The potatoes I am eating are nice, but they don’t stand out taste-wise. To find out what is special about them, you need to cut open the raw tubers and keep an eye on them. What you will see is, er, absolutely nothing – unlike normal potatoes, these gene-edited ones don’t turn brown when cut. That means less waste, because many people and businesses discard discoloured potatoes that are perfectly good to eat.
The gene-edited versions I tried aren’t on sale yet, but could be soon. They have already got the green light in the US and, thanks to laws given the final nod of approval by a UK parliamentary committee on 6 May, in six months the small British startup that created these potatoes, called Phytoform, will be able to seek permission from regulators for them to be grown in England, too.
It isn’t yet clear exactly what regulators in England will ask for before granting approval, but the idea is that the process will be fast and straightforward, provided there are no safety concerns. This is part of a worldwide trend – several other countries, including Japan, have already made it relatively simple to get gene-edited crops approved, and .
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For me, this is cause for celebration. Farming is the greatest destroyer of the environment, driving everything from deforestation to climate change. Anything that boosts food production or reduces waste helps reduce the damage caused by agriculture – and limits the price increases we are seeing as climate change increasingly impacts crops.
CRISPR gene editing is a very powerful tool that can help. Creating a non-browning potato could be done with conventional breeding, but it would take many years and generate a single variety. To add the trait to another variety would take many years again. With gene editing, by contrast, any variety can be made non-browning in just months, all without altering any other traits.
The potatoes I tried are one of five existing varieties already made non-browning by inducing a tiny change to their genetic material in order to block the production of the enzyme responsible for this discolouration. This doesn’t affect the taste or texture of these varieties, says William Pelton at Phytoform.
Whole truckloads of potatoes can be sent for animal feed or even discarded if there is a lot of browning and bruising, says Pelton. “That’s the ultimate waste, because everything put into that crop is wasted.”
For Phytoform, the non-bruising potatoes are just the first of a whole range of gene-edited crops it is planning to launch, including tomatoes that need less maintenance (I tried those too, perfectly good) or use less water. Thanks to the advances in gene-editing technology and the changes in regulations, small companies like Phytoform are now aiming to compete with big multinationals.
Not long ago, this would have been impossible. The stringent requirements for getting approval for a “standard” genetically modified crop – that is, one with whole genes added, sometimes from unrelated species, rather than simple edits to existing genes – means it can cost over $100 million, which only big multinationals can afford. Making it easier for gene-edited plants to get approval will, hopefully, lead to a lot more innovation and to many new varieties that are better for the environment, our health or both.
If you don’t like the idea of gene-edited crops, bear in mind that all the domesticated plants we eat are genetically altered in some way. Wheat, for instance, is a bizarre genetic monster with eight copies of its genome rather than the normal two. Early farmers just kept picking mutants or hybrids with desirable properties and ended up making very substantial genetic changes.
The main difference between what we call gene-edited crops and other domesticated plants is that the former have intentional changes that we know about whereas “conventional” breeding relies on random mutations.
So the only real choice is between eating plants with known mutations or eating those with unknown mutations. I know which I prefer.
