Written by Steve Savage
Cloned fruit is widely sold in grocery stores. Some of it is even cloned mutant fruit. None of these fruits are labeled as such. They aren’t even regulated. You can’t avoid this kind of fruit by going to Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. Should you be concerned?
Actually, almost all fruit is cloned for good reasons that I will describe below. I like to use this question as a way to show people how emotive language can be used to make something ordinary sound scary. That is why a healthy dose of skepticism is needed as we encounter so many alarmist allegations about our food supply. The danger is getting drawn into a conspiracy-theory mindset which leaves people unable to listen to reasoned explanation.
The Advance of the Clones
Yes, virtually all fruit is technically “cloned” because it is not grown from seed. Cloning means the genetics of the offspring are identical to the parent. For fruit, this has been the means of propagation for centuries.
If you plant the seeds from say, an apple variety that you particularly enjoy – several years later you will be disappointed to find that the fruit is not at all like the one you originally ate. It will probably be more like a crab apple. People long ago discovered that desirable specimens must be propagated by rooting, grafting, or budding onto some other root stock, and all of those are means of cloning. And yes, some fruit varieties were developed using mutation breeding. The Ruby Red Grapefruit is an example I enjoy on a regular basis. Nectarines are a spontaneous mutant of a peach which lacked the fuzz.
But What About Johnny Apple Seed?
As children we all heard the mythologized story of Johnny Apple Seed who supposedly planted apple trees across the US for the benefit of little children. As Michael Pollan so nicely explains in his book “The Botany of Desire,” Johnny was just opportunistically starting apple tree nurseries at the front of Western settlement because of a provision in the Homestead Act which required each land recipient to cultivate 40 apple trees. Johnny was there sell them what they needed. The actual goal was to insure that the settlers would be able to make their own alcohol supply in the form of hard cider (how’s that for a “nanny state!”). For cider, it didn’t much matter what sort of fruit was produced, so the variable seedling trees were acceptable. If the settler wanted a good eating apple they could graft a branch of it onto Johnny’s seedlings. Today, the rootstocks for most fruit trees are selected for specific dwarfing and/or pest resistance traits and also clonally propagated.
Nature Also Clones
Cloning sounds creepy to us because it isn’t something that happens naturally in mammals. Among animals like insects, worms and some amphibians there is a fair amount of non-sexual reproduction we typically call parthenogenesis – but it is a form of cloning because the offspring are genetically identical to the parent. Plants use clonal reproduction widely. Bananas generate “sons” that bud off at the base of an existing trunk. Grapevine canes on the ground or which get buried will sprout roots and generate a new, independent plant. Whole groves of aspen trees can be clones that arise from the root system.
There is desert shrub called Guayule, which is being developed as a new, sustainable source of natural rubber. It produces seed both through regular sexual reproduction and also through a process called apomixis. The seed looks normal, but it is genetically identical to the mother plant (thus technically a clone). Plant breeders would like to find a way to generate apomictic seed of major crops to avoid either expensive hybrid seed production or to avoid the extensive back-crossing needed to develop a line that will “breed true.”
Cloning Does Limit Genetic Diversity
While cloning provides us with high quality fruit, it limits the germplasm in use for some crops. There may be plenty of genetic diversity where a crop originated, but breeding diversity into elite lines is a very slow process for perennial plants. It would be far more efficient to move selected genes, such as those for disease resistance. Genes for disease resistance were moved from wild potatoes into commercial potatoes by a famous European public institution using genetic engineering.
This trait could be extremely helpful for European farmers, but it has predictably been opposed by anti-GMO activists. Yet, strangely, no one seems to worry about the crops developed decades ago by very clumsy methods of mutation breeding involving the use of radiation or toxic chemicals. Although the track record of such crop improvements has been positive, there is a far more reasonable basis for concern with that method than with genetic engineering.
So, what is the purpose of this botany lesson? I guess I’m trying to make the point that not everything that can be made to sound scary about food is really scary. Think about that the next time you enjoy some cloned fruit!
You are welcome to comment here and/or to email me as savage dot sd at gmail dot com.
Written by Guest Expert
Steve Savage has worked with various aspects of agricultural technology for more than 35 years. He has a PhD in plant pathology and his varied career included Colorado State University, DuPont, and the bio-control start-up, Mycogen. He is an independent consultant working with a wide variety of clients on topics including biological control, biotechnology, crop protection chemicals, and more. Steve writes and speaks on food and agriculture topics (Applied Mythology blog) and does a bi-weekly podcast called POPAgriculture for the CropLife Foundation.
Biofortified 
Some of it is cloned AND patented. Teh horrors!
LikeLike
aren’t you trying to compare cloning fears (of human cloning) with GMO food? because if subliminally you are, scientifically is wrong . we’ve been eating, voluntarily, fruits of cloned plants since de dawn of agriculture, not cloned fruits. And now we eat GMO food by force! of the potentates of agrochemical-industries. you should know the differences.
LikeLike
By force? Perhaps your grocery store is different from mine, but there’s many non gmo products available and there’s no one using force to make me buy gmo products. Or perhaps my definition of force is different from yours?
Noun
Strength or energy as an attribute of physical action or movement: “he was thrown backward by the force of the explosion”.
Verb
Make a way through or into by physical strength; break open by force.
LikeLike
Maybe the grocery store of my grammar is actually the difference, but I don’t find other way to comment on the obsessive events for total industrial control on the circulation of seeds between people and the limitations that are imposed indirectly to various models of agricultural production. this control is aggressive in the figurative sense of the term when we see how the lobbies of these corporations are moving in the corridors of power or how they avoid labeling their products, or even how they manage to control their safety, but also in the strict sense when you read news like a report by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation (Blackwater’s Black Ops, 9/15 / 2010) who revealed that the largest mercenary army in the world, Blackwater (now called Xe Services) clandestine intelligence services was sold to the multinational Monsanto.
has for loss of variability of cultivars we know this has happened since the first time someone took a portion of the germplasm from their radiation centers where we suspect their variability was optimum (as taught Vavilov). since then win or loose genes were developmental processes, some random other empirical brought to the present day high quality products, with whom we have established relationships that may well go up to the molecular level (I’m thinking on the implications of the possibility of small ribonucleic acid’s of plants eventually contact more than our intestines). The Plant Sciences are extremely important for the understanding of all these processes in the interest of Humanity, and shouldn’t need to stand permanently justifying themselves economically putting one gene here and knocking one there, always with an eye on the patent and other on the profit.
P.S about the story of John Apple seed I thought that because of the Homestead Act the settlers just needed to prove that that land was theirs, and how would they do that in a Country where there was no land registration till then? They planted an Apple tree that is (perhaps) native to Lebanon and it should be the landscape difference necessary and sufficient for them to reclaim the property.
Sorry for the aggressiveness
LikeLike
Nice article. I remember when they did a survey here and asked others: would you eat food with ‘genes’ inside? And the majority answered ‘no way, never’.
LikeLike
You can’t have just one !
LikeLike