“An Okanagan-based company is thrilled that their latest trademarked non-browning apple has been green-lit for sale on Canadian shelves, after a history of public nerves surrounding genetically modified crops.
Okanagan Specialty Fruits is the developer and grower behind ‘Arctic apple’ varieties, sold pre-sliced or diced with the promise of staying fresh and avoiding browning for up to 28 days thanks to bioengineering tweaks to the apples’ genetic codes.”
From Castanet.
“For almost all of human history, food was scarce for nearly everyone. The reason for this perpetual scarcity was that whenever food production increased, it did not lead to more food per capita but to more people.
Food production did not increase per capita. Population pressure ensured that living standards remained only barely above the subsistence level. Economic historians refer to this mechanism as the Malthusian Trap, and if you’d like to know more, you could read my article about it.
This changed in the last decades. More and more societies around the world broke out of the Malthusian Trap. We see this in the data as increasing food production in per capita terms. The chart shows that farmers have grown many fruits, vegetables, and nuts faster than the world population has increased.”
From Our World in Data.
“Rotten tomatoes no more: growing sweeter tomatoes is possible by editing just two of the fruit’s genes. Deleting the genes increased the engineered fruits’ glucose and fructose levels by up to 30% over mass-produced tomatoes, according to a study published today in Nature.
Better yet, the gene-edited tomatoes weigh roughly the same as those sold now, and the plants produce as much fruit as do current varieties. These findings could not only help to improve tomatoes worldwide but are also an important step forward in understanding how fruits produce and store sugar, the authors write.”
From Nature.
“From a peak of more than a billion head of cattle in the mid-2000s, stocks at the start of next year will fall to 923 million head, a record low in their data.
That may seem inconsistent with a world in which beef demand is still growing, but in fact it’s not. In crowded developed countries, animals spend much of their lives in intensive feedlots, where they’re given a grain-based ration to get them to slaughter weight in 18 months or less. This is much more productive than having grass-fed cattle living semi-wild on rangelands. In Brazil, animals can live for three years or more before their trip to the abattoir.
As major producing regions such as Brazil, the US and China intensify their beef production processes and focus on the breeds that grow fastest, we are eking more beef out of a smaller herd. This intensification means pasturelands already cover less area than at any time since the 1970s.”
From Bloomberg.
“Moolec Science SA is eyeing the vegetarian market after getting US planting clearance for its beef-infused peas, though it may be years before the genetically modified product finds its way to grocery shelves.
The legumes spliced with beef DNA, which received a green light from the US Department of Agriculture last month, would be the first GMO pea to come to market, said Gaston Paladini, chief executive officer of Moolec…
Moolec originally planned for the peas — much like its signature pork-infused soybeans — to be an ingredient for hamburgers and sausages. But now it intends to target vegetarians seeking iron-rich replacements for beef.”
From Bloomberg.
