This
should not be surprising. You must
always follow the market and the market is transitioning to organic that that
leaves the infamous GMO protocol facing a bleak future regardless of the science
itself.
There
is nothing we should welcome more than a massive capital investment into
conventional plant breeding to produce a massive library of traits to express
on demand, Again this future must be seen as early days and much of the
revolution in biology experienced over the past three decades needs to be
digested as well.
Yet
this shows us that we are not alone.
Monsanto Is Going Organic in a Quest for
the Perfect Veggie
BY BEN PAYNTER
01.21.14
7:00 AM
In a windowless basement
room decorated with photographs of farmers clutching freshly harvested
vegetables, three polo-shirt-and-slacks-clad Monsanto executives, all men,
wait for a special lunch. A server arrives and sets in front of each a
caprese-like salad—tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, lettuce—and one of the execs,
David Stark, rolls his desk chair forward, raises a fork dramatically, and
skewers a leaf. He takes a big, showy bite. The other two men, Robb Fraley and
Kenny Avery, also tuck in. The room fills with loud, intent, wet chewing
sounds.
Eventually,
Stark looks up. “Nice crisp texture, which people like, and a pretty good
taste,” he says.
“It’s
probably better than what I get out of Schnucks,” Fraley responds. He’s talking
about a grocery chain local to St. Louis, where Monsanto is headquartered.
Avery seems happy; he just keeps eating.
The men poke, prod,
and chew the next course with even more vigor: salmon with a relish of red,
yellow, and orange bell pepper and a side of broccoli. “The lettuce is my
favorite,” Stark says afterward. Fraley concludes that the pepper “changes thegame if
you think about fresh produce.”
Changing
the agricultural game is what Monsanto does. The company whose name is
synonymous with Big Ag has revolutionized the way we grow food—for better or
worse. Activists revile it for such mustache-twirling practices as suing
farmers who regrow licensed seeds or filling the world with Roundup-resistant
superweeds. Then there’s Monsanto’s reputation—scorned by some, celebrated by
others—as the foremost purveyor of genetically modified commodity crops like
corn and soybeans with DNA edited in from elsewhere, designed to have qualities
nature didn’t quite think of.
So
it’s not particularly surprising that the company is introducing novel strains
of familiar food crops, invented at Monsanto and endowed by their creators with
powers and abilities far beyond what you usually see in the produce section.
The lettuce is sweeter and crunchier than romaine and has the stay-fresh
quality of iceberg. The peppers come in miniature, single-serving sizes to
reduce leftovers. The broccoli has three times the usual amount of
glucoraphanin, a compound that helps boost antioxidant levels. Stark’s
department, the global trade division, came up with all of them.
“Grocery
stores are looking in the produce aisle for something that pops, that feels
different,” Avery says. “And consumers are looking for the same thing.” If the
team is right, they’ll know soon enough. Frescada lettuce, BellaFina peppers,
and Beneforté broccoli—cheery brand names trademarked to an all-but-anonymous
Monsanto subsidiary called Seminis—are rolling out at supermarkets across the
US.
But
here’s the twist: The lettuce, peppers, and broccoli—plus a melon and an onion,
with a watermelon soon to follow—aren’t genetically modified at all. Monsanto
created all these veggies using good old-fashioned crossbreeding, the same technology
that farmers have been using to optimize crops for millennia. That doesn’t mean
they are low tech, exactly. Stark’s division is drawing on Monsanto’s
accumulated scientific know-how to create vegetables that have all the
advantages of genetically modified organisms without any of the Frankenfoods
ick factor.
And that’s a serious
business advantage. Despite a gaping lack of evidence that genetically modified
food crops harm human health,
consumers have shown a marked resistance to purchasing GM produce (even as they
happily consume products derived from genetically modified commodity crops).
Stores like Whole Foods are planning to add GMO disclosures to their labels in
a few years. State laws may mandate it even sooner.
Beneforté
(broccoli)
Launched
Fall 2010
Availability
Year-round
Trait
Compared with standard broccoli, contains up to three times the amount of glucoraphanin, a compound that increases antioxidant levels
Method
Crossbreeding commercial broccoli with a strain growing wild in southern Italy
Region Grown
Arizona, California, Mexico
Price
$2.50 per pound
(broccoli)
Launched
Fall 2010
Availability
Year-round
Trait
Compared with standard broccoli, contains up to three times the amount of glucoraphanin, a compound that increases antioxidant levels
Method
Crossbreeding commercial broccoli with a strain growing wild in southern Italy
Region Grown
Arizona, California, Mexico
Price
$2.50 per pound
But those requirements won’t apply to
Monsanto’s new superveggies. They may be born in a lab, but technically they’re
every bit as natural as what you’d get at a farmers’ market. Keep them away
from pesticides and transport them less than 100 miles and you could call them
organic and locavore too.
John Francis
Queeny formed Monsanto Chemical Works in 1901, primarily to produce the
artificial sweetener saccharin. Monsanto was the family name of Queeny’s wife,
Olga. It was a good time for chemical companies. By the 1920s, Monsanto had
expanded into sulfuric acid and polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, a coolant
used in early transformers and electric motors, now more famous as a pernicious
environmental contaminant. The company moved on to plastics and synthetic
fabrics, and by the 1960s it had sprouted a division to create herbicides,
including the Vietnam-era defoliant Agent Orange. A decade later, Monsanto
invented Roundup, a glyphosate-based weed killer that farmers could apply to
reduce overgrowth between crops, increasing productivity. In the early 1990s,
the company turned its scientific expertise to agriculture, working on novel
crop strains that would resist the effects of its signature herbicide.
Now,
breeding new strains of plants is nothing new. Quite the opposite, in
fact—optimizing plants for yield, flavor, and other qualities defined the
earliest human civilizations. But for all the millennia since some proto-farmer
first tried it, successfully altering plants has been a game of population
roulette. Basically, farmers breed a plant that has a trait they like with
other plants they also like. Then they plant seeds from that union and hope the
traits keep showing up in subsequent generations.
They’re
working with qualities that a biologist would call, in aggregate, phenotype.
But phenotype is the manifestation of genotype, the genes for those traits. The
roulettelike complications arise because some genes are dominant and some are
recessive. Taking a tree with sweet fruit and crossing it with one that has big
fruit won’t necessarily get you a tree with sweeter, bigger fruit. You might
get the opposite—or a tree more vulnerable to disease, or one that needs too
much water, and on and on. It’s a trial-and-error guessing game that takes lots
of time, land, and patience.
The
idea behind genetic modification is to speed all that up—analyze a species’
genes, its germplasm, and manipulate it to your liking. It’s what the past
three decades of plant biology have achieved and continue to refine. Monsanto
became a pioneer in the field when it set out to create Roundup-resistant
crops. Stark joined that effort in 1989, when he was a molecular biology
postdoc. He was experimenting with the then-new science of transgenics.
Monsanto
was focusing on GM commodity crops, but the more exciting work was in creating
brand-new vegetables for consumers. For example, Calgene, a little biotech
outfit in Davis, California, was building a tomato it called the Flavr Savr.
Conventional tomatoes were harvested while green, when they’re tough enough to
withstand shipping, and then gassed with ethylene at their destination to
jump-start ripening. But the Flavr Savr was engineered to release less of an
enzyme called polygalacturonase so that the pectin in its cell walls didn’t
break down so soon after picking. The result was a tomato that farmers could
pick and ship ripe.
In
the mid-1990s, Monsanto bought Calgene and reassigned Stark, moving him from
Roundup research to head a project that almost accidentally figured out how to
engineer flavor into produce. He began tinkering with genes that affect the
production of ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase, an enzyme that correlates to
higher levels of glycogen and starch in tomatoes and potatoes. Translation:
more viscous ketchup and a French fry that would shed less water when cooked,
maintaining mass without absorbing grease. And he succeeded. “The texture was
good,” Stark says. “They were more crisp and tasted more like a potato.”
BellaFina
(bell pepper)
Launched
Fall 2011
Availability
Year-round
Trait
A third the size of regular bell peppers when ripe, mini-
mizing waste and allowing for flexibility while cooking
Method
Selectively breeding plants with smaller and smaller peppers
Region grown
California, Florida, North Carolina
Price
$1.50 per three-pepper bag
(bell pepper)
Launched
Fall 2011
Availability
Year-round
Trait
A third the size of regular bell peppers when ripe, mini-
mizing waste and allowing for flexibility while cooking
Method
Selectively breeding plants with smaller and smaller peppers
Region grown
California, Florida, North Carolina
Price
$1.50 per three-pepper bag
They never made it to market. Aside from
consumer backlash, the EPA deemed StarLink corn, a new biotech strain from
another company, unfit for human consumption because of its potential to cause
allergic reactions. Another genetically modded corn variety seemed to kill
monarch butterflies. Big food conglomerates including Heinz and
McDonald’s—which you might recognize from their famous tomato and potato
products—abandoned GM ingredients; some European countries have since refused
to grow or import them. Toss in the fact that production costs on the Flavr
Savr turned out to be too high and it’s easy to see why Monsanto shut down
Stark’s division in 2001. Large-scale farms growing soy or cotton, or corn
destined for cattle feed—or corn syrup—were happy to plant GM grain that could
resist big doses of herbicide. But the rest of the produce aisle was a no-go.
Furthermore,
genetically modifying consumer crops proved to be inefficient and expensive.
Stark estimates that adding a new gene takes roughly 10 years and $100 million
to go from a product concept to regulatory approval. And inserting genes one at
a time doesn’t necessarily produce the kinds of traits that rely on the interactions
of several genes. Well before their veggie business went kaput, Monsanto knew
it couldn’t just genetically modify its way to better produce; it had to breed
great vegetables to begin with. As Stark phrases a company mantra: “The best
gene in the world doesn’t fix dogshit germplasm.”
What
does? Crossbreeding. Stark had an advantage here: In the process of learning
how to engineer chemical and pest resistance into corn, researchers at Monsanto
had learned to read and understand plant genomes—to tell the difference between
the dogshit germplasm and the gold. And they had some nifty technology that
allowed them to predict whether a given cross would yield the traits they
wanted.
The
key was a technique called genetic marking. It maps the parts of a genome that
might be associated with a given trait, even if that trait arises from multiple
genes working in concert. Researchers identify and cross plants with traits
they like and then run millions of samples from the hybrid—just bits of leaf,
really—through a machine that can read more than 200,000 samples per week and
map all the genes in a particular region of the plant’s chromosomes.
Melorange
(melon)
Launched
Winter 2011
Availability
December through April
Trait
Tastes up to 30 percent sweeter
than cantaloupe
grown in winter
Method
Crossbreeding cantaloupe and European heritage melons with a gene for a fruity and floral aroma
Region Grown
Arizona, Central America
Price
$3 per melon
(melon)
Launched
Winter 2011
Availability
December through April
Trait
Tastes up to 30 percent sweeter
than cantaloupe
grown in winter
Method
Crossbreeding cantaloupe and European heritage melons with a gene for a fruity and floral aroma
Region Grown
Arizona, Central America
Price
$3 per melon
They had more toys too. In 2006, Monsanto
developed a machine called a seed chipper that quickly sorts and shaves off
widely varying samples of soybean germplasm from seeds. The seed chipper lets
researchers scan tiny genetic variations, just a single nucleotide, to figure
out if they’ll result in plants with the traits they want—without having to
take the time to let a seed grow into a plant. Monsanto computer models can
actually predict inheritance patterns, meaning they can tell which desired
traits will successfully be passed on. It’s breeding without breeding, plant
sex in silico. In the real world, the odds of stacking 20 different
characteristics into a single plant are one in 2 trillion. In nature, it can
take a millennium. Monsanto can do it in just a few years.
And
this all happens without any genetic engineering. Nobody inserts a single gene
into a single genome. (They could, and in fact sometimes do, look at their
crosses by engineering a plant as a kind of beta test. But those aren’t
intended to leave the lab.) Stark and his colleagues realized that they could
use these technologies to identify a cross that would have highly desirable
traits and grow the way they wanted. And they could actually charge more for
it—all the benefits of a GMO with none of the stigma. “We didn’t have those
tools the first time around in vegetables,” Stark says.
Also in 2005, Monsanto
bought the world’s largest vegetable seed company, Seminis. Think of it as a
wholesale supplier of germplasm. It turned out Seminis came with another
benefit: something in the pipeline that Stark could turn into his division’s
first test product. A decade prior, swashbuckling plant scientists had
discovered on the limestone cliffs of western Sicily a strain of Brassica villosa, ancestor of modern
broccoli. Thanks to a gene called MYB28,
this weedy atavist produced elevated levels of glucoraphanin. Stark’s team bred
further enhancements to that antioxidant-increasing compound into a more
familiar-looking plant—good old broccoli.
In
2010 Monsanto started test-marketing the new crop, calling it Beneforté. The
strategy was coming together: enhanced premium veggies for an elite buyer.
Beneforté broccoli came in a bag of ready-to-cook florets—so
convenient!—labeled with a bar graph telegraphing how its antioxidant levels
stacked up against regular broccoli and cauliflower. It sold, but Monsanto
researchers knew that future veggies would need a more compelling hook.
Everybody already knows that they’re supposed to eat their broccoli.
EverMild
(onion)
Launched
Fall 2010
Availability
September through March
Trait
Mild and sweet, less tear-inducing
Method
Selecting for individual plants that have lower levels of pyruvate, which affects pungency, and lachrymatory factor
Region grown
Pacific Northwest
Price
$0.70 to $2 per pound
(onion)
Launched
Fall 2010
Availability
September through March
Trait
Mild and sweet, less tear-inducing
Method
Selecting for individual plants that have lower levels of pyruvate, which affects pungency, and lachrymatory factor
Region grown
Pacific Northwest
Price
$0.70 to $2 per pound
Stark’s group had one last angle: flavor. In
produce, flavor comes from a combination of color, texture, taste (which is to
say, generally, sweetness or lack of bitterness), and aroma. But the traits
that create those variables are complicated and sometimes nonobvious.
For
example, Monsanto created an onion—the EverMild—with reduced levels of a
chemical called lachrymatory factor, the stuff that makes you cry. That wasn’t
too hard. But making a sweet winter version of a cantaloupe took more effort.
Stark’s team first found genes that helped a French melon keep from spoiling after
harvest. Through crossbreeding, they learned to keep those genes turned on. Now
farmers could harvest the melon ripe, and it stayed ripe longer with full
aroma. But the researchers didn’t stop there—they also made sure the fruit had
the gene for citron, a molecule associated with fruity and floral aromas. They
called the final product the Melorange.
Figuring out
these relationships takes place at a sophisticated sensory and genetics
lab perched amid hundreds of acres of experimental farmland in the rural,
sun-scorched outskirts of Woodland, a farming town in California’s ag belt.
White-coated scientists hover amid tubs full of fruits and vegetables in a lab,
probing them with the intensity of forensic investigators. Penetrometers
measure squishiness. Instruments called Brix meters track sugar content. Gas
spectrographs, liquid chromatographs, and magnetic resonance imagers isolate
specific aromatic molecules and their concentrations.
Eventually
volunteers eat the experimental foods and give feedback. In one tasting
session, sensory scientist Chow-Ming Lee passes out five plastic cups filled
with bite-size squares of cantaloupe, harvested from outside and brought in
from a store, to a dozen melon growers and distributors. Each cup is labeled
with a three-digit code. Score sheets have two columns: “Sweet/Flavorful” and
“Juicy.”
Frescada
(lettuce)
Launched
Spring 2012
Availability
Year-round
Trait
Crisp leaves with a longer shelf life, plus 146 percent more folate and 74 percent more vitamin C than ordinary iceberg lettuce
Method
Crossing iceberg lettuce with romaine lettuce
Region grown
Arizona, California
Price
$2.25 to $2.50 per pound
(lettuce)
Launched
Spring 2012
Availability
Year-round
Trait
Crisp leaves with a longer shelf life, plus 146 percent more folate and 74 percent more vitamin C than ordinary iceberg lettuce
Method
Crossing iceberg lettuce with romaine lettuce
Region grown
Arizona, California
Price
$2.25 to $2.50 per pound
After sampling each batch and writing down
their assessments, the participants punch their scores into devices that
connect to Lee’s laptop, which plots the room’s general sentiment on a screen
along a four-quadrant grid ranging from low to high flavor on one axis and low
to high juiciness on the other. None of the melons manage to crack the upper
corner of the far right quadrant, the slot Monsanto hopes to fill: a sweet,
juicy, crowd-pleasing melon.
In
the adjoining fields a few hours later, Monsanto breeders Jeff Mills and Greg
Tolla conduct a different kind of taste test. There they slice open a classic
cantaloupe and their own Melorange for comparison. Tolla’s assessment of the
conventional variety is scathing. “It’s tastes more like a carrot,” he says.
Mills agrees: “It’s firm. It’s sweet, but that’s about it. It’s flat.” I take
bites of both too. Compared with the standard cantaloupe, the Melorange tastes
supercharged; it’s vibrant, fruity, and ultrasweet. I want seconds. “That’s the
shtick,” Mills says.
Of
course, sweeter fruit isn’t necessarily better fruit, and it’s perhaps no
surprise that critics of Monsanto are unconvinced that this push toward non-GM
products represents good corporate citizenship. They question whether these new
fruits and vegetables will actually be as healthy as their untweaked
counterparts. In 2013, for example, consumer-traits researchers prototyped
their Summer Slice watermelon, designed with a more applelike texture (to cut
down on the dreaded watermelon-juice-dripping-down-your-chin phenomenon that
has scarred so many childhoods). But the denser texture made it taste less
sweet. So Stark’s team is breeding in a higher sugar content.
Is
that unhealthy? No one really knows, but it’s certainly true that the law
doesn’t require Monsanto to account for potential long-term effects. (The FDA
considers all additive-free, conventionally bred produce to be safe.) Nobody
has ever tinkered with sugar levels the way Monsanto is attempting; it’s
essentially an experiment, says Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist and
president of the Institute for Responsible Nutrition. “The only result they
care about is profit.”
Monsanto,
of course, denies that charge. Make fruit taste better and people will eat more
of it. “That’s good for society and, let’s face it, good for business,” Stark
says.
Monsanto
is still Monsanto. The company enforces stringent contracts for farmers who buy
its produce seeds. Just as with Roundup Ready soybeans, Monsanto prohibits
regrowing seeds from the new crops. The company maintains exclusion clauses
with growers if harvests don’t meet the standards of firmness, sweetness, or
scent—pending strict quality-assurance checks. “The goal is to get the products
recognized by the consumer, trusted, and purchased,” Stark says. “That’s what I
really want. I want to grow sales.”
But
he gets coy about the company’s longer-term agenda. “I’m not sure we ever
really projected what kind of market share we’ll have,” he says. The vegetable
division cleared $821 million in revenue in 2013, a significant potential
growth area for a $14 billion-a-year company that leans heavily on revenue from
biotech corn and soy. More telling is the company’s steady stream of
acquisitions, which suggests a continuing commitment to the produce aisle. It
owns a greenhouse in the Guatemalan mountains, where the dry, warm air allows three
or four growth cycles a year—great for research. In 2008 Monsanto bought De
Ruiter, one of the world’s biggest greenhouse seed companies, and in 2013 it
picked up Climate Corporation, a big-data weather company that can provide
intel on what field traits might be needed to survive global warming in a given
region. Mark Gulley, an analyst at BGC Financial, says the company is following
the “virtuous cycle” approach; it spends heavily on marketing and pours much of
the proceeds back into R&D.
The
new crops keep coming. In 2012 Monsanto debuted Performance Series Broccoli, a
conventionally bred line that stands taller, enabling cheaper, faster
mechanical harvesting as opposed to handpicking. Breeders are also growing
watermelons with the green-and-white-striped rind patterns familiar to US
consumers but also the tiger-striped variety favored in Spain and the oval jade
version loved by Australians. “It’s supposed to remind you of where you grew
up,” says Mills, the Monsanto melon breeder. That suggests the division plans
to be a player in the trillion-dollar global produce market.
For
his part, Stark hopes that when Monsanto’s affiliation with some of its best
sellers becomes more widely known, the company might win back some trust.
“There isn’t a reputation silver bullet, but it helps,” he says. In that
basement dining room at Monsanto headquarters, he waxes rhapsodic about the
lettuce long after he has cleaned his plate. During a recent trip to Holland,
where Frescada is gaining popularity, Stark saw folks peeling leaves straight
off the heads and munching them without dressing, like extra-large potato
chips. “People just ate it like a snack, which was not the intent, but …” Stark
trails off and looks around the room. His napkin is still on his lap. He’s savoring
the potential.
I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S
NOT GMO
Agriculture giant
Monsanto may be best known for genetic modification—like creating corn that
resists the effects of Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup. But when it comes to
fruits and vegetables you buy in the store, genetic modification is off the
menu. Monsanto thinks no one will buy Frankenfoods, so the company is tweaking
its efforts—continuing to map the genetic basis of a plant’s desirable traits
but using that data to breed new custom-designed strains the way agronomists
have for millennia. Here’s how it works—and how the results differ from GMO
crops. Thanks to this cross between high and low tech, a new era of
super-produce may be upon us. —Victoria Tang
The Old Way
Identify plants with recognizable, desirable traits.
Crossbreed those plants together.
Grow the offspring.
Wait to see if the traits show up. Repeat as necessary.
Identify plants with recognizable, desirable traits.
Crossbreed those plants together.
Grow the offspring.
Wait to see if the traits show up. Repeat as necessary.
The Genetic Modification Way
Identify plants or other organisms with recognizable, desirable traits.
Isolate the genes that manifest those traits.
Use enzymes to clip out those genes and paste them into the genomes of other plants, or inject them using a “gene gun” (for real) or by piggybacking them on a bacteria or virus.
Grow the plant with the inserted gene. If the gene has successfully incorporated into the plant, you’ll have a novel phenotype.
Identify plants or other organisms with recognizable, desirable traits.
Isolate the genes that manifest those traits.
Use enzymes to clip out those genes and paste them into the genomes of other plants, or inject them using a “gene gun” (for real) or by piggybacking them on a bacteria or virus.
Grow the plant with the inserted gene. If the gene has successfully incorporated into the plant, you’ll have a novel phenotype.
The New Monsanto Way
Identify plants with recognizable, desirable traits.
Crossbreed the plants.
Sift through the offspring genome for known markers for desirable traits.
Grow only the plants with those markers.
Identify plants with recognizable, desirable traits.
Crossbreed the plants.
Sift through the offspring genome for known markers for desirable traits.
Grow only the plants with those markers.
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