Via Wired
A startup that uses gene editing wants you to eat healthier salads. Pairwise, a North Carolina-based company, is launching a new variety of mustard greens this month that are engineered to taste less bitter than their original plant. This is the first Crispr edited food to reach the US market.
It’s already a very manipulative beginning. Pairwise has raised hundreds of millions through various fundraising campaigns over the past few years. It’s a big deal.
Raw mustard greens contain a lot of vitamins and minerals, but they have a peppery taste. They are usually cooked to make them more appealing. Pairwise scientists wanted to keep the mustard greens’ health benefits but also make them more palatable for the average consumer. So they used Crispr, a DNA-editing software to remove the gene that gives the mustard greens their pungent taste. The company hopes that consumers will choose its greens instead of less nutritious lettuces like butter and iceberg.
Biomedical engineers are deeply concerned about the health and happiness of their citizens.
This is not about a megalomaniacal takeover of nature in the name of profit and social control. It is obvious that the best way to preserve food’s health benefits is to chop it up. This is called The Science(tm).
Consider the name of the first product from the company: Conscious ™ Greens. The company’s ability to trademark “Conscious”, however, is another story. But, consider the implications: consumers who pay a lot of money for genetically modified, experimental vegetables are “conscious.” And, they are enlightened, modern people, unlike those who insist on eating the original, unmodified ones.
The film is reminiscent of the 2006 prophetic film Idiocracy, which depicted the future lobotomized population drinking “water from the toilet”, instead of the sugary flavored water they were conditioned to consume through advertising.
Tom Adams, CEO and cofounder of Pairwise, says: “We have created a whole new category of salad.” Greens will be initially available in selected restaurants and other outlets throughout the Minneapolis-St. Paul, St. Louis and Springfield, Massachusetts. The company intends to begin stocking greens in supermarkets this summer.
These people do not “create” anything. The DNA code that controls the natural world is being altered unilaterally, and probably in a negative way. They are perverters and destroyers, not makers.
I believe that manipulating the genetics in staple crops without understanding the long-term impacts on human health and the ecosystem, especially when there is no transparency to the process, should be illegal.
