Regardless of how this discussion plays out, I still like the term Frankenfood.
Now that's branding!
From The Milken Institute Review, January 13:
GMO or Not GMO? A $64 Billion Question
What’s in a GMO? That was an easy call when the first food stemming from a genetically modified organism received FDA approval: It was a plant created by combining the DNA of multiple species. The FDA still uses this definition, but advances in plant biology over the past three decades mean it is now possible to modify foods substantially without employing gene-splicing technology. Are these foods GMOs? Who knows. Or more to the point, who gets to decide?
Maybe it’s time for new rules and regulations, or at least new language regarding genetically modified food crops. That’s the premise of a recent paper in the prestigious journal Science with no less than 17 authors. They argue that because new technologies have blurred the distinction between genetic engineering and conventional plant breeding, it’s time for regulations based on the product rather than the process that creates it.
This struck me as entirely reasonable – but, evidently, I’m in the minority. The paper has been ignored or dismissed, lamented Fred Gould, the lead author who is a professor of agriculture at North Carolina State University and director of the university’s Genetics and Genomics Academy. “Nobody’s happy with it. If you’re anti-GMO you won’t like it, and if you’re a company, you don’t want regulation,” he said. “We’re in an untenable situation.”
Since the approval of the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994, we’ve seen the completion of the human genome project, the invention of the CRISPR gene-editing process, and the spectacularly successful mRNA vaccines for Covid-19. And yet, genetically modified food crops still arouse unfounded fears, while the “non-GMO” label has become one of the most successful branding efforts in marketing history.
Bred in the Field or Bred in the Lab?If you’ve shopped for apples in recent years you’ve surely noticed the diversity available, with varieties offering special characteristics like greater firmness, more sweetness or a tarter edge. One such, the Honeycrisp apple, developed at the University of Minnesota, has “explosive crunchiness” and honey-like sweetness, the result of controlled hybridization that requires taking the pollen from one kind of apple tree and putting it on the flower of another. The result is a fruit unlike its genetic parents — but it’s not considered a GMO.Or you may have purchased Arctic apples, available in Fuji, Gala or Granny Smith varieties, which were developed by Okanagan Specialty Foods using a technology called RNA interference. This is a biological process in which the expression of specific genetic information can be inhibited through exposure to certain RNA molecules. Okanagan uses it to produce apple varieties that don’t brown when bitten, sliced or bruised, which the company says means they last longer and generate less waste. They are considered GMOs, and thus required approval for cultivation by the Department of Agriculture. (Hoping to quell fears, Okanagan offered them for voluntary review by the FDA, too.)
Both of these apples are genetically distinct from pre-existing varieties, but the Okanagan apples drew opposition from organic food advocates and anti-biotech activists when they debuted in 2016, while the Honeycrisp launch in the early ’90s largely went unnoticed.
“Somehow, just because it was traditional, we’ve always been comfortable with plant breeding,” said Professor Gould. “We just assumed it was okay, though there were some instances with potatoes and tomatoes where there was a toxicant that came along with the breeding, so you take it off the market. Then GMOs come along in the ’80s, and people say, ‘We don’t know where the genes are going, so we’re going to regulate it.’”
Gould and his coauthors note that the first widely commercialized genetically engineered crops all involved the transfer of DNA from one or more donor species into a recipient crop (“transgenic”), with the initial placement in the genome being random for the most part. Today, genetic engineering technologies based on CRISPR and genomics can substantially alter the properties of a plant by making changes in a single nucleotide in a specific location. Some countries, notably Argentina, have already exempted such foods from safety testing.
CRISPR is a technology that can be used to edit genes, with world-changing possibilities. The technology provides a way to find a specific bit of DNA inside a cell and then alter it. CRISPR has also been adapted to do other things, such as turning genes on or off without altering their sequence. CRISPR’s co-inventors, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020.
Plant breeding has kept up with the times as well. “You can change plants dramatically with non-genetic engineered breeding,” Gould explained. “Companies look for ways of doing things that could be done trans-genetically, but they do it with CRISPR… They’re spending money to avoid regulation; we’re saying we’re beyond that. It’s not 1986 anymore.”....
....MUCH MORE
