Daily Food & Ag 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.
Biotechnology’s role in combating global food waste
A stark and heart-wrenching paradox haunts our modern world: while nearly one-tenth of humanity goes to bed hungry, a tidal ...
Health Canada opens grocery stores to cloned animal foods. Is the nation ready?
According to Health Canada’s own consultation documents, Ottawa intends to remove foods derived from cloned animals from its “novel foods” ...
Viewpoint: Can urban farming and agroecology rescue our planet?
By 2050, more than two-thirds of us will live in cities. Could urban farming feed 10 billion? Urban agriculture (UA) covers everything ...
Taste, nutrition, yield, disease resistance, climate resilience: England becomes first country in Europe to legalize the development and sale of gene-edited plants and food
Niab has welcomed the entry into force today (13 November) of the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 for plants ...
Pakistan paying an economic price for its reluctance to embrace crop biotechnology
The iconic green fields of the Punjab, once the heartland of Pakistan’s cotton economy, face a silent crisis. While official ...
How science figured out how to contain peanut allergies
It turned out that the guidance parents and pediatricians ... had been following, to avoid giving peanuts to babies and ...
Activists decry EPA approval of effective PFAS family herbicide
The Trump administration is poised to again approve a new Pfas “forever chemical” pesticide ingredient, a move that is drawing ...
Teaching AI to farm
[At] the North Carolina Plant Sciences Initiative (N.C. PSI) at NC State, data is considered an essential part of farm equipment. It’s ...
When gene editing offers health and nutritional benefits, consumer acceptance rises significantly
The research, “Consumer Acceptance of Gene-Edited Foods,” found that consumers are significantly more open to gene-edited products when the benefits ...
As Trump’s tariff war with China oscillates, America’s soybean farmers are trapped in a vise
Just days after the Trump administration pledged a $20 billion loan to backstop the finances of Argentina under libertarian President ...
Setting aside $18 billion: As glyphosate cancer litigation persists, Bayer places its survival bet on SCOTUS and federal legal protection
Bayer … notes that regulators in countries from the US to Japan to New Zealand have recently reaffirmed that glyphosate-based ...
What would be the global labor impact if the world embraces a more plant-based diet
A global shift towards healthier, more sustainable eating patterns could reshape agricultural employment across the world, according to new research ...
How eating garlic makes your armpit sweat more attractive and other mysteries of the genetics of smell
"The past few decades have revealed that odour is shaped by our genes, hormones, health, and hygiene," says Craig Roberts, ...
The genetics of food cravings and aversions
The binding interaction between taste receptors and food compounds drives our sensory preferences. Researchers are paving the way for personalized ...
Why Texas and its marginalized communities are the epicenter of MAHA’s food and health movement
With its diverse population, a political establishment eager to please the Trump administration, and a cabal of prominent MAHA converts, ...
Here’s an argument for breaking the binary framework that now separates organic and conventional
Life was simpler when ‘conventional’ and ‘organic’ covered all approaches to farming. This binary viewpoint has helped the marketing of ...
Meeting the challenge of reducing the sustainability impact of synthetic fertilizers
Engineering soil microbes to fix atmospheric nitrogen and reduce the use of synthetic fertilizers in cereal crops is a hot space ...
Agricultural and food companies launch counter offensive against Kennedy’s food dye proposal
Big food companies are working with conservative strategists to build support for national standards that would preempt the state bans ...
What happens when weight loss drug users phase out too fast?
We celebrate the success stories of GLP-1s, but we rarely talk about the crash that follows when treatment stops. And ...
CRISPR tomatoes that can produce up to 400% more fruit are in development
In what could be a boon for local tomato production around the world, trait development company Phytoform just unveiled a ...
Viewpoint: A 33%+ drop in food allergies challenges RFk, Jr.’s scientifically unsupported claim that aluminum in vaccines is causing a surge
[A] new study published in the journal Pediatrics found the rate of food allergies has declined from about 1.5 percent of all American children ...
Ultra-processed foods stimulate dopamine and are addictive? Latest science challenges activist consensus
A neuroimaging study of young, healthy adults showed that consuming a milkshake did not, on average, result in a significant ...
Distancing United States, Africa-China agriculture partnership poised to strengthen
At the 2025 General Assembly of the China-Africa Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Alliance (CAASTIA), held ... in Addis Ababa, ...
Peanut allergies have plunged 43% in 8 years. Here’s how it was accomplished
Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) compared peanut and food allergies before pediatric guidelines about feeding changed in 2017 and after, ...
Turning last night’s leftovers into fuel for airplanes of the future
One person’s trash is another person’s… jet fuel? Strange as it might sound, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign ...
Swine-origin flu remains a deadly threat. Here is a gene-edited way to protect pigs – and us
In a breakthrough for animal health and biosecurity, scientists at the Roslin Institute have successfully developed pigs resistant to classical ...
China escalates its push to replace U.S. and Europe in modernizing African farming
The 2025 General Assembly of the China-Africa Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Alliance (CAASTIA) kicked off ... in Addis Ababa, ...
