Lemonade furniture polish and gentically modified meat

We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons.

So called 'conservationists' spend millions of dollars to eliminate the natural commercial harvest of fish. Their reasons are a plenty. Their logic and fact research is skewed to an extreme.

What if there were no hatcheries....or harvest of Salmon with nets?

Are you ready to eat genetically engineered salmon?


Or how about an altogether new animal? One that was not on the Ark but marched out of laboratory test tubes into grocery stores across America?

We've been fooling Mother Nature with vegetables for a good while now, pasting and cutting out little baby carrots that come up as equally proportioned as a string of paper dolls.

And have you ever seen those long tubes of hardboiled eggs that slice and dice for salad bars?

Now the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is leaning toward approving the first genetically engineered animal for people to eat: an Atlantic salmon that can grow to market size in 16 to 18 months rather than the three years it takes the God-made kind - putting a whole new spin on the term "fast food."

The company that developed this Incredible Hulk of a salmon is called AquaBounty Technologies. It says this new creature would be grown in fish farms (as are most of the salmon we eat today) similar to common trout farms where fish are kept in holding tanks and fed fast and furiously until one day they chomp down on a kernel of corn at the end of a hook. It's not much of a sport, but fun for the grandkids.

The way they manipulate the salmon so that it grows faster than Mother Nature intended is to use genes from two of the Atlantic salmon's cousins, the Chinook salmon and the ocean pout. Ordinarily, the growth hormones of the Atlantic salmon shut down in winter but keep on going year round in the Chinook and pout. It's like putting in D-cell where there was only an AAA, turning those growth hormones into the genetic equivalent to the Energizer Bunny.

If the FDA approves this kind of animal engineering, the food industry predicts more to come: cattle resistant to mad cow disease, all white-meat chickens, healthier pork.

One of the issues the FDA must deal with is whether the government will require labeling these genetically altered salmon as such. The CEO of AquaBounty says his company isn't opposed to labeling but since they will be selling the fish eggs, not actually "making" the fish, it's not his company's problem. Also, quoted in The New York Times, he says that since the altered salmon "is identical in every measurable" way to the traditional food Atlantic salmon, "it would be misleading to require labeling."

All the genetically engineered salmon would be female, sterile and raised entirely in fish farm tanks, thus avoiding any contact or competition with wild salmon.

At a Canadian university, researchers and scientists are now developing what they call an "enviropig" - a new animal that supplies healthier bacon, having, among other things, less phosphorus in its manure.

I haven't decided what I think about all this. I don't know enough about it, though I don't really trust the FDA to look out for us, safety-wise.

I am not a vegetarian, but I eat more non-meat meals than most Americans. What I wish these brainy people who can reinvent pigs and salmon and other edible animals would do is concentrate on the other food groups. Why can't they make a candy bar that has the reverse effect of adding pounds? Why can't they make carrot juice taste as good as a margarita?

Can't they genetically alter fruits and vegetables so that the little red healthy heart shows up on restaurant menus alongside the chicken and dumplings, loaded-mashed-stirred-and-creamed hash browns with a double order of link sausages, or a super-sized shake?

Let's get them to work it out so the calorie police beg us to get the medium popcorn with triple butter at the movies instead of bringing in an apple.

Why can't Weight Watchers have a red velvet cake as an eat-smart alternate to, say, nonfat plain yogurt or a slab of tofu?

Of course, that would put diet plans from Hollywood to South Beach out of business, and willpower would become a nonplayer on the Food Channel.

And the reality is that American's have become acquainted with the taste of sugar and fat and relate to those flavors as GOOD. And that is probably the largest issue with obesity in America today. American's eat based on taste instead of eating what the body really needs.

I just got done surfing--- I am really hungry----and I am so happy to have a freezer full of NATIVE OREGONIAN GILLNET CAUGHT CHINOOK SALMON.

Go to the store and buy some while you can.
Because if the extremists have their way there will be no more fishing with nets in the Columbia---you will not have access to your state's native food source---and you will find plenty of genetically modified salmon in the freezer at Costco.