[extropy-chat] GM Food [was: World map of human ES cellandnuclear transfer policies]

[Brett Paatsch]

Brent Neal wrote:

> Now, it seems pretty obvious to me that factory farming
> produces more calories per hectare of land use than free
> range farming (correct me if I'm wrong). 

Your right, its almost axiomatic. I'm no expert but as it happens
I've just finished a semester of biochemistry. Calories are energy
released from the breaking of chemical bonds. Human metabolic
enzymes break particular types of bonds found in proteins, fats,
and carbohydrates from plants and animals.  Of course we are
going to be able to get more calories (i.e. energy, not nutrients)
in forms suitable for digestion by contemporary humans if we 
specifically aim at concentrating them in one area (like a farm) than 
if we don't. (The financial expense of increasingly concentrating
those consumable-to-humans calories is a separate issue - very,
very intense farming - Robert's bio-gruel idea - is not necessarily
going to be cheaper and so more cost effective than just intense
farming). 

Per unit weight, fat contains more energy (calories) than protein
or carbohydrates. That's almost fat's evolutionary metabolic 
purpose, to be a light weight energy store, that packs energy
extremely densely into volume - volumes like camel's humps etc. 

This says nothing about taste or nutrition though. Humans can't 
live on fat alone. 

Apparently, the best diet for humans was the one we had running
around as cro-magnon hunter gatherers. Contempory humans, 
with our modern understanding of nutrition and abundant supplies
of cheap food (in the Western world anyway) have only recently
returned to the height (tallness) of our cro-magnon ancestors.  
Diets related to agricultural based living conditions (that were 
suboptimal in terms of nutrition and calories or both) made us 
shorter in the interrum. Better nutrition and abundant food is the
cause of children being taller than their parents in recent
generations.

> The opportunity for companies that I see is to find out ways to
> engineer supplements and genetic therapies that allow the quality
> of meat and eggs raised in factory farms to be improved. This
> way, we might be able to have our cake (meat cake?) and eat
> it too.

Any given GM solution has to get over two classes of hurdles
(at least) - it has to be politically doable, and it has to be cost 
effective against the alternatives (including non GM solutions and
other GM solutions) after taking into account what value the GM
solution is supposed to add. 

Of course politically doability relates to cost as well. Its politically
easier to sell GM food in some countries, sectors, markets, so 
that affects the cost of the solution. 

Politically doability and cost effectiveness vis a vis alternatives
are very big broad classes of problem. 

Brett Paatsch