- WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- For many of your favorite foods, the future has arrived.
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- Genetic engineering, long the focus of
anticipation and discussion in American agriculture, entered the realm
of reality in a big way in 1998. The fact is that if in the past year you've
topped a sandwich with cheese, gobbled down a bowl of cereal, or guzzled
a soft drink, chances are that you've eaten foods from genetically modified
crops.
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- Although people in agriculture have been
heralding the promise of genetically enhanced crops for 20 years, few products
made it to market. Quietly, over the past three years, that has changed
in a major way. Marshall Martin, professor of agricultural economics and
director of Purdue University's Center for Agricultural Policy and Technology
Assessment, says that many common foods now use biotechnology in their
production and processing.
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- "The genetically engineered enzyme
chymosin is used in two-thirds to three-quarters of the cheese produced,"
Martin says. "Bt-corn, which allows the corn plants to resist the
corn borer, has found wide acceptance. So everyone is already eating foods
produced through biotechnology."
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- In fact, the use of genetically enhanced
corn has increased from 400,000 acres in 1996 to three million acres in
1997 to an estimated 17 million acres planted in 1998. Each year, total
corn acreage in the United States is about 80 million acres.
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- Biotechnology is used to produce some
of our most common foods:
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- * Corn produced through biotechnology
is being used in many familiar foods, including breakfast cereals and taco
shells. It also is used to make corn syrup, which is used as a sweetener
in many foods such as soft drinks, baked goods and candies.
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- * Soybeans are used in hundreds of food
products, including cooking oil, candies and margarine. In 1997, about
20 million acres of the soybeans planted in the United States were genetically
enhanced. Producers planted about 71 million acres in soybeans that year.
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- * Milk uses biotechnology because about
one-third of all dairy cattle in the United States are given bovine somatotropin,
a hormone created through biotechnology, to increase milk production per
cow.
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- Peter Goldsbrough, professor of horticulture
at Purdue, says that recent well-publicized failures of biotech crops have
led some people to mistakenly think that agricultural biotechnology is
struggling to gain acceptance. That isn't the case, he says.
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- "Biotechnology has had setbacks
recently," Goldsbrough says. "Flavr- Savr tomatoes, which were
the best-known biotech product, were pulled from the market, and so was
a virus-resistant squash. But this is not the death knell of agricultural
biotechnology."
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- According to Goldsbrough and Martin,
Flavr-Savr tomatoes failed not because of concerns over biotechnology but
because of the unexpected requirements of a new product.
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- Introduced in 1994, the Flavr-Savr tomatoes
promised the taste of home- grown tomatoes from the grocer's cooler. Typical
store-bought tomatoes are picked while they are green and hard so that
they will not spoil while they are shipped. The tomatoes then have their
red color brought out by spraying them with the plant hormone ethylene,
but they still have the lackluster flavor of unripe tomatoes.
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- Flavr-Savr was supposed to change that.
Because it had a longer shelf-life, it could ripen on the vine and then
be shipped to the supermarkets. "The problem was that they were using
the same equipment to pick and ship the ripe, soft Flavr-Savr tomato has
they had the hard, green tomatoes," Martin says. "The loss from
damage to the crop was as much as 30 percent. By the time they tried to
adapt peach-packaging equipment to handle the tomatoes, it was too late."
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- Biotechnology holds great promise for
agriculture, Goldsbrough says, and for that reason biotech-derived foods
will continue to appear on the market. "Biological processes are so
complex and diverse that somewhere there's an organism that is able to
inhibit the growth of the soybean cyst nematode, the leading soybean pest,"
he says. "We will find that organism, identify the gene or genes that
are involved, and put them into our soybeans."
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