[mtdewcmu]

When I see good people getting energized over something like GMO, I just feel kind of disappointed that that energy isn't going to a cause worth supporting. The fear of eating tainted food seems to be a sort of primal fear or archetype and I think the GMO issue taps directly into this. True, the concerns around GMO mostly involve things like remote ecological ramifications, not literal poisoning; but the fact that GMO is in the food supply (or could be) seems to raise the emotional temperature 100x. At any given time, there are people suffering because they can't afford to eat any food -- that concerns me more than the risks from GMO.

GMO might lie in a kind of nexus of overlapping fears; there are definitely others in there, too.

[glenra]

In my more cynical moments I think there is some sort of Conservation of Worry law. Human society is designed by evolution to be worried about stuff. If you render irrelevant all the more traditional threats such as starving or getting eaten by a lion, people just focus the same amount of worry on ever-smaller threats.

From that point of view it seems like a real luxury that we can now afford to waste brain cycles on stuff like global warming or GMOs. We've gone from worrying about threats that are actually visible NOW - getting hit by a car, getting eaten by a bear - to threats that somebody intuits might conceivably start to harm somebody at some point in the distant future if current trends continue in some specific predicted direction.

It's the social equivalent of an auto-immune disorder.