Modified grain

Organic grain is available...but even that does not guarantee it's not genetically modified.

If it is...what's the alternative?...don't drink beer?

http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/fcd2600
Statement #3 in the above Canadian link I think answers your wife's question (by not answering it) : )

I think a lot of people are going to look at that thread title and assume it's about "modified/highly modified/undermodified malt" Cheers

 

I hope Monsanto isnt selling us barley those f**kers

 

A GMO Barley was developed, but not released. Corn, rye, and wheat, could be, I don't know.

Hops breeding is done the tradition way, except for the triploid hybrids. Those are from a hop that has been forced to produce 4 chromosomes with alkaloids, then crossed with a normal hop with 2 chromosomes. Have never heard of any gene splicing.

Yeast - not that I know of.

Water. I modify mine. ;-)

 

This type of glib statement is made every time someone mentions GMO food crops. However, selective breeding is absolutely not the same thing as genetic modification, which often involves introducing genes that wouldn't have made it into the species over a million years of selective breeding. No matter how you feel about GMO, you should stop making this argument, because it's invalid.

Personally, my issues with GMO foods really don't have anything to do with whether or not they are safe to consume. The truth is, they are simply not a necessity. Genetic modification is there for the convenience of mass monoculture. All the GMO traits that have been patented are for things like herbicide resistance, so the farm can hose down their field with roundup and kill everything except the desirable plants, or resistance to spoilage so a tomato will make it from the Napa Valley to a Wal-Mart in Chicago without spoiling.

To your point, selective breeding has produced tens of thousands of wonderful food crops for humanity, many of which are underutilized. Diversification of crops is a far more sustainable practice than GMO-powered monoculture.

 

There is at the very least one commercially approved GMO strain, most likely more as this article was written in 1995: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8720067

According to a post in Beer Talk, there is a group in the UK that is trying to make a completely synthetic yeast strain, somewhat along the lines of what Craig Ventner did when he created a bacteria controlled from a chemically synthesized genome(created solely from A,G,T,C bases in a test tube).

Unfortunately the press release for the UK synthetic yeast strain was so poorly written it was difficult to figure out exactly what they were doing, although it really does sound like their trying to design a synthetic yeast strain that will be amenable to genetic engineering. Unfortunately the poster that started the thread was an idiot and got the thread shut down when he started to try and articulate his thoughts on cancer, poorly, and talk about his own research, poorly.

Link to Ventner: http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/

 

Bullshit. What do you think selective breeding does? It in the end results in genetic modification of the plant/livestock/etc. You're selecting for genetically derived traits that upon extensive breeding will result in genetic diversity in the population.

GMO can contain minor changes/improvements (depending on what your target is) to existing genes in the organism, or can contain exogenous genetic material from other sources, therefore there is a point of validity in the selective breeding argument, granted if used as a blanket statement its not entirely correct.

 

There you go. That's why it shouldn't be used. The argument being made is usually "It's the same thing so why does it matter." Well it's not the same thing because of the process, goal, and intent of the whole thing.

"Thousands of years of selective breeding," as bum732 calls it, is to the benefit of humanity. Genetic modification is not, imho, in the interest of posterity, for reasons that probably shouldn't be explored on BA.

 

There is plenty of food, and damn near all of the food we eat is non-gmo.

 

Not true. Go do a search of the US Patent office, there are tons upon tons of patents for other GMO traits, for instance the insertion of the metabolic pathways into tomatoes to make the tomato produce polyunsaturated fatty acids.

There are also patents on strains of tomatoes, potatoes, etc. that were created by selective breeding to cover the genetic modifications to said vegetables/fruits.

I don't think genetic modification is the devil here (as both breeding and GMO introduce genetic modifications), I think its the trait thats being selected for. Personally, engineering in pesticide resistance scares the shit out of me and is a terrible idea (see Monsanto) because of just simple scattering of seeds in the wind, but also in terms of horizontal gene transfer, however engineering a tomato to provide increased health benefits, or be more drought resistant so it can feed people in drought ridden climates are valid things to do regardless of GMO or breeding.

 

There are GMO varieties of all those foods yes, but that doesn't mean that all of it is GMO or that the majority of it is GMO. I'm eating an Odwalla bar right now that has wheat in it. I buy them because they're cheap snacks (88 cents at Winco), says "no GMO" right on the label. I avoided GMO without even trying.

I also don't consume much of anything with HFCS in it, not because I purposefully avoid HFCS, but because most of the foods that contain it are not the kind of things I eat. It's pretty easy to avoid, really.

I'm not really agitated over any of this really. These problems will all work themselves out one way or another.

 

Like I said, it's about goals and intent.

 

I didn't intend to say most food (meaning final processed/prepared products) humans consume is free of any GMO ingredient, but I can see how you thought that's what I was saying.

 

Note to self: Do not bring up or respond to GMO threads (not to be confused with GNO threads)

oops...too late

 

well, gotta say they are at least staying fairly civil in their discussion...

 

Incorrect! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_virtue

 

I love Golden Naked Oats... anyone else???

 

Shaving cream like head retention and berry sweetness, so good... But could they be better if they were GMO GNO?

 

GMO... a topic that's absolutely sure to generate undue hysteria, illogical responses, hyper-ventilating paranoia, and attract seriously large amounts of woo (read: woo = bullshit and pseudo-scientific horse-crap). There may be a new internet law needed, noting that it's impossible to discuss GMO on the internet without your internet discussion group's percentage of utter schleptards eventually approaching 172.8%.

GMO internet beliefs are kinda like homeopathy, in that they're based on a bunch of watered down hot air.

Just remember one thing when it comes to discussion of scientific topics on the internet by people that have no training in scientific topics...

As soon as they mention "quantum" this* or "quantum" that as an explanation or reason why their belief/remedy/spewings-forth is correct, you KNOW for a fact that it's complete and utter bullshit.

*ironically, the one exception to this would be actual physicists with actual training in the mathematics and physics of quantum mechanics, who actually wanted to discuss real quantam mechanics with other people who were also trained in those subjects.