GM toy tomatoes

January 2022

Genetic engineers have always liked playing with tomatoes.

The first GM food to hit US supermarket shelves was a tomato with a gene for ripening switched off [1]. This was Calgene's Flavr Savr tomato designed by science to last longer on the vine (it did), to be easier to handle during distribution (it wasn't), to taste better (it was pronounced 'mediocre') and to sell at a premium (it didn't). The Flavr Savr tomato's main claim to fame was its inappropriate (some would say absurd) use as a model GMO to set US regulations for all subsequent GM foods. Launched in 1994, the disappointing Flavr Savr finally sank into oblivion three years later.

The first GM food to hit UK supermarket shelves was Zeneca's cheap tinned Californian tomato puree made from GM tomatoes designed for lower processing costs due to their engineered reduced water content. These sank into oblivion in 1999 after two successful years and one disastrous year when consumer awareness caught up with the meaning of its "genetically modified" label.

Fast forward to 2008 when the media went wild reporting preliminary results of a GM 'anti-cancer' tomato produced by GM crop research scientists at the UK's John Innes Centre (JIC). These novel purple-fleshed, high-antioxidant ('anthocyanine') tomatoes were going to "save your life" (Martin).

Hopefully, no one held their breath waiting for their life to be saved by a tomato, because they'd still be waiting.

In 2013, a PR plug popped up with the exciting news that the GM tomatoes are not only purple and slow to ripen (the scientists who created them "are not sure why"), but taste better.

In 2014, the JIC announced the arrival in the UK of Canadian-grown purple GM tomato juice for further studies [2,3].

This expensive double transatlantic route for a crop which grows very well in the UK was necessary because the UK scientists didn't think it worthwhile to do the GM safety testing needed for GMOs in Europe and took advantage of Canada's lower regulatory requirements.

Things went quiet again for a few more years until 2021 when the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) conveniently scrapped its requirements for GM plants to undergo three years of trials in fields or greenhouses before marketing. Clearly America was the place to go with purple anti-cancer GM tomatoes. Approval was expected by the end of 2021, and in the meantime the GM tomato seed would be made available for home growing.

Creating and growing GM toy tomatoes is easy, but genetic engineers still have to contend with the entrenched resistance to GM food in US consumers.

"The (American) market for products certified to be non-G.M.O. has increased more than 70-fold since 2010, from roughly $350 million that year to $26 billion by 2018. There are now more than 55,000 products carrying the "non-G.M.O. Project Verified" label on their packaging. Nearly half of all U.S. shoppers say that they try not to buy G.M.O. foods, while a study by Jennifer Kuzma, a biochemist who is a director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University, found that consumers will pay up to 20 percent more to avoid them." (Kahn)

High time, it seems, to start educating Americans to love GMOs. On queue, a lengthy rambling article appeared in the New York Times heavily featuring the purple GM tomatoes as possibly "the first genetically modified anything that people actually want" and rehashing all the same tired propaganda that was being fed to the media and their audiences a quarter of a century ago.

Here in the UK, a whole stack of other toy tomatoes seem to be under construction by our genetic engineers. Possibilities in the pipeline include GM tomatoes which can generate artificial vitamin D or resveratrol anti-oxidant, and GM tomato drug-factories which can generate seratonin anti-depressant or levadopa for Parkinson's disease.

... and why are we talking about "toy" tomatoes? That's because the creator of the GM purple tomato at the JIC tells us "A lot of what (JIC genetic engineers) do is play".

Now you know.

OUR COMMENT

Antioxidants have acquired a reputation as miracle health supplements. Just because fresh fruit and vegetables are good at preventing cancer, doesn't mean artificially boosting one constituent of one vegetable will have any health benefit, and the GM nature of that boost could cause considerable harm.

The nonsense in the New York Times GM-promotional doesn't bear comment: you've heard it all before. Except for a couple of points ...

The statement in the New York Times article that snapdragons whose genes have been copied into the purple tomatoes are "a relative" is intended to trivialise the nature of the genetic transformation employed.

Tomatoes are members of the nightshade family, a group of plants well-known for its biochemical capacity to produce several glycoalkaloid neuro-toxins and other nasties. There's no reason to assume that disruption of the genome with artificial genes couldn't trigger an innate but latent ability to generate unusual harmful substances. Snapdragons are not nightshades, but their foreign genes forced into the tomato could provide that very trigger, especially under environmental stress.

Several scientists are quoted as pointing out that "a gene is just a narrow set of biological instructions". True, in a reductionist sense, but it trivialises gene function outrageously.

No matter how 'narrow' the instruction given by a gene is, it can and does interact with all the other genetic instructions unfolding in the cell. Engineered genes forced into the genome are not part of any natural genomic nor cellular control systems.

Finally, the New York Times article claims, intriguingly, that "In recent years, many environmental groups have ... quietly walked back their opposition as evidence has mounted that existing G.M.O.s are both safe to eat and not inherently bad for the environment." If any of our readers knows who are these "many environmental groups" who haven't been following the science on GMO health and environmental issues, please get in touch with GM-Free Scotland and let us know.

Background

[1] Belinda Martineau, First Fruit (The Creation of the Flavr Savr Tomato and the Birth of

Biotech Food), 2000, ISBN 0-07-140027-3

[2] WHAT USE IS PURPLE GM JUICE? - March 2014

[3] RED NOT PURPLE - March 2014

Sources:

·         Jennifer Kahn, Learning to Love G.M.O.s, New York Times, 20.07.21

·         Cathie Martin, How my purple tomato could save your life, Mail Online, 8.11.08

·         Purple tomatoes won't beat cancer, Cancer Research UK blog, 27.10.08

·         Lisa Melton, The antioxidant myth: a medical fairytale, New Scientist 2.08.06

Photo Creative Commons