14 replies to this topic

[KellyB]

Kindly vote and comment
Thank you all
Kelly B.

[Simon]

Hi Kelly, I hope you don't mind I slightly amended your poll to change Y for Yes etc. and I also added 'Unsure' as choice to question 3, because that's how I wanted to vote.

To sum up I don't know enough about cloned animals to make a decision one way or another whether I would eat/drink, however I would like to retain the ability to choose, so a label is a must for me.

Interesting topic.

Regards,
Simon

[KellyB]

No problem at all, Simon. After all, you are the Site Admininstrator
Thank you for voting
Rgds/Kelly B.

[cazyncymru]

I must admit i was a bit concerned about the subject title here.

I think its unfair to ask the question about meat and milk when to be realistic the amout of milk and meat by-products that go into foods/cosmetics/pharmaceuticals is phenomenal and these items will and already are affected.

Certain sectors have already accepted GMO's, and fundamentally that's all cloning is.....genetical modification in its extreme.

This is the kind of headline that id expect to see in the press.

I'm sorry if this is perceived as coming across strongly, but as i happen to work in the milk industry, and we're already being bombarded with unsavoury press, these kind of comments are the last thing we need.

[Charles.C]

Dear Pollsters,

Cazyncymru’s post nicely illustrates the scale involved and I can appreciate the sensitivity. Unfortunately I guess that for many people, industry is so far not considered to have satisfactorily demonstrated the safety of GMO items and this together with the Frankenstein overtones makes for excellent press of course. If there exists a more competent authority, it also seems to have achieved no great persuasion regarding safety either. Topics like antibiotics in food, radiation treated products also represent similar prime targets. It could be argued that the press are performing a valid watchdog function even though the sensationalist element may be over-emphasized (or not).

It’s a bit OT but I was personally taken aback when I first started looking into the google links on this subject as to the extent that products of GMO origin or containing GMO components seem to have quietly well-inserted themselves into the food chain already. Presumably (??) this has been facilitated in the US as a result of the labeling philosophy and perhaps (??) in the EU by cautious observance of the criterion –

“The importance of IP (Identity Preservation) is constantly growing in the foodstuffs industry. This is based partly on consumers’ refusal to accept genetically modified foods and the industry’s efforts to satisfy consumers’ demands for “GMO-free” products. In April 2000, the EU labeling regulation (EU 49/2000) came into force, which decrees that all products with a threshold of genetically modified ingredients of 1% or more must be labeled. In every case, the supplier is obliged to provide evidence that due diligence has been taken to prevent his product from becoming contaminated with genetically modified material. Even additives and flavors are subject to this labeling regulation – if they contain detectable DNA or proteins. Every foodstuff supplier must therefore ensure that appropriate guidelines and measures have been integrated into his quality management system, so as to comply with requirements outlined above.”
(quote from http://www.eurofins....ertification/en )

The scientific justification of the 1% limit looks intriguing ??

(Actually there is an extremely detailed [it seemed to me] BRC standard relating to Identity Preservation in the GMO sense but I haven’t ever seen it’s application come up in this forum )
I believe that labeling in the UK killed the sale of radiation treated products (pls correct me if not true) and I have a feeling that labeling of the polled items will have a similar result regardless of any science involved. As to the science, would like to see the risk analysis but fear I will not understand it.
Rgds / Charles.C

[KellyB]

Dear Charles C.,
I suppose you are right in most of your points. Labeling indeed can potentialy have a result to the consumers' reaction, but let me just give you one example on how consumers can be ignorant of what they eat. The company where I work, a major provider of asian foodstuff in my country, mostly deals with restaurants and caterers. Months ago we imported Tofu from an Asian country knowing that the soy used was geneticaly modified (legitimately) and we declare it with bold capital letters on the label, giving also a short description of the GM code and the number of approval. Much to my surprise this is one of the top selling products - this means that most of the people eating in these restaurants is served with GM tofu without knowing it, since the waiters are not obliged to explain anything to them. Chickens are fed with gm corn so the eggs they lay are sort of gm also. As far as the limit of 1% is concerned, to my knowledge, most of the times less that 1% is not detectable with the methods used by the Laboratories and maybe this is why 1% is the limit.
Rgds/KellyB.

[Charles.C]

Dear Kelly,

How much GMO in yr tofu ? Do you state
Is is usual for tofu to be GMO or are you creating a new market (very brave IMO if true!)

I wonder if it would still be a top-seller if there was additional wording under the GMO statement like –

“Please be aware that there is disagreement regarding the health aspects of foods containing GMO material.” (+ Added DISCLAIMER like for eating oysters ??).

Or to put it another way, how strong is the argument that they may not be safe ?? at X%?? (also see below)

I tried to do a bit more digging - an example of very up-to-date but (perhaps) rather sensationalist viewpoint is –

http://www.newscient...pinion/gm-food/

It also seems that the 1% rule (or perhaps 0.9% from what I read) is the result of a real mixture of political and technical issues together.

The technical aspect is already not simple, can try –
http://www.gmotestin...pcr_detect.shtm

And neither are the political issues, eg –

http://www.saveourse...em_13_04_04.pdf

(if the dwl is too slow, pls try the html version -

http://72.14.235.104...V...t=clnk&cd=9
)

http://www.ifoam.org..._Regulation.pdf

http://www.ifoam.org...ntamination.pdf

I don’t claim to have reached an answer, only trying to clarify the questions!



Rgds / Charles.C

Added – I realised later that the New Scientist articles are frequently truncated (surprise!) but I left it since I think they still offer an idea of the degree of confusion on this subject.

Further digging indicated that a key eu scientific article seems to be the SANCO item which is mentioned in the last 3 links above. This is fairly intelligbly written (ie I could mostly follow it ) and is very interesting IMO –

http://ec.europa.eu/...od/qanda_en.pdf

After reading this, I guess that Kelly's company presumably had to carry out a substantial official documentation procedure to be authorised to launch this product ?? (or was it in the market already?)

As you people probably already know the relevant main eu directive is at –

http://eur-lex.europ...7en00010038.pdf

(this contains the explanation of the risk analysis procedure but unfortunately gives no actual examples which would tell (reveal?) a lot more IMO)

Edited by Charles.C, 07 January 2007 - 07:26 PM.

[KellyB]

Dear Charles C.,
Very interesting reply indeed. I have paid my visit to most of the sites you're proposing and generally I agree with your opinion.
I'll have to check on my documentation but I think it was around 0,2% in our tofu. The law does not oblige us to state the percent for the time being, as long as it is legitimate (Monsanto's Round-up ready) and declared during importation. It is a very well-known company and this particular modification in soybean is also very well-known.
I suppose it is not usual for Tofu to be gm nor we are creating a new market. In fact the company I work for circulates abt 2500 products in our market and only 2 of them are gm. This tofu and a soy sauce (two different producers).
My personal position for this importation was negative but it was not up to me to decide. On the other hand, trust me it was not easy to find the particular type of product (to satisfy customers' requests) and when the provider informed us that it was gm, in the beginning we discontinued imports and tried to find another provider (from the same country) which could provide us with "clean" product -but with no results. So what we did (with our customers being more and more impatient) was to take a few samples from our old provider and pass all the way through the painful procedure to get the licence for importing it to our country with our own brand. We had 2+2 tests run in two different laboratories (one here and another one in a foreign country) so that the results would be cross-checked and then we had 3 meetings with a representative of the authorities in order to make sure that we would be legitimate all the way (including labeling). It took us 4 months and a lot of personal work (guess who carried out all this procedure! )
Since then we need to renew the authorization for every single import - so we still are trying to locate another provider to solve the problem. On the other hand, I find it a little bit unfare to have another 2.500 products in our catalogue (most of them containing rice, soy or corn) which are not gm and not being allowed to declare it on their labels ("this product is gmo free" or something like that).
Also pls note that we informed all our customers which buy this product about its being gm - but only a 5% of them discontinued buying it. The same product circulates in the country where it is produced (with the producer's brand) with no information about its being gm whatsoever!
For your information, people here are eating oysters and similar products like you're eating potatoes (we even catch them at the sea, many eating them raw with a few drops of lemonjuice) except of course if they are allergic. We just can't avoid it in a country with more than 2000 big and small islands!
I hope I have solved some of your queries.
Rgds/KellyB.

[Charles.C]

Dear Kelly,

The information is very much appreciated and being digested. Obviously there were significant financial aspects to this venture which I suspect would have implications on smaller enterprises.
I realise this thread has now veered rather OT (meat and milk) whereas large parts of the previous post were agricultural crop oriented although there is clearly practical subsequent overlap. This prompts me to further add another IMO very nice link (FAO 2003-4) although perhaps beginning to age with direct respect to cloned meat issue –

http://www.fao.org/d...0.htm#TopOfPage

This is very comprehensive (though no actual risk analyses I think), very readable, and contains some elegant polls similar to the ones in this thread ( see Ch6). I leave you to peruse the contents (Greece is represented!) however I noted there seems to be some disagreement with the poll contained in the ethically oriented link I added to another thread on related topic ( http://pewagbiotech....proceedings.pdf ). Maybe it depends on how you ask the question.

Rgds / Charles.C

[KellyB]

Dear Charles C.,
Thank you for the interesting link. I must admit it has escaped my attention.
Rgds/Kelly B.

[Charles.C]

Dear Kelly,

I also must admit that I totally forgot to open the original summary link which you posted in another thread -

( http://europa.eu/rap...;guiLanguage=en
)

This looks to have borrowed some pieces of all the above links + addded some extensions / updates. I'm slightly curious where the 0.5% limit came from (there must be some truly fascinating risk analyses locked away somewhere.).

If it hadn't been for the questionably humorous OTs added to yr other poll thereby re-activating it, I wouldn't have remembered to look (I'm not sure what the word "rag" means but I can suggest the reason why a large portion of the 3M (really!) readership may like the SUN is not totally unrelated to silicone.)

I think that makes 3 threads now running on this topic, perhaps one should be able to have more than one poll per thread ?

Rgds / Charles.C

[Simon]

Front page news on the UK's Daily Mail newspaper today.

Clone farming has arrived

They also have a poll "Would you drink milk from a cloned cow?"

I think maybe they have been spying on us.

Sorry to bring this up Caz, probably won't do much good for the milk industry, and yes you do have a point about the Daily Mail.

Regards,
Simon

[cazyncymru]

Front page news on the UK's Daily Mail newspaper today.

Clone farming has arrived

They also have a poll "Would you drink milk from a cloned cow?"

I think maybe they have been spying on us.

Sorry to bring this up Caz, probably won't do much good for the milk industry, and yes you do have a point about the Daily Mail.

Regards,
Simon

Its quite scary actually Simon how misleading that report is.
They quote "70 pints a day" from this super cow....well in all fairness a high yielding cow is already producing that kind of milk volume. The AVERAGE cow, according to 2006 figures, produces 9,000 liters of milk per annum. She is milked for approximately 300 days in that year

Now my maths is a bit rusty, so bear with me
9000/300 is 30 litres a day
there are 564ml in a pint

30litres to pints is 54 pints.

That is your AVERAGE cow.

And its not Paradise Dundee that's the clone but her mum!!

As i said in a previous post, i think cloning is only the extreme of GMO.

[Charles.C]

Dear Simon,

Excellent link. I thought the article was rather effectively presented. Correctness is another matter of course. It seems that there must have been a good reader response since on the first day it was paired with Kate Middleton but has now been upgraded to Jennifer Aniston.

Regardless, the attached comments are well-worth reading IMO. Some examples –

Being in a rural community, and with strong links to farming, A.I. (artificial insemination) has been going on in the dairy herds for years. It is not the farmer who pushes the bounds of science, but the large supermarket chains who demand cheaper and more milk constantly. This area was once amonst the primary milk producers in Britain, may still be - but a sign of the times is that there are few, if any, milking less than 100 beasts. There is even a farmer over Wigtonshire who boasts some 2,000 head of Dairy cattle.
Alas, the quaint old days of knowing every animal, by name, are gone. Just imagine the problem you would have with cloned cows!

I have nothing against cloning or GM foods as such, but I'm going to wait for twenty years to see its effect on others before I eat so much as a gram of it. They told us lies over BSE, why should this be any different? Foisting these foods on humankind is nothing more than an unregulated experiment, and we are paying for it.

Something more disturbing to me than these cloned cows is the fact they are adding human genes to plants we eat now. Since nothing is labeled, we have no idea if we are eating these human genes or not. In my book, that is cannibalism.

I hope they do not clone this Labour Government once is enough

Rgds / Charles.C

[cazyncymru]

Dear Simon,

Excellent link. I thought the article was rather effectively presented. Correctness is another matter of course. It seems that there must have been a good reader response since on the first day it was paired with Kate Middleton but has now been upgraded to Jennifer Aniston.

Regardless, the attached comments are well-worth reading IMO. Some examples –

Being in a rural community, and with strong links to farming, A.I. (artificial insemination) has been going on in the dairy herds for years. It is not the farmer who pushes the bounds of science, but the large supermarket chains who demand cheaper and more milk constantly. This area was once amonst the primary milk producers in Britain, may still be - but a sign of the times is that there are few, if any, milking less than 100 beasts. There is even a farmer over Wigtonshire who boasts some 2,000 head of Dairy cattle.
Alas, the quaint old days of knowing every animal, by name, are gone. Just imagine the problem you would have with cloned cows!

I have nothing against cloning or GM foods as such, but I'm going to wait for twenty years to see its effect on others before I eat so much as a gram of it. They told us lies over BSE, why should this be any different? Foisting these foods on humankind is nothing more than an unregulated experiment, and we are paying for it.

Something more disturbing to me than these cloned cows is the fact they are adding human genes to plants we eat now. Since nothing is labeled, we have no idea if we are eating these human genes or not. In my book, that is cannibalism.

I hope they do not clone this Labour Government once is enough

Rgds / Charles.C

LOL i thought some of the comments were wonderful Charles.C
Wonderful in the fact that there are some nutters out there who don't have a clue!!

Lets hope the Aliens aren't kidnapping them!!!!