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edricarica  ·  3203 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Misleading War on GMOs: The Food Is Safe. The Rhetoric Is Dangerous.

I have a personal anecdote related to this topic! Not evidence for anything, but may be of interest :)

I didn't know my biological father until recently. My mom met him in the '80s protesting Reagan and Thatcher's market reforms. He lived on a farming commune. They had some stuff in common: they both smoked a lot of weed, read socialist newspapers, were in Paris for '68, at Woodstock, etc. etc.

Fast forward to 2010, and I meet the guy for the first time. Turns out that now he's a top soil biologist (skills honed by growing MJ, I guess)

He was there when the first GM experiments were happening. And he protested them, the way he and his friends protested factory farming, pesticide use, monocropping, agribusiness tactics in the developing world, etc. etc.

Until, on a trip to the US (he's British), he picked up a copy of the NY Times with a cover story debating abortion. This is sort-of a non issue in Europe by and large, so it caught his attention. Being a liberal, and a Brit, his reaction was "Crazy Americans. How could anyone not be pro-choice?"

And then it hit him: His rationale for protesting GM was based on the same tribal instinct that lead pro-lifers to reject abortion. It's God's will, no matter what science says, humans have no grounds to be meddling in nature, etc. etc.

When he got back to the UK he devoted his lab time to trialling GM crops and their effects on soil depletion and stuff (sorry, this is the worst paraphrasing ever, I'm a film editor not a soil biologist).

Nowadays, he's a staunch defender of GM technologies (with some caveats) - we could actually engineer crops that are specifically environmentally-friendly (growing tropical crops in temperate climates, for example, to eliminate air travel; nitrate-adding plants to replenish soil; plants with increased CO2 absorption).

He still smokes a lot of weed.