USDA approves GMO potato designed by Simplot

[sue4e3]

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved commercial planting of a potato that is genetically modified to resist bruising and to produce less of a chemical that has caused cancer in animals.

Boise, Idaho-based J.R. Simplot Co. developed the potato, and it was approved by the USDA Friday.

Simplot is a major supplier of french fries, hash browns and other potato products for restaurant chains like McDonald's Corp.

The company altered the potato's DNA so it produces less acrylamide (ah-KRIL'-ah-myd), which is suspected to be a human carcinogen. Potatoes naturally produce the chemical when they're cooked at high temperatures.

The potato is also engineered to resist bruising, which can cause black spots in the potatoes, making them less desirable to buyers.

http://xfinity.comcast.net/articles/news-science/20141108/US-GMO-Potato/

[RiverLover]

1. I wonder how much less acrylamide? 5%? 10%?

Enough to make a marketing claim, but no actual benefit? (Yes, I'm cynical of frankenstein veggies)

Thanks for posting.

[hunter]

2. Here's the thread in General Discussion:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014939321

There are thousands of varieties of potatoes. I'm pretty sure there's some "non-bruisers" to be found in that library.

I wrote:

For every corporate foray into GMO foods I'd like to see publicly and privately funded efforts, magnitudes greater, to preserve heirloom genetic combinations and to create new Free and Open Source varieties of fruits, grains, nuts, and vegetables. A development process that works for computer software ought to work for potatoes too.

Imagine if there was a non-patented, non GMO potato, that competed favorably with this potato, and could be further developed by farmers to suit their local environments and practices. The world would be a wealthier place.

Monoculture of patented food varieties creates vast deserts lacking in biodiversity. That's bad.

Wouldn't it be lovely if every community had their own favorite varieties of potatoes adapted to the local environment and cultivation practices, and their own ways of preparing them?

[RiverLover]

3. Yes, it would be amazing. ~nt

[ag_dude]

4. The software comparison is at best naieve

A development process that works for computer software ought to work for potatoes too.

You just click upload and download to share open source software. Changes can be made in a very short period of time, sometimes a matter of minutes.

Developing a strain of any sort of vegetable requires several years of work and is limited in the amount it can produce. In most environments, you can't get more than one planting a year in and selecting for individual traits takes a considerable amount of time.

A person could theoretically do most of what is done via the genetic modification process over the course of a few decades but it would still take several decades.

[hunter]

5. But that's exactly how all these 3000-5000 varieties of potatoes developed.

People sharing potatoes, with no scientific knowledge, no writing, little more than intuition about heredity, and the idea that "hey, this is a pretty good potato, I'll share it with friends and family and maybe the village down the path."

Attentive to genetic processes we now understand, and in a massively parallel fashion with experimental gardens in every community, loosely organized over the internet, this development process could be quite rapid.

Proprietary development seems to slow down or even obstruct this naturalistic sort of progress and innovation. The internet as it now exists wouldn't have happened if corporations such as Microsoft, Apple, AT&T, or AOL had been able in some way to direct its development and patent its core processes.

A free and open source innovation can be immediately assimilated and improved upon by everyone.

Even easily licensed Open Source innovations are preferable to closed sourced proprietary solutions. Thats why the ARM microprocessor architecture came to dominate the personal electronics environment today. Licensing their intellectual property wasn't a game of high stakes poker as it is playing with Intel, Microsoft, Apple... or in agriculture, Monsanto and their ilk.

I'm an "organic" gardener and there's nothing Microsoft on my computers but their free Core Fonts. Go Comic Sans and Webdings!

In the world of Star Trek, if we get that far, nobody will remember the proprietary crap and they will curse it whenever it raises it's ugly viper head in their work.

Engineers will exclaim is this code and curse the likes of Microsoft and Monsanto.

[ag_dude]

6. the comparison is bunk

You can't speed up the life cycle of plants just by comparing them to software.

If software required years and years to update but Microsoft had a proprietary pror am that did it now, it might make zense.

[RiverLover]

7. Hunter never said "You can speed up the life cycle of plants just by comparing them to software."

Not once.

There's too much arguing around here for the sake of arguing.

[ag_dude]

8. When you compare open source software to developing a strain of plants...

...that is what you are doing.

It's a pointless and misleadingly simplistic comparison.

[hunter]

9. It's strange to call things "bunk" that have actually happened.

The depth of existing potato varieties is not "bunk."

The depth of Open Source software innovations is not "bunk."

Both were achieved through a very similar process.

[ag_dude]

10. not similar at all.

If software was developed by taking a dozen variations of the previous the happened by chance and choosing the best variation one time a year it might be closer to a legitimate comparison. Even then the ability to mass reproduce software by a simple click makes it an odd choice of a comparis on at best.

Making those types of comparisons oversimplifies a process that takes years and yearsto the point that you are misleading people.

[hunter]

11. Let's see. The first "real" operating system I used was BSD (Unix) in the later 'seventies.

Here in 2014, I now use Debian.

Getting from there to here has been a long and twisty road with many versions and varieties along the way, with one major "mutation" (Linux).

Software is reproduced on machines, potatoes reproduce in the garden.

Anyways, it's an analogy, and all analogies fail if you examine them too closely.

Let's play with metaphors: Most plant and software patents are shit.

The lawyers of giant corporations slugging it out over obvious or trivial patents, or gaming and restricting markets for maximum profit, greatly impedes progress and reduces diversity.

A field of patented hybrid pesticide and herbicide dependent corn is a biological wasteland. A closed source proprietary computer program dependent upon a proprietary operating system is a wasteland too.

[ag_dude]

12. Okay, let's try a test...

I'll update a piece of open source software with a useful new feature and I'll put up a version online where anybody in the world could download it with one click.

You develop a new strain of potatoes and produce enough of it to distribute in large scale.

We'll compare notes on the differences in a few years when you're done.

pesticide and herbicide dependent corn

Yeah, that's what Bt corn is, pesticide dependent.

lol.

My gosh, the level of ignorance regarding ag-science among those who feel qualified to discuss the subject is mind blowing. It happens all the time on here where somebody gets in a long discussion regarding GMOs and then refers to something absolutely boneheaded like pesticide dependent corn.

[hunter]

13. Yeah, Bt corn was wonderful.

For a little while anyways.



Sort of like Penicillin.

Next thing you know you're amputating all the limbs of MRSA patients, and they still die.

[ag_dude]

14. Bt still works is the vast vast majority of situations

And it no longer working should be a good thing for the anti-GMO crowd.

So tell me, what the hell did you THINK you meant when you mentioned pesticide dependent crops?

[ag_dude]

15. Pesticide dependent corn

...still makes me laugh.

[RiverLover]

16. McDonald's won't buy Simplot's GMO potato

Hell hath frozen over. But good on McD's!!!

http://news.yahoo.com/mcdonalds-wont-buy-simplots-gmo-potato-212201511.html