Engineering the Future of Food.
Lexile: 1190L
Publication: Futurist(May/Jun2012)
Author: Schonwald, Josh
Tomorrow's genetically modified food and farmed fish will be more sustainable and far healthierthan much of whatwe eattoday -- if
we can overcome ourfears and embrace it Here's how one foodie learned to stop worrying and love "frankenfood."
The Plant Transformation Facility at the University of California, Davis, has been the scene of more than 15,000 "transgenic events,"
which is the term molecular biologists use when they blast DNA from one life form into another. In room 192 of Robbins Hall, a brick
building not far from the student union, thousands of microscopic plantlets grow in Petri dishes bathed in pink and fluorescent blue
light.
Here, molecular biologists can mix what were previously sexually incompatible species together using a gas-pump-like tool called the
Helium Particle Delivery System. Using bullets (literally) made out of gold, they fire genes from one species into another in a
bombardment chamber. The Davis lab has given birth to grapes spiked with jellyfish, tomatoes spiked with carp, transgenic squash,
transgenic carrots, transgenic tomatoes.
Another important site in genetic engineering history, an innocuous office building about a ten-minute drive from Robbins Hall, is the
birthplace of the most audacious plant in the history of high-tech plants. Among biotech people and anti-bio-tech people, this plant, a
tomato, needs no introduction. The so-called Flavr Savr was supposed to be the game changer -- longer shelf life, better yield, better
taste. Calgene, the company that created the Flavr Savr, claimed it could bring "backyard flavor" to the supermarket tomato.
Achieving "backyard flavor" in an industrial-scale, California-grown tomato has long been one of the holy grails of the $4 billion-plus
tomato industry. During the pre-tomato launch hype-a-thon, the president of Calgene claimed that genetic engineering could not only
bring us the tomato of our childhood dreams, but also remake the taste of the tomato, tailored to our every desire: "Eventually we're
going to design acidic tomatoes for the New Jersey palate and sweet tomatoes for the Chicago palate."
The Flavr Savr turned out to be the Edsel of the produce world, a spectacular failure not just for Calgene, but for the whole biotech
industry. This purportedly longer-shelf-life tomato became the lightning rod for much of the anti-genetically modified organism
(GMO) movement. People learned about other transgenic crops -- a potato with a chicken gene, tobacco with a firefly gene, and,
perhaps most notoriously, a tomato with an Arctic flounder gene, which provided an image for a Greenpeace anti-GMO campaign.
Nongovernmental organizations cried foul. Consumers were alarmed. It was an op-ed about the Flavr Savr where the term
Frankenfood first appeared. As for the tomato's taste, most reports said that, far from achieving backyard flavor, it was not that great.
By 1997, supermarkets stopped stocking the bioengineered tomato. The Flavr Savr was a financial disaster for Calgene.
But that was almost fifteen years ago.
One fall day, across campus from the Helium Particle Delivery System, I went to visit Kent Bradford, the director of UC Davis's Seed
Biotechnology Center and presumably among the best-positioned people at Davis to answer my burning question: Whatever happened
after the Flavr Savr?
Genetic engineering obviously didn't stop with the Flavr Savr debacle; the use of GMOs has exploded. Many genetically engineered
foods can be found throughout our food supply. Genetically modified soybeans and canola dominate the market, which means that
most processed food -- everything from your spaghetti to your Snickers bar -- has GM ingredients. More than 90% of American cotton
and 80% of corn crops come from GM seed. All of these crops, though, are what are called "commodity crops." They're not what you
pick up at your local greengrocer. They're industrial crops, secondary ingredients. Not what interested me.
What I wanted to know is what was happening with the quest to achieve "backyard flavor"? And what I couldn't get out of my head
was this claim that tomatoes could be engineered for precise tastes -- "acidic tomatoes for the New Jersey palate and sweet tomatoes
for the Chicago palate."
What was going on? Did they just stop working on "sweet tomatoes for the Chicago palate"? Wouldn't the Flavr Savr creators be
intent on redemption, going back to the bench to try again? Or did everything just stop?
Strangely, Bradford, a plant geneticist who has been at UC Davis since the early 1980s, shared my curiosity about the post-Flavr Savr
world -- he just had a different way of explaining it.
"Yes. Where are all these output traits?" he said. (Input traits are breederspeak for what's so often critical to agriculture -- disease
resistance, insect resistance, adaptability to particular environments. An output trait is breeder parlance for what I was looking for -traits that improve taste and texture, traits that could change the dining experience of the future.)
Bradford had observed that, almost twenty years after the biotech revolution began, there were few signs of any "Second Generation"
crops. The First Generation was the commodity crops: soybean, maize, cotton, canola, sugar beets. Most expected that, after the first
wave of crops proved their worth, the next wave would be more consumer focused -- better tomatoes, tastier lettuce. But biotech
specialty crops (that's the crop scientist term for produce) hadn't appeared. In fact, a GMO specialty crop hadn't been commercialized
since 1998. Even Bradford, a longtime biotech believer, considered, "Maybe the genes weren't working?"
A few years ago, Bradford and his collaborator Jamie Miller set out to find out "what was going on" with bioengineered specialty
crops. They surveyed the leading plant science journals and tracked GM crop field trials -- all subject to government regulation -- from
2003 to 2008. Searching for citations related to specialty crops, they found that research not only had never stopped but was thriving.
"There was research on 46 different species," says Bradford. "More than 300 traits were being tested." A lot of it was on input traits
(disease, weed resistance), but breeders had also experimented with output traits. "It was happening at the research level, but it just
didn't move to the next step. It just stopped there."
There was an obvious explanation, Bradford says, sighing. "It was regulatory."
Post Flavr Savr, in response to growing consumer concerns about transgenic breeding, a regulatory process was created that treated
genetically modified foods differently from conventionally bred crops. If you have iceberg lettuce, using classic plant-breeding
techniques (crossing, back-crossing), the assumption is that the resulting lettuce is safe. There's no requirement for pretesting. You just
introduce the product into the market. But with GMOs, Bradford says, the attitude was that "it's guilty until proven innocent."
A genetically engineered crop must pass review by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the
Food and Drug Administration before it is commercialized. The cost could range from $50,000 to tens of millions of dollars to win
regulatory approval. For every "transgenic event," the genetic engineer must show exactly what genes went into the plant and how
they function, and then prove how the plant makeup has been altered. That research is costly. So is plant storage. Once a transgenic
creation is spawned at the Plant Transformation Facility, it is whisked to the UC Davis Controlled Environment Facility, where it will
stay in a tightly secured warehouse. Or it will be airmailed to some other place, where it'll live out its life in another intensely
biosecure environment.
The process is costly and time-consuming, which partly explains why biotech crop development is largely in the hands of the
agribusiness giants -- the Monsantos, Syngentas, and Bayer Crop Sciences of the world -- who have the resources to undertake the
process. With such high approval costs, big companies have favored commodity crops with market potential for hundreds of millions
of dollars in sales, not tens of millions.
We talked about the reasons for what Bradford calls "the bottleneck" for the biotech specialty crops. It was NGOs such as Greenpeace
and the Union of Concerned Scientists that were the bogeymen, in his view. Big Organic, a $20 billion industry, had a vested
interested in stopping GMOs. Back in 2000, when the USDA was developing the National Organic Program standards, the first draft
did not prohibit genetically modified foods, but then activists launched an anti-GMO campaign, flooding the USDA with a tidal wave
of letters -- 275,026, to be exact. The USDA then determined that genetically modified organisms would not be included under the
standard for organic produce. Being deemed un-kosher in the organic world is a hard stigma to overcome.
The anti-GMO movement hasn't lost momentum; the Non-GMO Project has become the fastest-growing food eco-label in North
America, with sales eclipsing $1 billion in 2011. As for Europe: After a 12-year moratorium on GMO crops, the European Union
greenlighted a GMO potato -- but not for human consumption. It would be used to produce higher levels of starch, which is helpful for
industries like paper manufacturing. In short, the European market is still overwhelmingly closed for genetically modified foodstuffs.
According to the World Health Organization, 250 million children worldwide, mostly in the developing world, have diets lacking in
vitamin A. Between 250,000 and 500,000 of these children go blind every year. Yet, there is a crop, developed more than 13 years
ago, that is fortified with vitamin A compounds. If children unable to get vitamin A from other protein sources simply eat this crop,
they will not go blind and die. It is named "golden rice" because of its yellowish hue, and every health organization in the world has
declared it to be safe to eat.
But golden rice was not bred through traditional means; it was bred in a lab. So golden rice is, by its opponents' definition,
Frankenfood, and therefore, like many other GMO crops, it's been ferociously opposed.
Now let's say that golden rice does get approved (as some predict it will in 2013), and let's say it saves millions of children from
starvation and blindness in Asia. Or let's say bioengineered crops slow down the creation of algal dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
Or a low-fat, anti-cancer potato becomes a smash hit at McDonald's. Consumer worries about GMOs evaporate, becoming as
anachronistic as fears of microwave ovens causing cancer. The regulatory barriers are gone; transgenic plants are treated the same as
any other. The Monsanto juggernaut is over; small, boutique companies and open-source plant breeders in the comfort of a Brooklyn
loft have a chance to contribute to the vegetable economy. Then what happens?
* Food will look different. There will almost surely be more varieties. Austrian heirloom lettuce varieties like Forellenschluss and
heirloom tomatoes like the Brandywines and Cherokee Purples could become readily available. So many vegetables today aren't
commercially viable because of disease vulnerabilities or production inefficiencies. But in a genetically engineered future, all the
flaws that make them ill-suited for commercialization become mere speed bumps.
"You could have disease immunity almost immediately," says Bradford. "And it would be very easy to take care of these other
variables. Instead of taking a decade to ready a crop for commercialization, it will take a matter of months."
It's possible that colors would change. You could find pink lettuce and blue arugula -- maybe with a green orange slice for St. Patrick's
Day. Color becomes malleable because it's often a single trait.
* Food will taste different. It is also likely, some geneticists say, that in 2035 some lettuces won't taste anything like lettuce. The
notion of tomatoes with customized flavor was a reckless ambition in the 1990s when the Flavr Savr debuted; modifying taste is
among the most challenging tasks for plant geneticists. You can silence a gene in the potato genome, tuning down the bitterness or
acidic quality, but it's still a fractional impact on taste.
Taste is complex. A tomato, for instance, has between five and twenty compounds that influence flavor. Changing flavor requires not
one gene, but packages of genes, and the genes must be placed precisely. Then there is texture, inextricably linked to flavor.
Modifying taste eludes technologists today, but in the next ten years, that could change, as bio-engineers will be able to choose from a
genetic cassette -- stacks of genes that together confer desired traits. With a few mouse clicks, geneticists say, they could choose from
a range of flavors, textures, and colors.
"Think of it like Photoshop," says C. S. Prakash, director of the Center for Plant Biotechnology Research at Tuskegee University. "At
some point that won't be a far-fetched metaphor." It will be technologically possible, therefore, to create a Caesar salad without the
Caesar dressing; the flavor of the Caesar could be bred into the lettuce.
Textures would also be far easier to change. You could bite into an apple that has the consistency of a banana. In a biotech-friendly
future, fruits and vegetables would merely be another frontier for adventurous and often mind-bending culinary pioneers.
* We'll see produce that doesn't spoil. In a biotech future, the sell-by dates will be different; instead of rushing to eat your lettuce in a
week, l00seleaf lettuce could languish, unsealed, for a month or more. One of the huge problems in the produce industry is
perishability, with close to one-third of all fresh fruits and vegetables produced lost to overripening or damage during shipment. But
bioengineers are already making progress in changing the post-harvest behavior of plants. By having an enzyme shut off, an apple has
been modified so that it won't turn brown after it is sliced, and a banana has been engineered to ripen more slowly.
Although small organic farmers are often the most hostile to technologized solutions and may be the least likely group to adopt hightech crops, it's possible that GMOs could change the farmers' markets in places like Chicago or Buffalo.
"In New York and Illinois, it's pretty hard to grow a lot of crops because they're going to freeze," explains Dennis Miller, a food
scientist at Cornell University. "But you could engineer in frost tolerance. You could extend the growing season and bring in more
exotic crops into new regions. I don't know if we'll be growing bananas in upstate New York, but it would expand the options for
locally grown fruits and vegetables."
Most breeders expect that the biggest change for consumers would be something that's already familiar to any Whole Foods shopper.
We already have calcium-fortified orange juice and herbal tea enhanced with antioxidants, but in an agbiotech-friendly world, the
produce section would likely be overflowing with health enhancements. Orange potatoes enhanced with beta-carotene., calciumenhanced carrots, and crops with enhanced antioxidants are already in the pipeline. By the 2030s.. vegetables and fruits will be
vitamin, nutrient, and beneficial-gene-delivery vehicles.
To illustrate how this would play out, Prakash points to the work of Cynthia Kenyon, a University of California-San Francisco
molecular biologist, who extended the life span of a ground worm by six times by changing a gene called "def 2."
While this is in the realm of basic science, Prakash also suggests that, if something like a "fountain of youth" gene is found to benefit
humans, it could be bred into vegetables. By combining genetics and plant science, a whole new realm of products would likely
appear.
Some geneticists envision a future in which crop development would become a highly collaborative process: Nutritionists, geneticists,
physicians, chefs, and marketers would work to develop new fruits and vegetables aimed at various consumer wants.
A scientist in a white lab coat doesn't conjure the same feelings as a micro-farmer in a straw hat. Growing fish in a warehouse isn't
quite as
stirring as pulling them out of a choppy Alaskan sea. A meat-spawning bioreactor doesn't have the same allure as a dew-covered
Virginia pasture.
But it's time to broaden the foodie pantheon.
Let's continue to celebrate our heirloom-fava-bean growers and our grass-fed-goat herders. Let's carefully scrutinize the claims of
nutritional science and keep a wary eye on new technologies, especially those with panacea-like claims from multinational
corporations with monopolistic aims and a history of DDT and Agent Orange production. But let's not be so black-and-white; let's not
be reflexively and categorically opposed to any and all technological solutions. Savoring the slowest food and foraging for wild
asparagus shouldn't be viewed as at odds with championing lab-engineered vitamin A-enhanced rice that could save children from
blindness.
Pairing a locally grown, seasonal mesclun mix from an organic micro-farm with cobia, a saltwater fish grown in an industrial-sized
warehouse, is not an incompatible, ethically confused choice.
I make this point because of the rising tide of food-specific neo-Lud-dism in America. While well intentioned and often beneficial in
its impact, this foodie fundamentalism is unfortunately often associated with a dangerous antiscientism. If we're going to meet the
enormous challenges of feeding the world's still-growing population, we are going to need all the ingenuity we can bring to bear.
My modest hope: Let's keep an open mind. Let's consider even the fringy, sometimes yucky, maybe kooky ideas. Let's not miss
opportunities to build a long-term sustainable future for our planet.
"The proces is costly and time consuming, which partly explains why biotech crop development is largely in the hands of the
agribusiness giants."
"With a few mouse clicks, geneticists say, they could choose from a range of flavors, textures, and colors."
Adapted from the forthcoming book The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food by Josh Schonwald. Copyright
©2012 by Josh Schonwald. To be published on April 10, 2012, by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
AquAdvantage® Salmon includes a gene from the Chinook salmon, which provides the fish with the potential to grow to market size
in half the time of conventional salmon, according to maker AquaBounty Technologies.
By Josh Schonwald