All About Food: Genetically modifying pigs, salmon and chickens

Oh, brave new world!

Are you familiar with Frankinswine? No? Well, I wasn’t either until I happened upon the term in an article about genetically modified animals.

Pigs, for instance — Enviropigs is a trademarked line of genetically modified Yorkshire pigs — are designed to digest phosphorus better, which means they are environmentally cleaner and have less odor.

Speaking of pigs, in Japan, scientists now claim to have produced pork that is healthier than the usual pork using DNA from plants. They removed spinach genes from plants and inserted them into fertilized pig eggs, then implanted them into a surrogate mother. This is the first successful inbreeding of mammals with the plant genes, said research leader Dr. Akira Iritani.

How do you feel about featherless chickens? They look naked, but they are bird-flu resistant and they save plucking time. They are created by breeding regular broilers with Naked Neck chickens, which actually have naked necks. This results in less fat, and the chickens don’t overheat.

Then there is the venomous cabbage. Scientists have taken the gene that programs poison in scorpion tails and mixed it with cabbage to keep caterpillars from damaging crops. The genetically modified cabbage produces scorpion poison that kills the caterpillars, reducing the need for pesticides, but isn’t harmful to humans, its developers say.

Chinese scientists are injecting dairy cows with human genes so they can produce cow milk that has the same advantages as human breast milk.

Scientists are breeding muscly pigs. With double muscles, they would have more meat. They are made by disrupting or editing a single gene, which is a much less dramatic modification. These might end up being the first animals to be genetically engineered for human consumption.

Salmon is the first genetically modified animal that has been declared safe to eat by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which announced the move on Nov. 19.

In 1995, California scientists developed fast-growing Atlantic salmon using genes from Chinook salmon and ocean pout (a type of eel) that makes more growth hormones so the fish get larger in less time. It takes only 16 to 18 months instead of the standard three years.

AquAdvantage, the company that developed the salmon, promised to breed only sterile, female fish so if they jumped into the wild they couldn’t spread the genes. The problem is that when AquAdvantage tried to sell it to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, the stores refused to carry the product.

Mother Nature Network says, “In the future you may even find yourself getting vaccinated for diseases like hepatits by simply eating a banana. So far researchers have successfully engineered bananas, potatoes, lettuce and carrots and tobacco to produce vaccines, but they say bananas are the ideal production and delivery vehicle.”

If a modified form of a virus is introduced into a banana sapling, it then becomes a fixed part of the plant cells. As the plant matures, its cells produce the virus proteins. It is not the infectious part of the virus. When eating genetically engineered bananas, full of virus proteins, immune systems build up antibodies to fight the disease.

Researchers have also used this technology to produce glow-in-the-dark rabbits and cats, glittering gold sea horses and hornless cows.

It would seem that this is what the future has in store for us. We are only beginning this journey, which at least has the potential to improve life on Earth.

TERRY MARKOWITZ was in the gourmet food and catering business for 20 years. She can be reached for comments or questions at m_markowitz@cox.net.