Jonathan,
I agree on most of what you're saying but here in Europe we are now caring a lot about what we eat, especially in relation to GMO....I am rather against contemporary GMOs - as they don't bring any particular advantage excepted for very large-scale industrial agricuture - but here in the EU we're becoming hysteric and that's very bad because there is pro/anti deadlock that is paralyzing public biotechnological research, with the consecuence of finally favoring (in the medium term) companies such as Syngenta or Monsanto....
Il giorno lunedì 27 maggio 2013 06:23:33 UTC+2, Jonathan Cline ha scritto:
Several of the projects I've proposed are food security related. Wait, does that phrase even exist? Why do we need security in food? Rhetorical question, maybe you get my point. It's actually called food safety and that's why the melanometer project created a lot of publicity. The FDA-government-corporate institutions apparently do not care about food safety, really, or it would try harder to enforce it and verify it. Anyway, the entire food distribution system needs checks on product which apparently can't be done reasonably at any point in the system with currently available technology, let alone a checked by a consumer (suppose a mother wants to check for melamine in the infant milk she just purchased). Basically, at each point in the system, someone is passing goods for as much money as they can make, versus passing goods at the highest quality they can provide. It's a reflection of the world consumer base, which, if you count the number of cars in line for a McDonald's drive thru on any given day, just literally does not care what goes into their bodies. If they cared, they wouldn't eat there.. or attempt fad diets.. or buy junk food.. or soda.. or interpret 2000 year-old religious texts as medical advice for what to, or what not to, eat and which days of the week are good for eating it.. or a thousand other ridiculous things. So the question points to a systemic flaw: if consumers don't care, why would local farmers care? And if local farmers cared, why wouldn't their marketing affect consumers decisions? My only conclusion so far is that very few people in the world (less than 0.02%) actually care about food quality; by the way, that's about the order of magnitude of low fat vegans in the world too. Tell me why I can't go to the pharmacy or grocery store and buy a machine which measures the arsenic in rice, after the FDA was recently forced to admit that a majority of rice in the U.S. contained above healthy levels of arsenic; it's because no one in the system cares: no market, no demand, product.--
With that said, it's a near perfect win for open source technology, because open source creators are indifferent to market forces or profit motives. Open source technology is made via the whims of the creators, often for the creators' own use. (Linux was not made in order to eventually be purposed by Google and put into Android phones. It was made because Linus thought it was fun and cool and useful for his own PC, period.) Open source has the power to innovate food safety where nearly every other angle has failed. Which was why I wanted a melanometer -- so I could measure my own milk (that is, before I gave up drinking milk completely). I'd like a simple white box on my kitchen counter to measure a variety of other bad things in today's food, though. A GMO-soy-detection machine would be nice. (I'm not saying GMO soy is bad or good; it would simply be great to know if the label which says "GMO-free" in fact matches the product, or not.) Obviously, farmers would find a GMO-soy-detection device really useful too. Sure, there are other ways to accomplish much of this, but not in real time, and not cheaply.
On Sunday, May 12, 2013 9:20:06 AM UTC-7, goliste1 wrote:Hi all,
I am a PhD candidate in Politics and I will investigate to what extent might open source arrangements and bio-hacking practices affect biotechnological R&D, enabling the pursuit of goals focused on the local level and on the farmers' needs rather than on the interestes of corporations and state elites.
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