GE Salmon, will you eat it?

[Moontanman]

GE Salmon, a fish genetically engineered from three different fish.

 

The company that developed the GE salmon, AquaBounty Technologies, claims the fish grows to market weight in 16 to 18 months instead of the usual 30 required for farmed Atlantic salmon. The fish was created by inserting genetic material of both Chinook (the largest variety of Pacific salmon) and ocean pout (an eel-like fish) into the genome of Atlantic salmon. The commercialized fish will all be females, making them unable to breed. AquaBounty's intellectual property will be further protected because the fish will be sterile, as they will all be triploids (fish with three complete sets of chromosomes instead of the usual two).

 

There seems to be a huge amount of emotion being touted as reason not to eat it but very little if any real evidence it could be harmful.

 

Will you eat it when it comes on the market?

[Mr Skeptic]

I'd eat it, but it better come with a detailed nutritional information box. I know that farmed salmon have a lower Omega-3 content than wild ones due to their feed. The new GE farmed salmon could have either more or less, so that would affect my opinion of them, same with other nutrients.

[UC]

Fish is fish. My only real objection to it initially was the chance for it to destroy native fish populations, should any escape into the wild. On the whole, that's my only real objection to GE. The females only and triploid information is new news to me and resolves the issue.

 

You'll notice that nobody makes any fuss about GE e. coli used to manufacture human insulin for use by diabetics. Or if there was, I haven't heard it.

[Horza2002]

UC, you've hit the nail on the head there! People don't mind about e. coli engineered to make insulin but once you added it to animals....And again I agree with my only concern being if they escaped into the wild.

 

I wouldn't have a problem eating it provided it passed the usual food safety tests.

[CaptainPanic]

I votes "YES" for a practical reason: I doubt I will know that I eat it.

 

I generally read the text on the packaging of products that I eat... but if one producer suddenly switches from non-GE to GE, I may never find out until after I already had it...

 

It may be written in very tiny letters on the packaging, but since there are already so many warnings and legal print on any packaging, I cannot be bothered to read it every time. Same goes for logos - most products have a brand logo, a EU logo, a quality logo, a price reduction logo, a general picture, a logo for biological this-and-that (there are many different ones), a logo for helping out the 3rd world in some way... etc, etc, etc. If a GE logo is added to it (and the lobbyists manage to keep it small and insignificant), then I will probably miss it.

 

Aside from that, I am more worried about the other chemicals in my food (antibiotics for example) than the exact sequence of a genome in the animal I eat.

[insane_alien]

assuming that measures have been taken to prevent them displacing true salmon (limited to fish farms, rendered sterile, whatever) and they've been through at least some basic tests to make sure no toxins are generated because of the change(toxins that are present in the original fish are fine) then i'll eat it.