ARTICLE: The food revolution: How consumer demand is changing the way we eat, what we eat
The following is an excerpt of a column in the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader describing how changing food tastes, including GMOs, are driving consumer choices.
What’s in the food on your table? Where did it come from? How was it grown? Tom Martin talks with Nancy Cox, dean of the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food, and Environment.
Q: How is agriculture responding to consumer expectations of all kinds of information about food?
A: Consumers are very interested in all aspects of the healthfulness of food. If it’s derived from an animal, for example, was the animal handled well, sustainably, humanely? So the food industry that’s connected to the university and scientific community has a lot of challenges in explaining the advantages of their food stuffs and what is healthy and what’s not proven to be healthy.
Q: Another major concern among consumers revolves around genetically modified organisms. Can you touch on this and tell us where the science stands today?
A: Certainly. The concept of genetically modified organisms first came about when genes were inserted into plants for a certain characteristic. One of the most famous ones of those is Roundup Ready soybeans. A gene would be inserted into the soybeans that would make them resistant to Roundup so you could spray those soybeans with Roundup and it would kill all the weeds and preserve the soybeans. It was a great agronomic production practice. It made you use less herbicide because you could control the weeds better.
That said, consumers had a very negative reaction to the concept of altering the genes in an organism that they or animals were going to eat. The technology has generally been proven to be very safe, but it’s a big challenge for the consumer to understand that the way scientists do.
The whole GMO story has been a lesson in the divide between the scientific community and the consumer and I think it taught the scientific food production communities a big lesson about not developing technologies that were unacceptable to consumers.
Now, we don’t just insert a new gene into a plant, we cause that plant to change its own genes to make a different characteristic. There’s a technology called CRISPR. It’s not GMO anymore, but we’re still altering genes. How are consumers reacting to that? So far, a lot better. But it’s not that different from the original GMO technology, which was not that different from the way we’ve always done plant breeding.
To read the entire interview, please visit the Herald-Leader website.