05/deep-agriculture/</a> for more on this theme.)

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