Preparing for what?

[bigpaul]

(6 January 2012, 15:18)NorthernRaider Wrote: I thought GM wheat was sterile?

funny, i thought that was what i just said-but a bit more long winded!

[NorthernRaider]

Sorry, I'm half asleep today

[Scythe13]

We've all been eating GM crops for years! GM has been a staple of our diets since the 70's (possibly 60's but I'm too lazy to check for the sake of a decade). The long term effect are as we are now.

The thing with GM being sterile is that not all GM crops are sterile. The ones sold to UK farmers are sterile, so that the big companies can keep selling the seeds to the farmers. If GM was 100% sterile, how do they make enough seeds to plant a field? They have crops that are not sterile, then they produce masses of seeds. Those seeds are steralised then sold to farmers.

The lower quality GM sold to the 'developing' countries is not sterile, but it is still higher quality than the traditional strains that were grown years ago.

[bigpaul]

yeah if you say so, personally speaking i'll stay away from the stuff, as much as i can.

[Scythe13]

If you look into the amount of breads on the shelves of supermarkets that use GM wheat, you'll have to stop eating bread.

Oh, and organic doesn't mean 'non GM' it just means grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Oddly enough, the healthy organic breads are ofte the most up to date GM plants.

Naughty but true!

[NorthernRaider]

Scythe are you sure you not refering to hybridisation rather than GM, I know we have been cross breeding various strains of wheat etc to improve drought resistance, mould resistance etc and have manipulated them to produce large seed ears on much shorter stems, etc

But I was not aware of any UK grains being engineered at the genetic level the way they are in the US & Canada.

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Pscythe I think ( not sure) you may be in error
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/20...bans/print

Bottom bit of this article

http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/artic...the-future

This one implies that trials have been done but GM not used?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/pol...49991.html

I've probably got thr wrong end of the stick again on agriculture its something I know nowt about

[Scythe13]

They are used much less in the UK than in the US and Canada. But with mass produced supermarket items, many of the manufacturers of bread find it's cheaper to import the GM crop and use that for bread production. Same as how a car is made from parts all over the world, as it is with much of the food we eat.

For example, the typical strawberry we eat is a species call La Santa, which are pretty tasteless when compared to any other strawberry. They are not GM, but they are a manipulation of our natural eating.

Tomatos that we eat have been blasted with CO2 to turn them red so that they look ripe, even though they usually aren't.

[NorthernRaider]

Aha I'm (slowly) catching up, Agri cultuture is something I'm not up on, i was speaking with our local wheat farmer last summer and i said to him " I'm sure wheat was much taller when I was a sprog" and he said " Yes it was much taller but now its cross bred with other strains to make the plant put more effort into making the biggest ears or wheat rather than making it grow tall" I got the impression though its done by selective breeding rather than messing on with genes ?

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scythe I've PMed you.

[Scythe13]

Got the PM, thanks mate.

The articles you cited are interesting. There was a case earlier in the year about a GM crop transfering over to a non-GM farm in the UK.

I'll find that article for you in a bit.

Here is another few you might like.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...ields.html

http://blog.sustainablog.org/2011/06/lab...ied-foods/

This one is largely based on export potential

http://www.economist.com/node/15580864

Look at the dates of the articles. That is how long the crops have been in the UK for. Each new strain of a GM crop gets tested. Which is why the first article says about it being an illegal crop.

[bigpaul]

we dont eat shop bread, we make our own bread and have done so for at least 6 years.