Bananas that don’t go brown even when cut and stale are among promised GM products – but most aren’t ready. Report: Claire Robinson

According to a GMO-boosterish article in the Telegraph, “Britain’s first genetically-edited (GE) foods will be on supermarket shelves in the new year as a result of Brexit freedoms. Crops which have been genetically edited to be tastier, longer-lasting and healthier will now be legally sold in England for the first time under the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023.”

The article says that among these products are “bread with less cancer-causing chemicals, longer-lasting strawberries and bananas, sweeter tasting lettuce and disease-resistant potatoes”.

What it doesn’t say is that not only are hardly any of them ready for commercialisation, but none of them are necessary or even desirable. They certainly won’t provide any better solution to our food and farming problems than the non-GM solutions already available.

Of the Telegraph’s list of gene-edited wonder products that are supposedly poised to leap onto our supermarket shelves, only the banana, from UK-based company Tropic, has been approved for consumption in some countries. However, it doesn’t seem to be on the market yet anywhere in the world.

The gene-edited strawberries are said to be in the commercialisation pipeline of US company Simplot. But do we really want produce that appears to be fresh even though it isn’t? When a fruit or vegetable sits on the shelf for weeks, what is the impact on nutritional content? And shouldn’t those of us who prefer to eat genuinely fresh produce be alerted to the “fake fresh” GM products via labelling – something the UK government is determined to avoid?

As for the gene-edited “low acrylamide” wheat, it ran into technical problems this year: The researchers are having trouble removing foreign DNA present in the product as a result of the inherent imprecision of gene-editing techniques. So it’s unlikely to be ready for market any time soon. Even if these problems are solved, the product is not needed, as there are many proven ways of avoiding excessive acrylamide production in food.

What about lettuce genetically modified to taste sweeter? It seems obvious that people who like the taste of lettuce can eat lettuce, and those who want sweeter food can eat naturally sweet food. If ever there was a product in search of a market, gene-edited “sweeter” lettuce is that product.

The GM gene-edited “disease-resistant potatoes” are another overblown promise. Despite the taxpayer funding that the Sainsbury Lab has gobbled up for the past 35 years to develop these GM products, they still aren’t available, even in countries with no or lax GMO regulation. In any case, research shows they don’t perform any better than the many non-GM blight-resistant potatoes that have long been available.

The Telegraph’s article contains a claim by the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) that its proposed regulatory framework will ensure that “any products that make it through the authorisation process are safe to eat”. However, this is false. The proposed framework consists largely of the GMO developer self-declaring that their product is nature-equivalent, is safe to eat, and doesn’t require any safety testing or meaningful regulatory oversight. There isn’t any requirement to prove that these claims are true through actual testing.

In sum, the only “Brexit freedom” that the GMO deregulation has brought is the likelihood that potentially unsafe foods will be allowed onto our supermarket shelves on the basis of empty or overblown promises from the GMO industry. But perhaps they'll take some time to materialise, if at all.