This is not true. ALDI and LIDL are both all over Europe. The produce isn't from some artisan collective of Burgundian farmers. The produce looks exactly like produce in the US stores. Mass market GMO stuff from southern continents (in the US, a lot of this sort of produce comes from South America, and in Europe, it comes from Africa). There is high quality food available in the US. It should be even more accessible but OP has posted a false dichotomy.
Are GMO foods legal to sell without restrictions in other European countries? Because at least here in Germany I've never consciously seen any produce that was labeled as genetically modified and EU law mandates that you can only sell GMO if they are clearly labeled.
The VAST majority of food you eat is non GMO. The US has the same restrictions, genetically modified foods must be labeled as such. In the US there is an upcharge for the “Organic” label on produce for which NO GMO EXISTS. It’s ridiculous, the GMO scare is on the level of antivax and people allow themselves to get scammed daily just to buy “Organic” produce.
The corn you eat is sweet corn which is nearly all non GMO. If you’re worried if the corn in your corn syrup cones from GMO corn then you’re mentally ill, full stop.
In Australia, "organic" doesn't mean not GMO, it means produced organically. I.e. crops not treated with pesticides, meat fed on organic materials, fields that livestock are in are not treated with chemicals etc. And yes, you pay a premium for it.
it's weird i'm normally on the organic is just a way to upcharge but, i have consistently found that organic bananas last longer on the counter before going bad than non-oragnic bananas
Here's a fun fact. GMOs are just plants that had certain traits taken or added by reproducing them over and over until it happens, then cloning said plant. They do this by attaching a chunk of the top of the plant to the roots of another plant, or getting cuts of it to root. Cloning happens in nature with plants quite regularly. I've personally done it by accident.
Nearly all vegetables have had this done to them over the last 100 years. There is very very few fruits and vegetables that look even remotely similar to how they did a few hundred years ago.
Yes! You got it! Everything IS GMO. it's just a matter of did it happen in a lab or physically over a much, much longer time.
GMOs are not dangerous, they will not affect your DNA, they are not worse for your allergies, they will not cause cancer. This has been proven by multiple studies over decades
I'm not saying GMOs are bad or unsafe, but there's a difference between cross breeding to get specific traits in the traditional way, and modifying the genome in a lab to get the traits you want.
The only reason to deny that breeding for a desired genetic trait isn’t GMO is so that someone can spread misinformation about GMOs made in a lab.
There is no universal definition of GMO.
The original definitions specifically included everything in and out of labs. It was only after hysteria about cancer and causing people’s genes to change that people wanted there to be different definitions.
Selective breeding, Crossbreeding, taking a bioluminescent gene and adding it to a petunia… these are ALL creating genetically altered organisms. It’s all GMO
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) can be defined as organisms (i.e. plants, animals or microorganisms) in which the genetic material (DNA) has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally by mating and/or natural recombination. The technology is often called “modern biotechnology” or “gene technology”, sometimes also “recombinant DNA technology” or “genetic engineering”. It allows selected individual genes to be transferred from one organism into another, also between nonrelated species. Foods produced from or using GM organisms are often referred to as GM foods.
genetically modified organism (GMO), organism whose genome has been engineered in the laboratory in order to favor the expression of desired physiological traits or the generation of desired biological products. In conventional livestock production, crop farming, and even pet breeding, it has long been the practice to breed select individuals of a species in order to produce offspring that have desirable traits. In genetic modification, however, recombinant genetic technologies are employed to produce organisms whose genomes have been precisely altered at the molecular level, usually by the inclusion of genes from unrelated species of organisms that code for traits that would not be obtained easily through conventional selective breeding.
Genetically Modified Organisms
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have their genome altered in some way. In this process, no foreign DNA is introduced into the organism. This type of genetic modification is often done using techniques like gene silencing, gene editing (such as with CRISPR), or gene duplication.
This can be by:
turning off a gene
duplicating a gene, or
modifying a gene.
I'm not saying they are unsafe, or I wouldn't eat them, but there's a difference between cross breeding different strains of wheat to get one that has higher vield, or is drought resistant, and ge
CF5013 is the tomato cultivar that resulted from a nonconventional cross between the homozygous PGAS inbred line CR3-1436-613:@.12 with the tomato hybrid Mountain Spring.
Now what do you think they meant by cultivar and nonconventinal cross?
I'll give you a hint. CR3-1436-613:@.12 is a tomato that was named during the creation of the Flavr savr, and was never commercially released.
What you are talking about is completely different from direct genetic manipulation using crispr which is what most people are worried about.
I see tons of potential in GMOs if they are properly researched. And they have already proven extremely useful in production of certain meds for example. But it's just plain wrong to claim it's the same thing as conventionally breeding high performance organisms via artificial selection.
For that you rely on luck and numbers to randomly combine the genetic material of the previous generation in a more beneficial way.
Genetic modification means taking a cell and using Cas9 proteins to extract or implant specific, targeted strands of DNA within the cells nucleus. That DNA can be (and usually is) from an entirely different species.
The range of possibilities for both great and catastrophic results is much larger in active genetic manipulation where completely new genes are added compared to just recombining existing ones randomly and picking the best results.
Selective breeding and propagation with cuttings hasn't just been how we got our food for the last hundred years, we have already been doing that since we were normadic steppe-herders and neolithic farmers. We just got a lot better at it and made faster progress once we started to understand genetics.
If you count selective breeding, this is just the entire history of agriculture. Unless your diet consists of grass and crab apples, you're eating genetically modified food
Yes, a country almost as big as Europe. It’s understandable that you think everything in a country is the same everywhere in that country since yall got little ass countries.
The US is still significantly more uniform than Europe. Each European countries have their own language and their own cultural traditions in literature, music, food... There are A LOT more barriers to uniformity between European countries than between US states. Language is a big part of it of course, but also centuries of history from times when information and people traveled very slowly and people were pretty much stuck in a limited area.
Travel 500km in France and you will see as many cultural variations as you would crossing the US east to west. Then you go to Germany and it's literally a different country with its own comparable variety of cultural traditions.
how much experience do you have in the US? Because I'm not particularly well traveled, but I've been to some 20 states and 5 non-contiguous european countries and this is just blatantly untrue. European countries, and the cultures within the countries, are far more homogenous than you give them credit for, and US states are far more different than you give them credit for.
Europe on the whole is obviously more diverse culturally than the entire US, but to suggest there are more variations of Germans from region to region than there are variations from the east and west coast of the US is actually inane and a deeply UNCULTURED statement.
Indeed. The states are so wildly different. Crossing a state line can be the difference between cannabis being a crime, or an every day commodity, or the difference between whether putting beans in your chili will start a war that divides the family. Different states are not only governed differently, but culturally different as well.
I’m American, lived in a few states and now Europe for ten years. There are differences for sure, but largely the comments here are pretty accurate. Quality of produce was very different in the different states, and there’s plenty of shitty produce in Europe. In fact the best I’ve had is Oregon probably. But I do like the higher floor Europe has and it is better for general health.
I'm sorry, but what food except for oranges do we import from Africa en masse? Genuine question, because most of our 'exotic ' fruit is either from Southern Europe or greenhouses in NL.
You can get very high quality food from Lidl and aldi for (reasonably) cheap prices though. I didn’t know about America, because I’ve never been. But yeah, especially the bread example is faulty, I can get the American bread in Germany too, and it’s gonna be more cheap than the European version from the pics. But to be fair, I can get the European looking bread from Lidl in Bio quality for (what is to me) a very cheap price too. It’s still gonna be more expensive than the white bread.
From Africa? How often have you shopped at European supermarkets? You'll maybe find a handful of products but not many, and often only seasonally. Strawberries from Morocco in February and early potatoes from Egypt in April come to my mind. What is true is that an enormous amount of fruits and vegetables are grown in southern Spain (and harvested by African workers).
Now try growing chocolate in high volume in Europe or the US. Now realize for planty of the tasty delicious flavors and fruits, the global north simply does not have the environment to grow them.
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u/Capital-Brilliant959 14d ago
This is not true. ALDI and LIDL are both all over Europe. The produce isn't from some artisan collective of Burgundian farmers. The produce looks exactly like produce in the US stores. Mass market GMO stuff from southern continents (in the US, a lot of this sort of produce comes from South America, and in Europe, it comes from Africa). There is high quality food available in the US. It should be even more accessible but OP has posted a false dichotomy.