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seedless wonders?

i get a magazine called “nexus” (it’s so left-wing it comes covered up in a paper sleeve). there was an article this month about how pretty much our entire food supply is going GM and how it is known to gradually destroy the human (and rat) immune system.

i called whole foods and they don’t carry anything GM in their stores period. no GM seeds, whether organic or conventional.

i was wondering about “conventional” produce in general though. on the east coast we hardly get any organic citrus (except lemons and limes), and i just noticed as i was eating an orange this morning that there were NO seeds. the sticker was “3…”, which is supposed to mean sprayed but not GM. have things shifted while we weren’t looking? are there “natural” seedless oranges? watermelons? cucumbers????

anyone know anything about sunkist?

any info or literature to consult would be greatly appreciated!

Comments

  • newbienewbie Raw Newbie

    I have organic navel oranges and they’re seedless.

  • pianissimapianissima Raw Newbie

    huh? so are navels NATURALLY seedless? the plot thickens… immaculately conceived fruit…

  • I may be wrong, but seedless fruit was developed through propagation methods, long before GM was around. They can be organic. I have rarely run across a navel orange that has seeds. I read somewhere that you should buy seeded fruit as there is more life in them. But I have seen seeds in seedless fruit. I just read from someone, Gabriel Cousens?, that after so many generations, seedless fruit starts producing seeds so maybe they aren’t so bad after all. I think that if you buy non GM you are okay.

  • Selective breeding will produce fruit with no seeds. Actually the seeds are there but quite small and not viable.

  • pianissimapianissima Raw Newbie

    wow, i did NOT know this. i just read that seedless watermelons, grapes, and cucumbers were GM. but i guess it doesn’t work in the reverse. (i.e. seedless is necessarily an indication of GM…). can something be GM and have seeds?

    since that forum on codex alimentarius, i’ve been very nosy about these things.

    there was this quote by kissinger in the article i mentioned “control oil and you control governments. control food and you control the people.” scary!

  • Certainly something can be GMO and have seeds. Otherwise for some plants they would be unable to propagate. Have you heard of “terminator” seeds? Plant seed in the ground and get a crop but seeds in the crop are sterile (terminated) and you can’t save the seed to replant a future crop.

  • pianissimapianissima Raw Newbie

    right, ok. i heard GMOs actually COULDN’T propagate, but i guess that doesn’t mean they don’t HAVE seeds. so how do you know if something is GMO? i heard it was the sticker #, but i have yet to see a # indicating GMO and apparently most of our corn and soy is GMO, so is there a list somewhere of companies not to buy from?

  • Aha! A horticulture question!

    Citrus differs from other tree fruits in that it is very readily “pathenocarpic.” This means they can develop the fruit without the stimulus of a developing seed or fertilization. Most fruits require a developing seed to build tissue around. That’s why squash that isn’t well pollinated will be all dented in on one side and why a loss of honey bees is damn big deal. Sometimes this means that fertilization takes place but the pollen tubes blow up (really, they do in the case of incompatible pollen partners in cherries) on the way to the embryo, causing the tiny little abortions that one sees in most parthenocarpic tree fruit.

    I know, this sounds like a bunch of mad scientist craziness, but is just another day in the life of a horticulturist—it’s normal, and partially why we have to many clonally propagated crops. Have you ever seen a bananna seed? The cavendesh bananna is a good example of a parthenocarpic tropical.

    As an aside, the story of how the navel orange got to California is quite a good one. There’s a similar story about the first shipment of pome fruits to arrive in Oregon. One of those pioneer stories that didn’t result in bloodshed.

    In the case of GMO crops, you’re thinking of the Monsanto lethal gene. Since nearly all tree and vine fruits are clonally propagated scions, only the stock is likely to be the result of a sexually produced seedling, and even this is often not the case with fruits such as apple, which is very often propigated in a moist environment of sawdust, with the unpleasant name of “stooling.”

    The lethal gene of monsanto is almost entirely aimed at annual, commodity crops of the sort that are likely to be used in countries where they have resisted hybridized varieties or where no hybrids are possible, such as in the case of cloistogamous (self-pollinated before they open) fruits like beans and peas. I do not know if they’ve targeted staple African crops such as T’eff and millet, but I wouldn’t be surprised at those wanna-be Nazis.

    I could go on all day, but to answer your question, if oranges were to become GMO, it would more likely be an agronomic characteristic that you’d hardly notice, such as roundup resistance. In the case of citrus, I’d imagine that GMO threats would impact fungal resistance (or particularly the amount and type of wax on the leaves) or some sort of toxin that killed the med fly. Adaptability to a cooler climate is likely a complex trait and

    I would also point out that tree fruits and nuts take a long time to breed (10 years from seed to seed is considered average, with an average of at least 3 generations to yield a useful cross) and the technology using Agrobacter spp. (as opposed to the “gene gun”) hasn’t existed long enough for woody perennial crops to be affected this way. In fact, the pioneering reserch on micropropigation of woody Prunus and Pyrus crops were just being done a few years ago when I was at Oregon State, though if a crop were to get the GMO treatment, it just might be citrus. You’ve p’bly got a few decades before you have to worry about it.

    Also, the current NOP Organic Standard disallows GMO crops thanks to the efforts of the several hundered thousand people who wrote the USDA when the original standards were about to be approved in the mid-1990s, which would have included irradiation, municipal waste (millorganite) and GMOs.

  • alpdesignsalpdesigns Raw Newbie

    Here’s an article on the birth of the first seedless watermelons.

    http://cuke.hort.ncsu.edu/cucurbit/wmelon/seedl…

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