How many brewers use fake hops?

I guess we'll have to disagree. Your criticism is valid for a few corporate strategies specifically, not for genetically engineering in general.

The problem isn't with genetic engineering, it's with the lack of public investment (i.e. tax funded university-level projects). If we, the public, let all genetic engineering and the resulting technology and applications reside solely with for-profit companies, of course they're going to act in their own self interest and design seeds that require subscriptions and/or secondary purchase of their patented pesticides.

If we instead recognize that it's a technology with tremendous potential, but is intrinsically neither good nor evil, we should shape its future to the benefit of both mankind and all the other species we coexist with. This isn't a tired industry argument - I am staunchly against gene patents.

To your last point, gene marker assisted breeding isn't a more effective tool. At all. Not even a little bit. It's at least ten times slower for crop plant species, and often much slower than that. And you often get undesirable traits along with the good.

If we have a barley variety that produces a nice plump grain, high extraction, lovely husk character and flavor, but is susceptible to fungal infection, no farmer is going to use it. If there's another variety that has a gene (or more likely, about 10-12 genes) that provide fungal resistance but its malting and brewing quality is awful, it makes perfect sense to me to use a technology such as CRISPR to move those resistance genes into the variety with good brewing characteristics. And do that in 2-3 months instead of 5-20 years. And do it with a USDA grant at a university, where the resulting germline and seeds are available to any farmer that wishes to use them. Explain to me how that is a bad thing?

 

There are GMO advances that are not necessarily very profitable, yet can bring a lot of public good, stop disease, save lives, etc. In particular, in developing nations where food shortages, disease, and poverty are common. The weak economies and poor infrastructure of developing nations are significant hurdle already, but then there is always intense resistance from an ignorant and irrationally fearful public as well, so companies and charitable/publicly-funded research institutions decide it's not worth the effort fighting and they divert research to more profitable sectors, i.e. the profitable pesticide-resistant crops you don't like. So, when you can't find many examples of "good" GMO products, part of the blame lies on the knee-jerk anti-GMO resistance. Golden Rice is a perfect example.

Also drought resistant crops in Africa.

 

@Ranbot @Peter_Wolfe
I don't expect any of us will change eachothers mind, but since you brought up the old favorite "golden rice" that gets trotted out to silence any GMO dissent I figure I should share thishttps://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/gmo-golden-rice-offers-no-nutritional-benefits-says-fda/
It's certainly a noble pursuit but it has never worked and consumes a ton of resources. And we still don't actually know the risks involved in its consumption long term.
I agree that GMO technology should be studied in a university setting, it's certainly interesting technology that holds a lot of potential, what I object to is its non theoretical, real world application of involuntarily subjecting the broader public to an experimental food product and advancing the interest of a few corporations towards control of our food system. Pretty shoddy way to operate if you ask me

 

Agreed. However, you'd stand a better a chance of changing my mind if you linked to a more credible news source. It's kind of easy to spot these when you get used to seeing them. Some tell tale clues are below [and these are pretty universal to sniff out other questionable sources for topics like anti-vax, flat-earth, climate-denial, chem-trails, aliens, etc...]
Clue #1: Very formulaic article structure typical of activist sites.
Clue #2: Many source links lead to very biased anti-GMO pages.
Clue #3: The sidebar links are all for more anti-GMO stories [to carry one down the rabbit hole]. It's really odd a site with an innocuous name like "Independent Science News" doesn't think there is any other important science news in the world to to talk about other than GMO issues.
Clue #4: This takes a little work, but if you take the first sentence of a story and enter it in Google (with quotes), you'll find it copied verbatim among many other sites of questionable merit, often without any references to the original document, which should make you question if "Independent" Science News might be less independent than they seem.
Clue #5: When you click on what the website says they are about there are lots of conspiracy tropes like: "...manipulation of science..." "...science’s protective mythology of impartiality and rigour that deters questioning by outsiders..." [said no scientist ever ] "...corporations and governments have conspired..." "...interests have sought to manufacture a public consensus..." "...secret manipulation..." It all climaxes into this emotionally charged woo that I gotta quote all of: "The ultimate intent of such deceptive ideas, which originate often with PR companies, is to constrain public thought and shift mass opinion into narrow bounds amenable to those powerful interests. The ultimate long term goal is to permit politicians (for example) to declare, apparently rationally and in good faith, that there is no alternative to a chosen policy when in fact the arguments in favour are based on a hidden ideology. This manipulation of information is all necessary because, as Abraham Lincoln said, “With public opinion nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed”."

They invoke President fucking Lincoln to support their mission to expose the deceptive ideas of PR companies and government with hidden ideologies manipulate information that constrain our thoughts to narrow bands amenable to powerful interests-*hyperventilates and passes out, but luckily Ranbot's head fell it hit the Post Reply button*

 

can we just close this thread?

 

Just keep remembering that the truth is not the truth. And that's all I know about that.

 

Phew good thing you didn't have to read the article since you are opposed to the organization that published it

 

That's an unfortunate stance. I am open to having my mind changed about anything, GMO included. In my opinion, the risks of GMO are policy based, not biology based.

Golden rice is a poster child for the simple reasons that: 1) it was developed by a non-profit to address a specific health problem, 2) it is simple and works very well, and 3) despite all of that it encountered ludicrous levels of opposition and has yet to be deployed to solve the problem it readily and easily addresses. Everything you said above about it is wrong: it does work, it is safe (the same genes are present in multiple food crops such as carrots and tomatoes), and we do know the risks involved in its consumption long term (i.e. none, as shown after decades of careful study and approval by countries such as Canada, the US, and Australia who have no vested or financial interest). The fact that literally hundreds of thousands of kids are still going blind and/or dying because a bunch of people want to hear themselves talk and feel important despite betraying profound biological ignorance is pretty depressing to me.

Now, back to the beer world, 'cause that's what we're here for, right? - GMO is interesting to me with respect to beer simply because beer (and alcohol drinks in general) are a luxury good. They aren't required for life, like food is. Of course we've all joked that "beer is food" and it certainly can be part of a healthy lifestyle and diet, but if it disappeared tomorrow no one would be harmed. The cereal grains grown for brewing are diverted from what could otherwise be food, in a world where not everyone has enough to eat. It's probably worth mentioning that this has come up before many times in history. The Bavarian writ of Reinheitsgebot was intended in part to prevent competition between brewing grains and baking grains, because given the choice, evidently people would drink themselves into starvation.

At some point we have to make everything more sustainable, and even moreso for things like malting barley and hops that really are a "nice-to-have." Genetic engineering is just one more tool to do that; a complement to things like hyper-efficient drip irrigation for hop fields. If we can also reduce pesticide loads and/or make things tastier, even better.

 

You clearly didn't read the linked article. It doesn't work. The FDA said it didn't have enough vitamin A to warrant a special nutritional label. And it is only being developed now by a nonprofit because it didn't work in terms of functionality in the field for the company that developed it.
If we really want a sustainable food system it's going to require massive decentralization as the first step. Bio tech is a really fascinating theory but if we dedicated the massive amount of resources it consumes to understanding natural farming systems better we'd get a much better return

 

Are you aware of (with emphasis in bold by me):

“The FDA also has since rebutted Latham and Wilson’s article, saying the claim of “no value” is misleading. In the comments section of the ISN website, this response was posted from Marianna Naum, communications team lead from the FDA’s Office of Food and Veterinary Medicine:

It is unfortunate that the statement you reference in our letter responding to BNF 158 has been misconstrued to suggest that there would be no value of the pro-vitamin A in golden rice for its use in the countries where it is intended for distribution.

Our statement applies only to labeling considerations in the United States, in that golden rice contains insufficient pro-vitamin A to warrant differential labeling for nutrient content based on the low levels of rice consumption in the U.S. Requirements for nutrient content claims on labels in the United States take two factors into account, the amount of the nutrient needed as well as it’s concentration in the food and the typical or average level of that food consumed in the U.S. For the rice to be labeled in the United States with a claim containing provitamin A, our regulations stipulate that the food must contain 10-19 percent of the RDI or DRV for the substance per reference amount customarily consumed (essentially a measure of consumption).

Additionally, U.S. consumers eat rice at very low levels compared to consumers in the specific Asian countries with vitamin A deficiency for which golden rice was developed. IRRI reports that consumption of rice by children in Bangladesh is 12.5 g/kg body weight/day, compared to about 0.5 g/kg bw/d for U.S. consumers). Rice is the major staple in those countries and levels of rice consumption are many-fold higher than they are in the U.S. While a U.S Consumer would be unlikely to eat enough of the rice to achieve that value (10-19 % of the NDI or RDA), that does not mean that the level of consumption of golden rice in the targeted countries would be insufficient to accomplish the intended effect of supplementing their very low consumption of vitamin A-containing foods. Consuming rice containing the levels of pro-vitamin A in GR2E rice as a staple of the diet could have a significant public health impact in populations that suffer from vitamin A deficiency.”

https://geneticliteracyproject.org/...r-misrepresentation-of-golden-rice-nutrition/

Cheers!

 

hopefully it works out for them this time around

 

Come on everyone, let's be accurate here. It's not a troll, it's an Alf!

 

If only people were forced to read something like this before being allowed to use google Actually looking whether the source is credible, an amazing concept.

 

What are fake hops, I guess lets start with that. A list of fake hops and who uses them then we can proceed with this.... I am not aware of any rep brewery making fake beer. LOL and my posts get removed and this remains up... Yep.

 

Mmmmm, I love Hop Stoopid. I buy it anytime:

A) I can read the date on the bottle.
B) It's less than a month old.

So, I don't buy it much. But I love it.

Wait, what was this thread about again?

 

I asked this question, repeatedly, upthread. Crickets. Stopped following the thread.

Randomly checked back in.


Lurking Back Out.

 

But hop extract isn't synthetic. You are certainly free to dislike its use and avoid beers that use it, but it's not synthetic it's just an extract of the oils from the hop flower. It doesn't contain anything besides hops

 

Nothing on their list has anything to do with synthetic hops