A potato genetically engineered to eliminate a potentially harmful ingredient that emerges in the high heat required for French fries and potato chips has been approved for commercial planting, the Department of Agriculture announced Friday.
The potato’s DNA has been altered so that less of a chemical called acrylamide is produced when the potato is fried. Acrylamide has been shown to causecancer in rodents and is a suspected human carcinogen. The newly designed potato also resists bruising.
The potato was developed by the J. R. Simplot Company, based in Boise, Idaho, one of the nation’s largest potato producers and a major supplier of frozen French fries to McDonald’s. The resistance to bruising is a characteristic long sought by commercial users of potatoes because the damage — which usually occurs during storage and shipment — makes them unusable.
Simplot is also applying for approval of another genetically modified potato that is resistant to late blight, the cause of the Irish potato famine. The U.S.D.A. is considering that application.
The approval applies only to growers in the United States. Other nations have their own rules — some of them much more stringent — on the growing ofgenetically modified foods. The European Union, for example, has been much more reluctant to approve the modified crops.
Potatoes are the latest genetically engineered crop to get approval in the United States. Others include corn, soybeans, alfalfa, canola, sugar beets, certain types of yellow squash and zucchini.
The question now is whether the Innate potato, as Simplot calls it, will be adopted by food companies and restaurant chains, given opposition to genetically engineered food among some consumers. Groups opposed to genetically engineered crops have already pressed McDonald’s to reject it.
A genetically engineered potato failed to catch on once before. In the late 1990s, Monsanto began selling potatoes genetically engineered to resist the Colorado potato beetle.
But the market for the product collapsed after big potato users told farmers not to grow the potatoes, according to news reports at the time.
J. R. Simplot itself, after hearing from its fast-food chain customers, instructed its farmers to stop growing the Monsanto potatoes.
This time around could be different, however, because the potato promises at least potential benefits to consumers, not just farmers. And unlike Monsanto, Simplot is a long-established power in the potato business and presumably has been clearing the way for acceptance of the product from its food and restaurant company customers.
Simplot hopes that the way its potato was engineered will help assuage consumer fears. The potato does not contain genes from other species like bacteria, as do many genetically modified crops. Rather it is engineered with DNA sequences that serve to silence four of the potatoes’ own genes involved in the production of certain enzymes.
That is not likely to persuade groups opposed to such crops, who say that alteration of enzyme levels might cause unpredicted changes in other characteristics of the potato.
How much of a consumer benefit is not clear. While the World Health Organization has called for more study and moderation in levels of acrylamide in foods, the National Cancer Institute says that scientists do not know with certainty if the levels of the chemical typically found in food are harmful to human health.
The nonbruising characteristic of the Innate potato is similar to that of genetically engineered nonbrowning apples, which have not yet been approved for commercial growing by the Department of Agriculture.
No comments:
Post a Comment