Salmon, apples and potatoes — 3 healthy and sustainable foods that you can buy now under the new “bioengineered” label

Label required by Jan. 1, 2022, on food products containing bioengineered products and byproducts. Credit: USDA.

(this post originally appeared on Genetic Literacy Project - January 4, 2022

The “bioengineered” label for foods sold in the United States is now in effect. Any food or food ingredient that has been genetically modified must include a label that says “bioengineered,” or come with a phone number or QR code guiding consumers to more information online.

On the positive side, the national labeling law avoids the nightmare of state-by-state requirements. The major negative is that the label could well become the target for negative campaigning and marketing around the fear-based, anti-GMO narrative and misleading “Non-GMO” labeling that have permeated food-related messaging for so long.

Fortunately there are some exciting “consumer-oriented” products finally becoming available which can display that newbioengineered label that would help consumers to overcome the disinformation and embrace technologies that actually improve our food system and our ability to enjoy it. The most notable are non-browning Arctic Apples, non-browning Innate potatoes and healthy, fast-growing, AquaBounty Salmon, which I wrote about two years ago in an article in Forbes and on Medium titled: “Three Foods I Wish I Could Buy at Costco.” These novel options that are not only tasty and healthy, but also have benefits in terms of sustainability, climate-smart farming, and food waste reduction.

I’ll discuss each example in detail below, but the big picture is that consumers in some locations are now able to find these products for sale, although they are not yet in national chains like Costco or Walmart, which for now are bowing activist pressures. Supplies are limited, but there is also a hesitancy on the part of many retailers who don’t want to be “first” to step into something potentially controversial. The truth is that there is no justification for such controversy since all the safety or environmental questions have already been addressed during the extraordinarily long and rigorous regulatory process overseen by the USDA, EPA and FDA. The farmers that grow major commodity crops have been able to take advantage of biotech crops for a long time, but consumers and specialty crop growers are only beginning to have that opportunity. Let’s see what that looks like.

Arctic Apples

Twenty-five years ago a Canadian fruit grower named Neal Carter and his wife Louisa started a project to develop non-browning apples with the vision of reducing food waste and reversing the declining consumption of that healthy fruit. With a very small organization (e.g. less than 12), Okanagan Specialty Fruits Inc.(OSF) developed varieties of well known apple cultivars in which a gene for a particular enzyme was turned off or “silenced.” That enzyme is what turns the fruit brown when it is bruised or cut. Turning it off makes the fruit more robust in general and dramatically reduces the amount that is rejected from harvest through storage and processing. The other non-browning trait advantage is that Arctic apples can also be sold as a ready-to-eat, sliced product that retains the fruit’s full flavor, aroma and vitamin content.

OSF shipped me a box of these as whole apples a few years ago and I was able to take them to a potluck dinner a couple of hours after slicing and compare them with regular apples. Everyone who tried them thought they were great, wanted to be able to buy them, and didn’t worry at all about them being “GMO.” I think that will be a normative reaction once consumers can see biotech advantages first-hand instead of just hearing them demonized by notorious anti-technology groups and writers.

OSF was acquired in 2014 by Intrexon, a publiccompany where R.J. Kirk served as Chairman and CEO. As of 2020 ownership transferred to Third Security, LLC, a venture capital firm led by Kirk. Kirk encouraged a vertical integration business strategy focused on the sliced apple or “Fresh cut” market. Neal Carter continued to run the company as he still does today. Talking with him last week I was impressed by the scope of his expertise and understanding ranging from the growing the trees to the processing step, to nutritional information, food safety protocols, product distribution options, marketing and building of a solid public image. He also has a solid understanding of the science involved in the genetics of the Arctic® offering and how that technology has become ever more sophisticated over time.

OSF has purchased or leased 1300 acres of land for apple production land in Washington State where it currently grows 2.6 million trees. They have plans for additional orchards and their own dedicated slicing facility in the near future. Their apple variety options include Arctic Goldens, Arctic Grannys, and as of this year Arctic Fuji. Arctic Galas will be next. In the longer term, non-browning red skinned apples are on the list. They are also hoping to develop more robust, non-browning cherries that will avoid the stem decline or pitting that tends to occur with that delicious fruit.

Credit: Articapples.com

OSF’s apples are now being sold asstand-alone slices or as a component of fruit mix products packaged in cooperation with companies providing the other ingredients. There is also a dried version which is special because the slices don’t require sulfur products to prevent browning while they were being dried. These products are increasingly available at some regional grocery retailers; at certain convenience store chains and food service outlets. Some is now provided through military procurement. In some geographies the sliced fruit is now available for home delivery from Amazon Fresh. The convenience store and home delivery options have become even more popular during the pandemic. In the long term these slices might be found at a Costco or other national chains, but this will require expanding orchard plantings that that is a relatively slow process (4-5 years from planting to achieve full productivity).

Overall, Arctic apples address many societal needs and desires: a positive olfactory experience (flavor, aroma, appearance, and texture), convenience, health benefits, food waste reduction, and efficient use of farmland and inputs.

Innate Potatoes

In the process of harvesting, cleaning, sorting and storage of potatoes, they can get bruised leading to black spots and browning inside the potato that makes them ugly and undesirable. This damage generates substantial waste all along the food chain from the packing house, to processors, to stores and through to the consumer. Black spots and browning are also very undesirable for making something like hash browns at home.

The Simplot potato company has been using biotechnology methods to “turn off” or “silence” a PPO gene that is similar to the one silenced in Arctic Apples. They have also turned off genes to reduce the amount of the amino acid asparagine in the potatoes that can turn into the naturally occurring compound acrylamide during frying. Acrylamide is linked to various health effects so having less is a nice outcome. These potatoes have been on the market since 2015 as “white russets” and were labeled as “bioengineered” even before the requirement to do so in 2022. This has not been controversial with the consumers who have had access to the product, mainly at regional grocery chains and restaurants, not in national chains like Costco, Safeway, Kroger, etc. Again this is partly because of retailer’ hesitancy to “be first,” but as the supply of these potatoes increases it will be interesting to see whether that picture can change

Simplot has other grower- and consumer-oriented potato improvements in the development pipeline. They have moved genes from wild potatoes to make their potato cultivars more resistant to late blight – a fungal disease that caused the Irish potato famine in the 19th century and which still requires substantial control efforts by potato farmers today. That trait is “cisgenic” or “intragenic” in that it is based on potato genes being used in potatoes.

Simplot also added these resistance genes to the potato cultivars typically grown in Bangladesh and Indonesia and provided them for free to those farmers. They are also working on resistance to a virus disease (Potato Virus Y) which has become a bigger issue for North American potato farmers since an insect called the potato psyllid has moved into the Northwest. That pest movement has likely enabled by climate change in that pest can now survive the warmer winters in that major growing region. Hopefully, the anti-technology voices won’t deprive the farmers of these pest resistance traits as they did successfully with the Colorado potato beetle resistance trait developed by Monsanto and first sold in 1997. Growers saw great benefit from those “NewLeaf Potatoes,” but the controversy led to their removal from the market in by 2001.

Simplot has future plans to use CRISPR on russet varieties and even extend them on smaller, non-Russet potatoes. They recently announced they are working with the strawberry breeding company, PSI to make various consumer-oriented options in that popular fruit crop using gene editing. Simplot has also received a CRISPR license to work on browning and bruising reduction for avocado! That could prevent a lot of food waste at the consumer level.

The many sustainability advantages of Innate non-browning potatoes. Credit: Simplot Biosciences

Overall the Simplot efforts address many positive societal benefits: food waste reduction, enhanced consumer experience, health benefits, farmer pest management and land-use-efficiency.

AquaBounty Salmon

The third food is a kind of Atlantic salmon that has been improved using biotechnology so that it can grow more rapidly and require less feed while still having the highly desirable nutritional content of other salmon (e.g. the heart-healthy omega-3 fats). The US imports ~400,000 metric tons of farmed Atlantic salmon each year, around 16% of the growing global demand (Norway, Chile, Canada and Scotland are the largest producers).

AquaBounty salmon are raised in bio-secure, re-circulating, terrestrial aquaculture systems (RAS) that return 95% of the water each day and remove any sludge for use as fertilizer on nearby farms. In the tanks the fish can be carefully monitored. They are also free from the parasites and pathogens found in the ocean so they don’t need antibiotics or vaccines. Another advantage is that they are not exposed to ocean pollutants like heavy metals or microplastics.AquaBounty salmon can be raised anywhere such a facility can be built – the first one is in near Muncie Indiana so the transport carbon footprint is minimized to many US markets vs international imports.

Salmon swimming in tank. Credit: AquaBounty

While this desirable fish option is now commercially available for some Americans and Canadians, it will take time to expand the number of production facilities sufficiently to serve national food retail chains like a Costco. Unfortunately my home state of California might never be on the list for local production. There is a state regulation against raising these “GMO” fish. There is no rational reason; it isn’t that there is danger of these fish getting loose in the Pacific Ocean (they are all sterile females and the tanks are secure). I’m still trying to trace the “logic” here, but ironically there is an exception in the state law for aquarium hobbyists to buy novelty “Glofish” that are genetically engineered to glow because they have DNA from jellyfish.

It makes no sense to allow anyone to buy cool“GMO” pets and not allow local production of one of the most resource efficient, environmentally friendly, safe, healthy and delicious food production options that will eventually be available to most regions.

What’s next?

If you want to know more about the label, and which foods or ingredients will be labeled as such, check out the USDA website and hear a good discussion featured in the first part of this podcast.

If you as a consumer are excited about these options and would like to see more innovative food products in the future, I would encourage you to seek them out in stores or on-line and to ask for them at your favorite retailers. Our best hope of overcoming the decades-long, fear-based campaigns against modern biotechnology is to finally “vote with our food dollars” and let our voice be heard through the comment boxes or websites that are available.

Not Your Grandfather's Tobacco, Not Your Father's Marijuana

A zero-THC variant of Cannabis could help not only with uses where the “high” is undesirable, it would also make this kind of relief more practical by clearly separating the medical and recreational uses of this plant. (Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)

(This post originally appeared on Forbes on 6/19/17)

A plant biotechnology company called 22ND Century (NASDAQ: XXII) is developing two very interesting new crop varieties. One is a line of tobacco that barely makes any nicotine. The idea is to use that tobacco to make cigarettes that can help people quit smoking. 22ND Century’s other new offering is a line of marijuana that doesn’t make THC. The goal in this case is to make it possible for people to realize various medical benefits of Cannabis without the physical and legal complications of the high. Both of these offerings demonstrate how the increasingly sophisticated scientific understanding of plant genetics can lead to positive contributions.

The plants we humans enjoy as cultivated crops provide us with energy, protein, vitamins and micronutrients. Plants are also pretty amazing chemists that provide us with a diverse collection of and useful compounds. These include delectable flavors and fragrances that enhance the experience of foods. Many foods also provide beneficial “bio-pharmaceuticals” such as anti-oxidants.

Some plants provide us with chemicals we use as drugs. The coffee plant makes caffeine, which many of us use as a stimulant to help start our mornings. Some excessive consumption of caffeinated products can be problematic, but in general this is a plant-based drug that society uses safely and without regulation.

Tobacco makes nicotine – a psycho-active chemical which stimulates certain receptors in the brain. Unfortunately nicotine is highly addictive and drives users to continue smoking in spite of the profoundly negative health outcomes of doing so. In spite of the extremely well documented risks to both smokers and bystanders, smoking remains a legal, if sometimes taxed or restricted, activity. According to the World Health Organization, over 1.1 billion people smoke.

How smoking varies around the world

The main product concept for the very low nicotine tobacco is for prescription cigarettes that doctors can recommend to patients who want to stop smoking. Kicking the nicotine habit is quite difficult. Independent studies have been encouraging about the potential for smoking cessation aided with cigarettes made with the very low nicotine cigarettes (VLNC). The physical and sensory ritual of smoking without the narcotic effects seems to be an easier transition.

Cannabis contains the psychoactive drug, THC, which is the basis for its recreational use. The plant also makes a number of other chemicals that can potentially relieve nausea for those in chemotherapy and prevent seizures for those with various conditions. Sorting out the medical potential has been complicated by the patchwork of differing legal status throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world.

A zero-THC product could help not only with uses where the “high” is undesirable, but it will also make this kind of relief more practical by clearly separating the medical and recreational uses of this plant.

Low THC versions of Cannabis have long been grown as “Hemp” with many valuable fiber and food applications. But under some circumstances those earlier versions of the crop can still make too much THC. That is part of why they cannot be legally grown in many places and why the farmer faces some risk of having his or her crop rejected and subject to destruction. A zero THC Hemp could be free from those issues, and also more attractive to consumers interested in something like a source of hemp oil, hemp milk etc.

It should be obvious that these new versions of tobacco and Cannabis are “genetically modified,” as are virtually all the crops we grow. In this case the developers used the tools of modern molecular genetics like RNAi to figure out what metabolic pathways in plants are critical for the ability to make nicotine or THC. Armed with that information they could then find other ways to shut down the genes for specific enzymes to achieve the desired end result.

In making their final crop lines, the scientists behind the work at 22ND Century intentionally employed methods of genetic modification that wouldn’t trigger the regulatory or marketing problems for a “GMO Crop.” What does or doesn’t get classified as “GMO” is not a science-based criterion, and in a rational world, all advanced crop modification would be regulated by the features of the final product, not by the process used to get there. But the reality is that by avoiding the “GMO” controversy, 22^nd Century can more practically and speedily deliver these good options to the people who need them.

The very low nicotine products are currently going through the FDA review process in the U.S. The Zero THC Hemp is only awaiting the production of commercial quantities of seed. It does not require any regulatory approval as it contains no foreign DNA and is not classified as “GMO.”

You are welcome to comment here and/or to email me at savage.sd@gmail.com

The Non-GMO Food Label Is A Lie

(This post originally appeared on Forbes 6/11/16)
You may have noticed more and more food items being marketed as “Non-GMO Certified.” As Americans, we are familiar with food being sold for what it is not, so we don’t think much about the fundamental absurdity of this new labeling.

After decades of being sold “non-fat,” “zero cholesterol” or more recently “gluten-free,” this looks like just one more marketing claim. In fact, the non-GMO label is fundamentally different because it is based on an entirely false assumption.

The truth is, virtually all the foods we eat have been “genetically modified,” and often in dramatic ways. The widespread belief that our food still resembles what our ancestors domesticated out of “nature” is only a demonstration of how little we understand history and science. However, the Princess Bride meme above is pertinent, because this new appeal to our ignorance is definitely coming from “someone who is selling something.”

How some crops looked before they were domesticated.  Lots of genetic modification involved, just not understood when it was done

Recently, I saw an ad in a trade magazine that compelled me to go tilt with the windmill that is “non-GMO” labeling. The ad was promoting the potential “Texas-Sized Sales” of bags of Sweet Scarlett’s grapefruits. I love those grapefruits. They are tasty and sweet, a beautiful red color, and seedless. I’m happy that my favorite stores carry this excellent product. But at the bottom of this particular ad, I noticed the logo declaring that these are “Non-GMO Project Verified.” That crossed a line for me.

These delicious grapefruit varieties are a textbook example of how crops were genetically modified back in the 1960s and '70s using a method called “mutagenesis breeding.” Basically, seeds (or in this case pieces of budwood) were exposed to gamma radiation in substantial doses, and then sifted through to find ones with mutations to their DNA that had desirable qualities. You don’t get much more “genetically modified” than that! That positive plant breeding story could certainly be made to sound scary in terms of unintended consequences, but in fact, thousands of modern plant varieties were modified this way. To date there is no track record of bad effects on consumers. There are now far more precise and controlled ways to genetically modify crops, but only certain new methods have been singled out for opposition as “GMOs,” while clumsy old methods, like mutagenesis breeding, escape this demonization.

So my problem with calling these grapefruits “non-GMO” is simple. These fruits are absolutely “genetically modified." To call this product non-GMO is a lie. That is true for most other non-GMO labels. These are also lies that dovetail with another long-term lie that has been widely disseminated in the Internet age - a “lie with pictures.” I'm talking about the widely used, stock-photo images illustrate of ready to eat fruits and vegetables stuck full of large hypodermic needles that are used in campaigns against “GMO food” Those images bear absolutely no resemblance to how plants are genetically engineered, but they are a powerful lie that has been quite effectively used to manipulate consumers.

What is truly disappointing is that the non-GMO “labeling lie,” and its inevitable connection to the photo-lie, is officially sanctioned by the very federal agency charged with truth in labeling for foods. In its guidance document on the subject, the FDA says that while it “prefers” more accurate wording on labels, it “will not pursue enforcement actions” with regard to the use of the “non-GMO” terminology. Thanks for protecting us from inaccurate labeling, FDA.

The disease that threatens these grapefruits and all citrus is already in Texas

There is another reason that this particular kind of disinformation is a problem. The grapefruit farmers in Texas are facing a threat that is common to all citrus growers. Already, an exotic bacterial disease spread by a newly introduced insect (Asian Citrus Psyllid) has destroyed half of the oranges in Florida. The pathogen and vector have already made it to many other states, including Texas and California, and even with intensive efforts to contain the threat, it is probably only a matter of time before other citrus crops go into decline. For me, this intensifies the absurdity of marketing a very much “genetically modified” crop as non-GMO, because one of the best hopes for saving citrus crops is through modern genetic engineering – the kind where you actually know what you are doing to the genes. How will the marketers then back-track on their implicit message that “GMO” is a bad thing? Most likely the bacteria will win and the farmers and consumers will lose.

I have spent a vast amount of my own time over the last seven years writing blogs and articles defending modern agriculture against disinformation. I have great respect for the farmers who produce our food and for companies like Wonderful Citrus who clean, pack and ship that food to consumers. Thus, I’m uncomfortable calling out this and other food/produce companies who have jumped on the non-GMO labeling train. Even so, I feel compelled to do that, not just in the case of this “Texas Sized” lie, but also across the board. I challenge the food industry to reject this kind of marketing even if it is FDA sanctioned and highly appealing to your marketing folks. I’ll leave you with another thought that has been well articulated by “the Dread Pirate Robert.”

You are welcome to comment here and/or to email me at sdsavage@gmail.com.  I have tried to contact the marketing company for these grapefruits and have gotten no response.  I have contacted the non-GMO certification group, but they have yet to put me in contact with anyone willing to discuss the science related to their certification of this or other crops.  I don't know who to talk to at the FDA about this. If you know a good contact there, please let me know.