Gene-edited food coming to plate, no regulation included
For Pete Zimmerman, a Minnesota farmer, the age of gene-edited foods has arrived. While he couldn’t be happier, the high-tech soybeans he’s now harvesting are at the crux of a long-running debate about a frankenfood future.
Zimmerman is among farmers in three states now harvesting 16,000 acres of DNA-altered soybeans destined to be used in salad dressings, granola bars and fry oil, and sold to consumers early next year. It’s the first commercialized crop created with a technique some say could revolutionize agriculture and others fear could carry as-yet unknown peril.
In March, the top U.S. regulator said no new rules or labeling are needed for gene-edited plants since foreign DNA isn’t being inserted, the way traditional genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, are made. Instead, enzymes that act like scissors are used to tweak a plant’s genetic operating system to stop it from producing bad stuff — in this case, polyunsaturated fats — or enhance good stuff that’s already there.
While that seems a winwin, “you don’t know what those mutations or rearrangements might do in a plant,” said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at the Consumers Union. He wants the plants tested for safety before they’re marketed, and clearly labeled once they’re sold.
Tinkering with plant genes could lead to unplanned deletions or complex genetic rearrangements that cause “unintended consequences” within the food chain, he said.
The Trump administration, however, disagrees. In a March 28 statement, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said his department has no plans to regulate new plant varieties developed with gene editing, countering a European Union decision to designate the technique as producing GMO crops.
In his statement, Perdue called gene-editing an “innovative” technique that’s “indistinguishable from those developed through traditional breeding methods.”
The end result: Geneedited plants can be developed and marketed in the U.S. much more quickly and at less cost than GMOs that blend DNA from different plant varieties, a highly regulated technique with mandated field trials that can take a decade or more to develop.
That’s allowed the Minnesota-based biotech firm Calyxt Inc. to get its soybeans into the market within five years from the time Dan Voytas, the company’s science chief and co-founder, altered the DNA in a single soybean cell in 2012 using an enzyme called TALEN he helped develop at the University of Minnesota.