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.
Viewpoint: African nations leverage gene editing to break Europe’s anti-technology stranglehold on food production across the continent
On the African continent, a dozen genetic-editing projects are being put at the forefront of agriculture. However, for the past 20 ...
Genetic diversity squeeze: Camembert is on the verge of extinction. Here’s what can be done to rescue ‘endangered cheeses’
Each hunk of Camembert or smear of brie is an ecosystem, an assortment of fungi and bacteria that turn milk ...
Australia is first country to approve genetically engineered banana, modified to resist disease
Queensland researchers have just received news over 20 years in the making – their genetically modified banana species called QCAV-4 has ...
Viewpoint: ‘Science is evolving, and times have changed’ — Foodie France slowly opening doors to ecology-promoting gene-edited crops
Science is evolving, and times have changed. “Life is constantly mutating. Every year there are 240 million mutations in a ...
Climate-smart agriculture: Here are the barriers keeping South Asian farmers from adopting next generation farming techniques
A researcher originally from Bangladesh has been looking at farms in South Asia to determine why agricultural practices aimed at ...
‘Peach tree grown’ hamburgers? Marjorie Taylor Greene’s incoherent fulminations targeting cell-based meat highlight ignorance of right-wing science rejectionism
For some reason, a lot of conservatives have a knee-jerk negative reaction to lab-created meat. I checked the writings of ...
Latin America: A biotech laboratory and world champion in GMOs and gene editing
Since the commercial release of GMOs began in the mid-1990s, Latin America has been a key region in the industry ...
Want to sample lab-grown meat? Too late — experimental tastings at premier restaurants around the world are on pause. Here’s why, and what the future holds
July 2023 was a landmark moment for the cultivated meat industry. For the first time, meat brewed directly from chicken ...
Concord grape colored tomato with antioxidant-packed flesh? It contains a key secret: Snapdragon DNA
As home gardeners in the U.S. page through seed catalogs and pick out their favorite heirlooms, there's a new seed ...
Viewpoint: New low for anti-GMO activists — Nigerian environmental groups claim modifying crops causes sterilization
A few weeks ago, the chairman of the Global Prolife Alliance (GPA), Dr Philip C. Njemanze, sent a petition to ...
Kosher animals? Here’s why not all cellular-based meat will pass muster with Jewish law
From the perspective of Jewish law, lab-grown meat poses several novel questions, most obviously if it’s kosher. The short answer ...
Viewpoint: Are we in the midst of a ‘beepocalypse’ or besieged by ‘false bee alarmism”?
“Bee populations in the United States are declining at a rapid, unprecedented rate,” Ohio State University first reported in 2020. Phys.org added last ...
Urban farming sounds great in theory — but releases more CO2 than conventional agriculture. Here’s what needs to change
A new study in Nature Cities compared carbon emissions from small farms and gardens in major cities across the U.S. and Europe with ...
Bioluminescent petunias: Light-up mushroom genes are secret ingredient in green glowing genetically modified plants — and they are now on sale
Consumers in the United States can now pre-order a genetically engineered plant for their home or garden that glows continuously. At a ...
Arizona joins slate of states pushing cell-based meat bans
Arizona, along with Florida and Texas, is the next state to propose stringent laws like censorship and bans for cultivated ...
Why gene editing could slingshot cell-based meat to economic viability
A shocking report from the University of California, Berkeley suggests that cultivated meat could reduce emissions by 96 percent. However, currently, the ...
Idaho lawmakers introduce bill to curb pesticide lawsuits, citing exploitation of the legal system by anti-chemical activists
State senators in Idaho have introduced new legislation that aims to limit chemical exposure and injury lawsuits filed against pesticide ...
Boost to regenerative agriculture: Nanotechnology-enhanced bacterial fertilizer might could reduce farmers’ synthetic chemical dependency
Claims we may only have 60 harvests left appear to be hyperbole but the fact remains that our agricultural land ...
USAID’s funding freeze on blight-resistant GM potato research in Ethiopia could have grave consequences
Researchers are left in limbo as they await funding for a genetically modified potato project that lost its financing as ...
Easy-to-use, biodegradable plant-based pesticide detector in development could provide an extra layer of food safety
Brazilian researchers have created a sensor that can be attached to the skin of fruits and vegetables to check for harmful ...
Changing livestock diets: Here’s how crickets will help address agricultural sustainability challenges
During the late summer and early fall, you can hear the commotion in a customized, food-grade shipping container on the ...
Viewpoint: ‘Villainous’ methane-burping cows may be part of an integrated solution to climate change
Beef and dairy cattle have been demonised by many as one of the main causes of increased green house gas ...
Religious Muslims cleared to consume lab-grown beef if origins of cells are from ‘humanely-killed’ cows
Lab-grown meat is a rising trend among those looking to reduce their carbon footprint ...
Grow in the dark vertical farming? Here’s how gene-editing could allow crops to grow without light
Startup Square Roots announces a new program to prove that light can removed from a commercial vertical farming system and ...
Organic is not for everyone: Availability and affordability limit organic produce to higher-income households
One of the major reasons why people aren’t buying into organic food products is the lack of availability, particularly in ...
Viewpoint: Some Republican-governed states want to ban or limit sales of cell-cultivated meat. Here’s why that’s a bad idea
At the end of January, Florida’s House and the Senate Agriculture Committee approved a bill introduced by Republican Rep. Danny ...
Post-apocalyptic farming? How seaweed could help us avert starvation during a nuclear winter
A nuclear war would plunge our planet into a deep nuclear winter. In the worst-case scenario, a nuclear exchange... could ...
