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.
How Ginkgo Bioworks leverages synthetic biology to shape future of food
Patrick Boyle is currently the Head of Codebase at Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based synthetic biology company that makes and sells ...
Viewpoint: In debate over ‘dangerous’ chemicals — from aspartame to glyphosate — advocates cash in peddling pseudoscience
What if you were told, on good authority, that drinking a glass of diet Cola is a serious cancer hazard? ...
Fertilizers are critical for farming — but they are often environmentally costly. Synthetic biology may offer a solution
Almost everything about synthetic fertilizer sucks. It sucks for the climate, generating 2.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, more than ...
Pakistan case study: Illness and famine follow in wake of climate-induced weather disasters
To document one of the most widespread threats — extreme heat — The Post and CarbonPlan, a nonprofit that develops publicly ...
Viewpoint: ‘All-natural’ animal meat misnomer designed to make plant-based foods look bad
The culture war pitting plant-based meat against its animal-based counterpart rages on, it seems. Plant-based alternatives are called “ultra-processed,” “fake” ...
Another GMO approval: Philippines approves commercial growing of Bt insect resistant cotton
The Philippine Bureau of Plant Industry issued a Biosafety Permit for the Commercial Propagation of Bt cotton (GFM cry1A) developed by the Philippine ...
Viewpoint: ‘California’s plan to choose politics over science on pesticides will dump millions more tons of carbon and threaten food security’
Pesticides undergo a rigorous evaluation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It takes an average of more than 11 ...
America needs food: Why do presidential debates ignore agricultural policy?
Much of the presidential debates involve rehashing points of the last two presidential terms. Gun rights, immigration, and the conduct ...
As grocery store prices rise, consumers open to experimentation opt for animal meat over more expensive plant-based versions
In a survey of more than 1,200 US adults, Purdue University found that consumers largely preferred beef from cattle over ...
Viewpoint: Finding optimal crop traits using traditional breeding is like finding ‘a needle in a haystack’. Here’s how precision breeding can help
Finding the best genetic characteristics of a crop one season at a time through traditional plant breeding was like finding, ...
What’s behind recent surge in ‘magical’ health regimens? Getting to bottom of diet and nutrition science
Public health messaging is often a difficult tightrope walk (see: COVID-19) and that is especially true for anything related to ...
Talking Biotech Podcast: Kevin Folta talks with a crime lab expert on how DNA can solve cold cases
DNA has been an invaluable tool to make certain matches between a suspect and a crime. Since its early use ...
Is lab-grown meat environmentally harmful?
U.C. Davis researchers concluded that producing cell-cultured meat could actually be more burdensome to the environment than its traditionally farmed ...
‘Pinkglow’ pineapple: What gives this genetically-modified pink pineapple its distinctive rosy color?
Scientists have engineered a pink pineapple: It's unassuming on the outside but a blushing pink on the inside. The new ...
How heirloom seeds help preserve genetic diversity
Safeguarding heirlooms may be more important now than ever, as the full scope of our current biodiversity emergency continues to come into ...
Sequencing the watermelon family tree reveals ‘lost’ disease-resistance genes that were bred out generations ago
As autumn looms, we’re enjoying the last bites of sweet, juicy watermelon ...
Quixotic vision: Why advocates’ obsession with agroecology will prolong poverty in Africa and the rest of the developing world
Like in the rest of the world, the vision for the future of agriculture in the developing world is highly ...
Viewpoint: Why hyped ‘dangers of glyphosate’ is not a story in Slovenia
Plant protection products are a perennial bone of contention between environmentalists and farmers ...
Organic food is healthier than conventional? Cholesterol is bad for you? Here’s 10 debunked nutrition myths
There are several longstanding nutritional myths many of us have fallen prey to. We are here to tell you: it ...
Kenya looks to GMO cotton to jumpstart textile industry
Kenya recently said it will leverage adoption of Bt cotton to revitalise the textile and apparel industry. The government is ...
How a ‘foreign invasion’ contributed to Hawaii’s devastating wildfires
After a catastrophic wildfire that killed more than 100 people in Hawaii, eyes have turned toward an unexpected culprit: invasive ...
Can we ‘vacuum carbon dioxide from the atmosphere’ to fight global warming?
In August, the Biden Administration granted $1.2 billion in federal funding to kickstart a project intended to vacuum carbon dioxide up ...
Viewpoint: ‘What would a future without the weed-killer glyphosate look like?’
Glyphosate helped end the reign of the weed once it was approved in 1974. Then, when combined with genetic modification ...
Podcast: Talking Biotech with Kevin Folta — How to respond when anti-biotechnology activists call scientists shills
If you've ever publicly communicated enthusiasm for a new product or technology, you inevitably have been accused to being a ...
Viewpoint: Claiming a ‘slippery slope’, Non-GMO Project opposes synthetic palm oil, which would protect biodiversity, limit climate change and reduce pollution
Palm oil is ubiquitous, in part because it has a higher yield and lower cost of production than any other vegetable ...
Cost of GMO bans: Global crop assessment finds GMO restrictions limit food production to ⅓ of potential, with poorer countries hit hardest
How costly are GM bans? To find out, we calculate by how much yields would have been higher in 2019 ...
Canadian farmers abandon organic certification because approved ‘natural’ chemicals can’t control devastating grasshoppers
Organic growers may have decisions to make after grasshoppers chomped their way through prairie fields this summer ...
