Comment by VLM
4 years ago
This will probably come in handy for industrial espionage type tasks.
Lets say you had a nation-state enemy who eats a lot of some ethnic ingredient. Come up with a cheap artificial flavor/color or process that is optimize to give heavy consumers cancer in 30 years. Not in one year, that will show up in the approval process. Then have an agent in the target country "discover" thru random chance this really excellent food dye or whatever.
Now you kill half the population with cancer, you're gonna get nuked in response, even non-nuke countries will be pissed off enough to get nukes just to nuke the perpetrator. But lets say you make the victims fat and sick and die a little younger just enough to get 1% hit on economic growth...
Some people would say this is how we ended up with trans-fats and margarine and vegetable oils in general or certain veg oils in specific.
Certainly, corn syrup has caused more human and economic devastation that fission, nerve agents, or most any WMD I can think of...
The problem with this is that this is basically genetic engineering, you might successfully make a low-level economic growth impact now, but future generations will be resistant to the poisons as those weak against them die off. You are securing your own demise long-term if you don't subject your population to the same.
This is far more fun than believing in an emerging accident. You don't have to eat corn syrup, btw.
I guess if it's tasty then it's fair game.