Yum, yoga mat! List of foods that include this new food group!

[Orrex]

48. That's the fallacy of provincial wisdom. It's also argument from aesthetics.

As stated above, I begrudge no one their right to make decisions for themselves, so whatever path you follow to your own conclusions is fine with me. But when we steer our health policies based on nostalgia or aesthetics, then it's reasonable to raise reasonable objections.

Which would my cells appreciate more? A healthy piece of bread made from old seeds, or a piece of bread with chemical crap flung into it, grown with seeds developed by Monsanto or whoever, blending the DNAs of bacteria with the DNAs of wheat?

Are you asking what your cells would prefer, or what do you think your cells prefer? It's actually quite similar to folk medicine prior to germ theory. Simply put, the inferred preferences of one's cells don't trump the realities of nutrition. A lot of people's cells crave nicotine, alcohol and saturated fats in preference to raw sugar and wheat germ. Does that mean that beer and cigarettes are a prescription for health?

I guess I think that way because my grandparents and greatgrandparents all lived in villages, pulled water out of incredibly deep wells, grew normal, ordinary wheat before Monsanto decided to tamper with its DNA, and washed their plain clothing with bars of soap they made themselves, and my grandma on my dad's side told me her stories.

That's nice, but it's a sort of glossed-over nostalgia. If your grandparents resided in the US, and if you're less than 500 years old, then there's a really good chance that their environment was hardly the pristine Eden that you imagine.

As a microbiologist friend once opined, with only slight hyperbole, "the dirtiest thing we're likely to eat today is cleaner than the cleanest thing most people ate 100 years ago."


In addition, I have seen no evidence that DNA-altered food presents any greater hazard than non-altered food, if such food can even be said to exist 10,000+ years after the agricultural revolution. Every single argument I've seen, including the current OP, is based on fear of technology, aesthetic squeamishness, and guilt-by-association innuendo.