You may have noticed a new phrase on the packaging of your favorite breakfast flakes or crispy snacks: “Contains a bioengineered food ingredient." That’s because since January 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has required this language to be displayed on the packaging of some products that contain substances called “genetically engineered ingredients,” “genetically modified organisms,” or, as they're more commonly known, “GMOs.”
Beckles describes another technique for developing GMOs that comes under the second category, called RNA interference (RNAi). As the National Library of Medicine notes, in this process a cell is manipulated into destroying a segment of its own RNA and the protein it encodes, thereby reducing the gene’s expression of a particular trait. Scientists created the Arctic Apple, which does not brown when cut, using this technology.
There are additional techniques for bioengineering food, but they are less commonly used.
Several GMO crops are grown and sold in the United States for human and animal consumption, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), including:
Other foods that come in bioengineered forms around the world include eggplant, papaya and salmon, the USDA reports.
“Absolutely,” says Wright. “Genetically modified foods have been well studied.” She points out that the USDA has approved the GMOs on the market as being safe for human consumption. Plus, a study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found no evidence that genetically engineered plant crops that were commercially available carried any more risk to human health than conventionally bred crops.
More recently, the National Academies has stated that foods with GMO ingredients aren’t harmful and don’t pose a higher health risk than non-GMO food. When scientists compare health trends in North America to trends in Europe, where genetically engineered crops are rare due to widespread opposition, they have not found differences in “patterns of cancer, obesity, diabetes, kidney disease, gastrointestinal problems, celiac disease, autism, or food allergies,” say the National Academies.
Furthermore, there are advantages to using GMOs, says Wright, from increasing food production using herbicide-tolerant and insect-resistant crops, to enhancing the nutritional value of food as a bulwark against malnutrition. She points to so-called golden rice, which is genetically modified to produce beta-carotene, which is converted into vitamin A by the body. It gets its golden hue from the nutrient and is designed to help address widespread vitamin A deficiencies in developing countries. You won’t find it available yet in the United States or most other countries, but farmers in the Philippines have begun harvesting the grain, according to Time.
Another example is the aforementioned Arctic Apple, which is sold in the United States in bags of precut slices. Methods commonly used to control apple slice browning include sulfites, which can cause allergic reactions. "You prefer not to have these apples dipped in chemicals,” says Beckles. RNAi technology has been used in the Arctic Apple to block an enzyme that causes browning when apple flesh is exposed to oxygen in the air, as research details.
Over the years, GMO crops and ingredients have been a source of controversy, despite widespread scientific agreement about their safety. Among respondents to the aforementioned Pew survey, 37 percent reported believing that genetically modified food is safe, compared with 88 percent of scientists in the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific professional society, who say such foods are “generally safe.” Yet two-thirds of the public believe that scientists don’t have a clear understanding about the health effects of GMOs.
Historically, negative public sentiment about GMOs have contributed to banning and restrictions in nations around the world. For instance, 19 European Union (EU) member states have opted out of genetically modified crop cultivation in all or part of territories, according to the USDA; still, a number of countries in the EU do import genetically modified soybean, corn, and rapeseed products, mainly for feeding livestock and poultry.
Reasons for being opposed to GMOs include:
Beckles chalks up the differences between the European and American regulatory approaches to politics and differing attitudes toward corporations. “America is more capitalist. Here, I would think that corporations have more power with the U.S. government than what we would see in Europe, and the European politicians have basically ignored science. They’re letting their populations drive a fear-based approach to GMOs.”
Europeans aren’t the only ones approaching GMOs with caution. Despite assertions by the inventors of golden rice that the GMO can address malnutrition and save lives, it has only been cleared for cultivation in one country, per the International Rice Research Institute. Opponents say there are cheaper solutions to addressing vitamin A deficiency that don’t require dependence on GMOs and the biotechnology companies that could ultimately profit from their widespread cultivation.
Despite all that, international opposition appears to be softening against the latest generation of GMOs: gene-edited organisms. In July 2023, the European Commission proposed loosening restrictions on gene-edited plants after a review of its regulations.
So-called new genomic technique (NGT) plants that could also occur naturally or be obtained through conventional breeding techniques would be treated like conventional plants and exempted from GMO legislation. They would not have to be labeled any differently from conventional plants. Other NGTs, such as those that involve species that are not sexually compatible in nature, would still be subject to GMO rules.
Beckles explains why such distinctions are being made. Unlike the earliest-introduced GMOs, which use foreign material such as bacteria to modify a plant’s genome, gene editing does not involve the introduction of foreign material or large changes to the DNA of the organism. She gives the example of wheat and the four basic building blocks of DNA named adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T), billions of which shuffle and combine in complex strands to determine its characteristics.
“Wheat has 16 billion of those letters, and with gene editing you can change one letter. And if you do it in the right gene and in the right part of the gene, you can get a beneficial change — maybe a wheat that uses nitrogen differently, that needs less fertilizer or that makes high-fiber starch or that flowers earlier. That's why gene editing is so powerful. It relies on our knowledge of what the genes are doing in the plant, but we can do it with such precision and accuracy that we hardly make any changes at all,” she says.
