The so-called Frankenstein food repertoire grows steadily wider. The multinationals created, or are going to, science fiction products. There are strawberries enabled to resist cold weather thanks to the introduction of a gene collected from an arctic fish; beetroots can offer diet sugar once crossed with a Jerusalem artichoke, in particular with its harsh resistance to parasites. Tomatoes can be forgotten for even weeks into the fridge, they won't go off. Rice turning red because of proteins and vitamin A; plus, it can be planted in brackish water. Cheese with no mould. Milk drank to vaccinate against exanthematous diseases. Garbage and vegetables untouched by the ice. Potatoes, maize, corn, artichokes, tobacco, and further tens of other vegetables immune from the attacks of virus and bacteria. Vegetables and cereals that, before getting to our tables, come to light on a genetic engineering lab, where they undergo complex molecular manipulations.
To become some-thing unseen before: veggy-animal hybrids, half mouse, half artichoke. In a word: transgenic plants.


Plants, differently from vertebrates, do not have antibodies able to set up defences when the organism is attacked by a virus or bacteria: they can only 'burn' attacked cells, aiming at the isolation of the enemy. But they lose most times. The intuition of manipulating a plant DNA in order to obtain increasingly more perfect products, preservable, capable of countering the actions of micro-organisms and insects, came, in 1976, to a group of researchers' mind, while working for a small Californian society: Genentech. By then the growth of transgenic food seems to be unstoppable.

To genetically manipulate an organism means to introduce a DNA molecule able to produce a protein which the organism couldn't have produced before. We've always been fed with proteins, however some of those, as other substances, might be refused by our body. When in touch with certain molecules, in fact, our system can react violently, exploding in what we named 'allergic reactions', that is allergies.
Transgenic food supporters argue that the introduction of such products in our diet cannot raise risks of new allergies, quoting the example of the insertion of a banana gene in tomatoes, without considering that - in this case - it is widely consumed food. Genetic engineering, though, often concerns genes, hence proteins, not belonging to the traditional sorts of food: dangers cannot be predictable when the 'transplanted' gene, wheat for bread, pasta and so on, comes from, say, a scorpion, a petunia or other organisms never eaten before.
 

An example is

The artichouse

In order to render immune the artichoke from a virus, Benvenuto, Enea engineer, and his colleagues, infected a mouse with such pathogen, whereby its immunity system immediately started to produce defensive antibodies. The genes responsible for the immunity answer have been identified, isolated, modified and finally inserted into the plant's cellular structure, on behalf of another micro-organism working as a vehicle. Thus the vegetable has become active against the virus.

Transgenic soya enters in 60% of the food (chocolate, biscuits, frozen food) in the form of lecithin without any warning for the consumer.

TOP