Recent Comments

1. almost 5 years ago on Loose Parts

   The scariest thing about eggplant: They used to taste worse. The modern eggplant is the product of centuries of selective breeding to make them larger, juicier and better tasting.

2. almost 5 years ago on Loose Parts

   Straws don’t get dumped in the ocean in the USA either, as a rule. If you pay attention, NONE of the anti-plastic websites are willing to talk about specifics of how much plastic waste the US dumps. There’s a reason for that. They talk about how much the world dumps, but not the US.

   If the US became 100% effective at recycling every scrap of plastic it produces, uses or disposes of, it wouldn’t have any noticeable effect on the amount of plastic in the oceans. The US is the platinum standard for recycling plastics in the world.

3. almost 5 years ago on Loose Parts

   Internal. There’s a reason people hate getting their windshields cleaned by them.

4. almost 5 years ago on Loose Parts

   False dichotomy. There are middle grounds between using the public as unwitting guinea pigs for science experiments, and time-proven husbandry techniques.

   When you selectively breed animals, you can only produce what those animals’ genomes contain. When you splice in things that can’t happen in nature, you run the risk of things you never intended, or unforeseen consequences from things you did intend.

   Without extensive testing, the first sign of trouble is people falling over with various medical conditions, possibly including death. If you take 20 years off a loyal customer’s lifespan by giving him cancer, nobody will know until it’s far too late for him or you to do anything about it. And given the scale involved with GMO products, there could be hundreds of millions of victims.

5. almost 5 years ago on Loose Parts

   Since when do fancy restaurants let you bring in outside food?

6. almost 5 years ago on Loose Parts

   Well, technically life IS sunshine and lollipops. Just try living through the day with no glucose in you at all — or getting any without sunlight.

7. almost 5 years ago on Loose Parts

   Anorexia is a terrible, terrible thing.

8. almost 5 years ago on Loose Parts

   The hoopla is that genes are fiendishly complex, and the difference between taking 20 years off a customer’s life due to cancer and making food more nutritious is something that won’t be known for decades, or centuries. It might even be both. We just don’t know, and nobody will find out until it’s too late for millions of people.

   Traditional breeding methods don’t have that risk — neither parent animal or plant has any such feature, and such a feature is not possible in their genome. But when you splice in a gene sequence found in a poisonous plant to make the animal resistant to parasites, you might create things not found in nature — that’s the entire point of doing it at all.

9. almost 5 years ago on Loose Parts

   The USA or anywhere else on the planet. Things get paid for by someone, somehow. Paying for it with taxes instead of directly from your wallet doesn’t make it free, it just makes it easier to ignore the doctor’s bill’s existence.

10. almost 5 years ago on Loose Parts

    Perhaps it was an unusually stubborn millipede?