Carolyn Cutrone
4/23/10
It smells a little funky, with the mixture of dried up test tubes and possibly some body odor. The rows of beakers sit beside even more rows of labeled bottles, each containing a different element to the food in which they will soon become a part of. Nestled in the corner, a beater like instrument revolves in a plastic ball, containing a creamy like substance. Inside this lab, DNA is manipulated, compounds are purified and carcinogens are extracted in an attempt to make food more nutritious, abundant and sustainable, right in time for Earth Day.
The Food Science Department at Cornell University bioengineers foods to make it larger, more accessible and packaged to improve shelf life. Instruments such as the one rotating in the lab, work to purify compounds.
Bioengineering means taking a gene from one specific species and implementing it into another to add a desired trait. Cornell University Food Science Professor, Carl Batt explained the purpose of bioengineering food.
“It comes down to the basic idea that DNA is the blueprint of life, and that you can go in a very deliberate manner, take out genes from one organism and put that into another organism,” Batt said.
By manipulating the DNA of a certain plant, fruit, vegetable or meat, foods can be changed to accommodate a greater nutritional value by adding nutrients where some foods are lacking. A Junior Food Science Major, Yuhang Sun, explained how the foods are being engineered to be healthier for consumers.
“They bioengineer these foods to be better than the natural foods, so they’ll find ways to have that certain type of food express a certain type of amino acid or a certain vitamin,” Sun said.
Along with adding extra nutritional value or vitamins to certain foods, bioengineering also works with extracting vitamins that are harmful to humans. In a lab held this week, Sun’s professor brought in turkey bacon and regular bacon so the class could analyze their nitrites.
The class digested the food by adding chemicals to break it apart. Digesting in bioengineer terms, means separating the different parts of foods so they are able to be analyzed better. In some instances, they free vitamins. In this lab, nitrites were freed. After constructing a graph, students were able to look at the absorbents in the food and determine exactly how many nitrites were in a food sample.
“You don’t want any nitrites in your food product, because at high levels it can cause cancer.” Sun said.
This specific lab was targeted towards the disease prevention aspect of bioengineering food.
While many advances are being made in bioengineering food, the general consensus still yields to the choice of natural foods over genetically modified food. Lab Technician and Manager, Chris De Rito, said he believes in the benefits of bioengineering, but still said he would eat a piece of fruit before ever popping a pill.
“It’s always better to eat fresh, whole foods, it’s always better to eat an orange than to eat a vitamin C tablet,” De Rito said.
He explained that a naturally grown orange is better because it contains compounds that work together in a way only natural foods can.
Unfortunately there are places around the world where fresh food is inaccessible, as well as produced using up an immense amount of natural resources. Sun said he is involved in the Food Science Major to help countries that are not able to produce enough food or do it in a sustainable way.
“I support bioengineering because the way humans are, we use a ton of resources everywhere, and if we aren’t going to be smart about it, we are going to run out of it one day.”
Sun believes that bioengineering food can help countries in poverty stricken areas such as Africa, deal with shortages of food. Economically, it costs less to produce food through bioengineering than it does to grow and nurture natural foods. One of the purposes bioengineered food may serve in the future, is creating abundances of food by taking cells of larger foods and putting it into other foods, creating more quantity. However the old “quantity over quality” drawbacks stand strong here.
“They’re also bioengineering these foods to be bigger so you might lose out on natural characteristics like sweetness.” Sun said.
He explained that Japanese strawberries are significantly smaller than the ones sold in the U.S., but the ones in Japan are much sweeter and taste better.
Local restaurants in Ithaca N.Y, such as Moosewood, are making a valiant effort to contribute to serving fresh, and mostly organic food, adding to the effort of healthier and more sustainable food. Moosewood is a vegetarian restaurant located in the Commons and changes it’s menu daily to give variety to people who chose vegetarian or vegan lifestyles. One of the owners, Ned Asta, said that she grows her own food and raises her own chickens. She said that a change in pace is happening in America where more people are paying more attention to what they eat.
“In America tending towards going organic and free range—I don’t know what they shoot the cows up with to tell you the truth, it’s really scary—but I think more and more people are paying attention to it,” Asta said.
Vegetarianism is similar to bioengineering in that it is a less costly way of consuming food, as vegetables and other products cost less money than meat. Vegetarianism is also a more sustainable choice in diet because it uses about half the resources that machinery and technology of raising and producing animals do.
But like most things that cost less, Professor Batt said that it is a trade off between what a consumer is willing to risk from eating genetically modified food, and what effects them economically in the present.
“At some point you are arguing: What is the potential risk involved and how much is it economically important to me, and you can’t really come up with an answer,” Batt said.
Skepticism arises whenever the thought of chemicals in food enters the equation. De Rito thinks that there are significant benefits though, to adding certain chemicals when it comes to making vitamins more digestible to the human body.
“A lot of people claim that they’ll lose a lot of their nutritional value, but that’s not necessarily the case, it’s kind of a big grey area because a lot of times when foods are processed, they are heated so that destroys a lot of vitamins, but it can also liberate a lot of nutrients as well to make them more bio-available,” De Rito said.
It all comes down to considering the potential risks of bioengineered food. This also means considering that bioengineering is a new study, so if there is a backlash, it most likely hasn’t happened yet. But looking at science in general, Professor Batt puts the risks in perspective.
“Science is not a perfect thing— if you smoke, there’s not a 100% chance you will get lung cancer and die— and with these things [bioengineered food] the correlation is far less obvious,” he said.
