Daily Food & Agriculture Digest
Every day, the staff of the Genetic Literacy Project scours the Web for stories on a range of agricultural and food issues, including the GMO debate, conventional and organic farming, regulations, new breeding technologies and sustainability. We publish excerpts of those stories and encourage our readers to visit the original publications for the complete stories.
Lab-cultured eel alternative to an over-fished delicacy? Israel-Japan partnership looks to 2025 launch
Forsea Foods, the only known company working on cell-based eel, has created the first prototype of its cultivated eel. The ...
Disease is poised to wipe out much of Africa’s rice crop. Still-unapproved gene edited varietals may be the only hope
A new study has found that CRISPR technology can be used to edit genes in some strains of rice, developing ...
Viewpoint: Who is behind reactionary European movement to hobble lab grown meat revolution?
Vienna, Paris and Rome, along with nine other EU countries, are set to argue that meat grown in a laboratory ...
Bayer to appeal $2.25 billion judgment that its glyphosate weedkiller caused worker’s cancer
Bayer was ordered on January 26 to pay $2.25 billion to a Pennsylvania man who said he developed cancer from ...
Tomatoes ready for harvest in 40 days? Gene edited prototypes could transform one of the world’s most popular fruits
Scientists have just genetically modified cherry tomatoes to make them easier to grow, and the future applications could include making them more ...
From the plow to GMOs, here are 8 innovations that radically transformed agriculture and human history
What are the agricultural inventions that have had the most impact? Here's a chronological list of some of the most ...
After EU Environment Committee vote approving relaxed crop gene editing rules, full European Parliament vote looms in 10 days
The European Parliament’s Environment Committee (ENVI) approved on January 24 new rules for new genomic techniques (NGTs). The plenary will ...
‘Cell-based meat grows like a tumor’: A new ad campaign targeting cultivated meat industry criticized as ‘deceptive and unscientific’
A new public information campaign against cultivated—or “lab-grown”—meat is being run by a group with close links to a controversial ...
Urban farming impact: Growing food in cities has six times the carbon footprint of conventional agriculture
A new University of Michigan-led international study finds that fruits and vegetables grown in urban farms and gardens have a ...
Better tasting, climate-proof coffee: Largest genetic map of Arabica coffee helps researchers grow optimized beans of the future
Researchers in Italy pieced together the most complete genetic map yet of Arabica coffee, the world's most popular drink ...
Patenting plants: Here’s why the oft-criticized system enables innovation
Intellectual property rights can be classified as copyrights and industrial property rights. Copyrights cover intellectual and artistic works. Industrial property ...
USDA: Why cell-based meat is critical to address climate change
In a historic move, USDA-NIFA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative's Sustainable Agricultural Systems (SAS) program invested in cultivated meat research ...
How China’s decision to aggressively expand GMO soybean planting and imports is reshaping geopolitical trade and food wars
China’s recent decision to expand the pilot planting of genetically modified soybeans has the potential to reshape the global soybean ...
Swiss consumers are more resistant to gene-edited crops than Americans. What could change the status quo?
This study investigated what consumers from the United States of America (i.e., a country where gene technology is legal and ...
Midwest farmers feel pinch from tighter regulations restricting development of next-generation weedkillers
Reuters interviewed two dozen farmers, scientists, weed specialists and company executives and reviewed eight academic papers published since 2021 which ...
Mother Jones joins science-literate chorus criticizing the American Academy of Pediatrics’ bungled critique of GMOs and glyphosate
Last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued new guidelines for doctors fielding parents’ questions about the risks of foods containing genetically modified ...
Viewpoint: With only 4% of New York farmland organic, why is the state letting this narrow special interest group dictate crop protection policy for all farmers?
The 1980s farm crisis wasn’t only a fiscal and economic burden on the states and the farm workers, it also ...
Clothes made of banana peels: How fruit waste can be turned into a sustainable cotton alternative
Every year, the world produces about 10 million metric tonnes of bananas a year. 35% of the banana’s weight are ...
Next breakthrough CRISPR crop? Turning wild rice species into a domesticated crop
[Jiayang] Li, a plant geneticist at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology in Beijing, is working on a wild ...
Israel becomes first nation to approve a cell-based beef product
Aleph Farms has announced that Israel’s government agency has issued regulatory approval for Aleph Cuts, the “world’s first” cell-based beef ...
Viewpoint: Science or scare-mongering? How many pieces of misinformation can you find in this disgraceful American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) attack on GMO crops and glyphosate?
On Dec 11, 2023, a clinical report titled, “Use of Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) – Containing Food Products in Children” ...
Here’s how CRISPR is evolving into a tool to protect small African farmers
A research team has used genome editing to produce a rice variety resistant to yellow mottle virus, which is responsible for high ...
Viewpoint: ‘Drought-sensitive crops keep Kenya on the precipice of famine’ — Why anti-GMO court challenges stall biotech solutions to Kenya’s food security
Dr Chris Ojiewo of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) says Kenya is on the path of a ...
Viewpoint: Proposed Arizona lab-grown meat ban protects cattle ranch interests and holds back needed food innovation
House Bill 2121 has been introduced in the Arizona legislature and would ban the sale or production of cultivated meat ...
Ugly, browning bananas could become a fruit of the past as gene-editing tweak reduces spoilage
Bananas turning brown is a natural process that occurs over time as the fruit overripens and produces too much ethylene ...
Methane gas from cow burps and other sources accelerates global warming. Here’s a genetic tweaking technique that could transform it into organic fertilizer
A Bay Area biotech firm is working on a clever strategy to capture a worrisome greenhouse gas, and in the ...
Nearly half the Earth’s land mass is devoted to growing crops, with no large arable areas still uncultivated. With demand for food expected to skyrocket by 2050, what are our options?
By 2050, the global population is projected to total 9.7 billion people. That’s nearly 2 billion more folks on the ...
