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Comment by WhatIsDukkha | Hacker News Reader

European consumers seem to not want factory farms that produce such low quality food that it needs to be CRISPRed (as is the case with this story) just to be kept alive long enough.

I also am in that camp, I don't want to eat pork raised in unsanitary conditions and then sold to me at top dollar (because lying/obscuring about sourcing).

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Then you should want regulations about how the pigs are raised, not banning the use of CRISPR.

As an EATER of food what is the benefit of CRISPR/GMO?

There answer after a good 40 minutes of searching is... nothing.

It's a technology 100% in service of being lazier/sloppier for industrial scale food production and in service of IP restricting the food supply in favor of shareholder X or Y.

"but we can make tasteless US tomatoes on even more inappropriate cropland!"

...

Great for my stock portfolio to screw over developing countries but useless for me as a first world eater of food.

No proof of existence of a benefit.

Uh. Healthier animals.

This specific approval is for a gene therapy to prevent PRRSV infection - a major porcine virus and one that regularly infects pigs in the EU.

It has nothing to do with mistreatment of animals or factory farming.

poor husbandry is the primary objection to US food products

the chicken has to be chlorinated because it has literally been produced covered in faeces

this would seem to be enable it to become even worse

So don't import US food products if it scares you. That's a separate issue from whether to allow CIRPRed livestock.

Again, this disease regularly affects pigs in Europe and causes immense animal suffering.

> So don't import US food products if it scares you.

this is exactly the position of the EU, UK governments

and is one of the few policies that is universally supported by their populations

The EU and UK both import food from the US.

Some US food products are banned for concerns about safety, but they're hardly unique - the US also bans some food products from the EU and UK that are considered unsafe in the US.

None of that has to do with whether or not countries should allow CRIPRed livestock to be raised domestically.

no GM crops, no milk with growth hormone (nearly all of it), no beef with growth hormone (nearly all of it), no chlorinated chicken (nearly all of it), no washed eggs (nearly all of them)

and now pork will end up on that list too

> None of that has to do with whether or not countries should allow CRIPRed livestock to be raised domestically.

I couldn't care less if US'ians want to eat shit (here, literally)

> Then you should want regulations about how the pigs are raised

We have those. EU animals have "five freedoms".

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