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.
Viewpoint: ‘Cattle laundering’ — Is the beef industry deforesting the Amazon?
On paper, the Brazilian Amazon is one of the most protected ecosystems on the planet. There are thousands of protected areas, in ...
86% positive: Cultivated meat gains support from top American chefs
A survey from food-tech company SuperMeat found that 86% of American chefs are interested in serving cultivated meat. Concerns for the ...
Viewpoint: ‘25 years of proof that GM foods are safe for the environment and humans’ – Nobel Prize winning geneticist makes case for embracing gene editing
Genetically modified plants are not cultivated in Europe, the regulatory requirements are too strict and the reservations of the population ...
Viewpoint: Ukrainian farmers ‘increasingly bleak’ in face of Russian shelling and dropping temperatures
Ukrainian farmers are doing their best to keep farming and producing food in their war-torn country, but the outlook is ...
Viewpoint: Why Columbia University has disaffiliated itself from ‘pseudoscience quack’ Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz
Throughout the election cycle, Columbia has stayed silent on Oz, whose campaign office did not respond to requests for comment ...
Shrink shrimp’s carbon footprint by half? Here’s how AI-led land-based seafood farms can sustainably meet our protein needs
Inside a humid warehouse in suburban Indianapolis, a company called Atarraya is using large metal containers and the latest technology ...
Cruelty-free foie gras? Europe’s largest foray into luxury lab-grown foods
French cultivated meat startup Gourmey has raised €48 million in what is thought to be the largest fundraising round of ...
Viewpoint: Should Europe stop using pesticides? This binary, all-or-nothing thinking misrepresents the benefits of crop protection chemicals
Long confined to the agricultural environment, crop protection issues now have a societal dimension with legitimate questions about the potential ...
Would you pay $300 for a 3D-printed steak? One day you may be able to print your own meat for a fraction of the cost
Would you eat lab-grown steak? A recent study from the Good Food Institute — a nonprofit thinktank — indicates that about 40% ...
‘Splatometer’: Here’s how scientists are trying to understand the environmental implications of the sharp drop of dead bugs on windshields
Experts say the lack of insect innards on our summer windshields is just one symptom of a broader decline in ...
‘Fuel of the future’: South Africa factory uses renewable energy to create ‘green’ ammonia
Ammonia is also used to manufacture explosives for the mining industry and is a key ingredient in many pharmaceutical and ...
Allergy epidemic: Up to 10% of children have food intolerances. Where did they come from?
Food allergies are becoming increasingly common, in children and in adults. Yet it’s surprisingly difficult to get a handle on ...
Viewpoint: ‘A book is not judged by whether it was written by a typewriter, pen or computer’ — Italian farmer and policy wonk on why Europe needs sensible gene-edited crop regulations
Agriculture today is facing very serious challenges for which new tools are needed. The planet's population is increasing while arable land ...
Viewpoint: Kenya needs hundreds of thousands more tons of corn to feed the country’s population. Lifting the GMO ban is a great first step
I don’t know much about Kenya’s new president, William Ruto, but I already like his approach to agriculture. In the ...
With organic demand outstripping supply, USDA commits $300 million to help convince farmers to grow organic
Over the decades, something unexpected happened — demand for organics started increasing so fast that it began outstripping the supply produced ...
A ‘dazzling, eggplant-colored’ genetically-modified tomato slated for US rollout. Here are its prospects in Australia
Last month, the US Department of Agriculture issued a statement on a dazzling eggplant coloured fruit ...
Targeting sustainable farming: Here’s how much money low and middle-income countries are missing out on if they reject genetically-modified crops
GM crops produce higher farm incomes plus reduced land tillage practices and lower insecticide use, bringing substantial environmental benefits. While ...
Rice paddies in the desert? How China is creating productive farmland and growing ‘seawater rice’ using heat-tolerant biotech crops
In a bid to finally ensure that nobody ever needs to go hungry in China again, researchers there have been ...
Carbon removal breakthrough: Genetic tools that have created climate resilient crops could capture carbon dioxide as well
To understand just how powerful genetic tools can be in agriculture, take a look at [Pamela Ronald, a plant geneticist ...
If you want cell-based meat pioneered in the Netherlands, you should… head to Singapore? Outdated regulations hold back Europe’s slaughter-free cultivated meat industry
Singapore’s regulatory landscape, diverse population, and openness to emerging technologies have created an attractive test ground for cultured meat. Dutch ...
Getting over GMO food fears: Inside Japan’s slow but progressive march towards embracing genetic modification
Japan has been conducting studies on GM food crops including soybeans and rapeseed since 2006, and the latest 2020/2021 report ...
Next generation biofuel: Genetically-modified duckweed can grow in wastewater, and it yields seven times more oil than soybeans
While plants such as corn and soybeans are major sources of biofuel, they're grown on land that could otherwise be ...
Underground farms, aquatic meals and more: What would our food system evolve into if an asteroid hit Earth?
Imagine a giant asteroid strikes the Earth a few years from now, blocking out the Sun and collapsing agriculture worldwide ...
Viewpoint: Europe’s ‘Green’ activists wield McCarthy-era tactics by promoting ideology over science, undermining the push for sustainable food
Calls for realistic and workable regulation of “new genomic techniques” (NGT or new breeding techniques, “NBT”) for plant breeding cannot be heard. Those ...
Uganda’s challenge: Climate change, crop disease and pests are crippling agriculture. Here’s why new solutions are so desperately needed
Climate change has come along with incurable crop diseases and insurmountable pests and our main cash and food crops are ...
Organic vs natural: How food grown from genetically engineered seeds can address growing consumer expectations
What is a ‘natural’ food product? Depending on who you ask you’ll likely receive a different answer. As regulators, processors, manufactures ...
Australia approves trial run of high-yield herbicide-resistant GM canola and mustard seeds
Australia's Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR) has issued license DIR 188 to Nuseed Pty Ltd., for the limited ...
