Forbes Promotes The Use Of Gene-Edited Foods While Disparaging Organic Foods

The following report is by Forbes, written by Juergen Eckhardt:

Fruits and veggies are nature’s gift to humanity. Chock full of vitamins, delicious and colorful, they deserve a starring role in our diets. But some things tend to get in our way, like seasonality, cost, availability, and inconsistent or off-putting flavor. When we’re also surrounded by cheap, delicious, and ubiquitous processed foods, it’s all too easy to reach for the chips instead of the cherries.

But now, thanks to new genomic techniques, we’re starting to see a wave of bioengineered produce that enhance the nutritional value or accessibility of the original varieties. To name a few examples: there’s the Norfolk purple tomato in the U.S., which incorporates two genes from snapdragons to increase production of anthocyanin in the tomato, a rich source of antioxidants. There’s the high-GABA tomato in Japan, which uses CRISPR to quadruple the level of that amino acid, which can help lower blood pressure. There’s the Arctic Apple, which uses RNAi to knock out the apples’ own gene that causes it to brown when bruised or sliced. These sliced apples have an extended shelf life of 28 days and result in reduced food waste. And there’s the CRISPR’d salad mix that removes the wasabi-like flavor from mustard greens, which have double the nutritional value of romaine lettuce.

“If you look five years into the future as the gene editing market expands, there should be hundreds and hundreds of products by that point,” says Jon Entine, executive director of the non-profit Genetic Literacy Project, which focuses on biotech in medicine and agriculture. “You might even see sections of grocery stores that highlight this in a positive way.”

Genetically engineered foods as a selling point rather than a scare tactic would be a welcome and remarkable shift for a culture that has erroneously demonized it for years, going back to Golden Rice.

A Decades-Long Odyssey

One of the original products that set out to improve people’s health through bioengineering was Golden Rice. In the late 1990s, several European scientists discovered how to genetically modify rice to produce beta carotene, which the human body converts to Vitamin A, an essential nutrient that is missing in the diets of many people in lower-income countries.

Golden Rice “has potential, if adopted widely, to reverse vitamin A deficiency, which affects 125 million children worldwide,” says Adrian Dubock, executive secretary and member of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board. According to the WHO, an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 who are vitamin A-deficient become blind each year, and half die within a year of going blind. “If you can get something into staple food especially at no cost and with no detriment, this can really make a big difference.”

Yet the rollout of Golden Rice was notoriously hampered by anti-GMO activists like Greenpeace, who protested the use of the technology on false grounds, claiming that only natural foods are safe. They even broke through fences to destroy test crops. In fact, The World Health Organization, National Academy of Sciences, and other major science organizations, including the FDA, have found no evidence of harm posed by genetically engineered foods on the market, and have deemed them as safe as conventional foods…