Colorado voters who last fall decisively defeated a measure requiring labels on certain foods that have been genetically modified will be interested in news that the U.S. Agriculture Department has approved a gene-altered apple that resists browning.
It’s another example — although to be honest, a relatively modest one — of why GM crops shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, and especially not out of bogus fears regarding safety that scientists overwhelmingly reject.
In The New York Times, the executive director of the anti-GM Food & Water Watch that “this GMO apple is simply unnecessary” — which, strictly speaking, is true. Many of the advances that characterize modern civilization are unnecessary to the extent that humans got along without them for most of their history. So?
Restaurants and other food-service providers that offer pre-sliced fruit might be quite keen for the Arctic apples — of the Granny Smith and Golden Delicious varieties — created by the Canadian company Okanagan Specialty Fruits Inc. And Okanagan is a small firm that defies the image usually invoked by GM opponents of huge agribusiness corporations dominating the science.
If there’s a market for the apples and no evidence that they are unsafe (and there isn’t), then Okanagan should indeed be allowed to proceed.
The company says it will be open about how the Arctic apples have been engineered. So it’s possible American consumers will balk at buying or being served them. But at least they’ll be given a choice, which is more than they’d get in those countries that have ignored science and banned GM food.
The great promise of GM foods actually has more to do with crops that resist drought and insects, and that provide nutrition critical to a still expanding world population, than with apples that brown more slowly when cut open or bruised. But a better apple? What’s wrong with that?
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