On the left is “tassel ear”, where silks and kernels (female, seed producing plant parts) appear on the tassel (male, pollen producing plant parts), where they are most certainly NOT supposed to be – it’s ok for sorghum and other grasses, but not for corn! On the right, there are at least 2 ears where there should be one, and those leaves poking out between the two might be more ears. Neither of these plants are transgenic or carry heritable mutations that cause these strange phenotypes. Both transgenic and non-transgenic fields are treated with a herbicide before we plant but after that the plants are grown with no additives, chemical or otherwise.

So, what the heck is going on?

I’ve always meant to look it up, but pollination season is so busy, and then it’s harvest season which is so busy, and then we’re analyzing the seeds… you get the idea.

While looking for pictures of corn borer damage, I found an awesome site by Peter Thomison and Allen Geyer of the Horticulture and Crop Science Department of Ohio State University: Troubleshooting Abnormal Corn Ears and Related Disorders.

They say that tassel ear is due to a variety of causes, including mechanical injury due to hail, which we did have pretty badly last year. No one really knows what causes “bouquet ear” with multiple ears appearing where there should be one, but it might be due to temperature stress due to cold.

There are many other common but strange corn phenotypes explained on their site. Check it out!

Field of cotton by Brian Hathcock via Flickr.

We’ve all heard about the tragic suicides of farmers in India, and we’ve all seen blame placed on Bt cotton. Vandana Shiva has been a leading finger pointer, saying that farmer suicides are due to genetically engineered crops (specifically, due to Monsanto), as in the April 2009 post From Seeds of Suicide to Seeds of Hope: Why Are Indian Farmers Committing Suicide and How Can We Stop This Tragedy?, instead of focusing on real problems like the lack of fair credit.

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The farmer suicides in India were studied in depth in an October 2008 report Bt Cotton and Farmer Suicides in India: Reviewing the Evidence by IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute). I covered the report over at Genetic Maize in Bt cotton and suicides in India, but I have zero experience in India, so it wasn’t a very in depth post. Happily, I have just found the post I wish I had the experience to write!

Siddhartha Shome writes about India and agriculture (among other things) at Sid’s Blog. His November 2008 post P. Sainath and Farmers’ Suicides in India is as relevant as the day it was written. I hope you’ll take a look. His recent post Frequently Asked Questions about GMOs and Bt-Brinjal is well worth a read as well.

Farmers' Market in Jackson, Mississippi by NatalieMaynor via Flickr.

Visitors to Biofortified may notice some seemingly conflicting messages in our posts. The authors of this blog are generally proponents* of biotechnology. We are also often proponents of low-input high-genetic diversity farming, and proponents of local or regional food systems. How can that be? Well, we don’t think these ideas are conflicting at all. We think biotech** goes hand in hand with sustainability. We’d like to someday see vendors at farmer’s markets proudly displaying the traits they use in their produce to benefit the environment and consumers.

There are many ways that biotech traits can help farmers reduce inputs and have more biodiversity on their farms, and ways to help food be more local. Two great examples are apples and tomatoes. Both of these are extremely popular fruits, are a healthy addition to any diet, and are eaten fresh as well as processed. Both can be grown in a variety of climates, but have a short growing season in most places, meaning that they are often shipped long distances before they get to consumers. There are a lot of specific traits that could be put into locally adapted varieties of apples and tomatoes to help make it easier to grow in a wider variety of places for a longer season, decrease pesticide use, and increase profit margins.

A recent example of an apple trait that could help small local farmers is scab resistance (learn more in A Vf gene a day keeps the fungus away). If more traits like this were developed, they could be bred into many different varieties of apples and those apples could then be grown profitably in areas with sub-optimal growing conditions. This would allow for more local production of apples and encourage more genetic diversity of apples, based on what varieties best meet the needs of the farmers and consumers in each area.

Tomatoes have been in the news recently too, with a new biotech trait that keeps cell wall modifying enzymes from making the tomatoes all squishy (see I say tomato… and You say tomato! for more). At first glance, you might think this trait would only encourage shipping tomatoes long distances. While the trait could be used that way, it could also be used to keep tasty local tomatoes fresh long after the growing season is over, and might just give busy people time to clear their schedules for canning those tomatoes before they go bad.

How do we get there?

Breeding by small seed companies that specialize in locally adapted varieties as well as by farmers themselves is essential to keeping high amounts of crop genetic diversity on farms in developed and developing countries alike. Giving these breeders access to traits that will help enhance or protect their yields as well as traits that allow them to add value to their crops is essential to helping them compete with big seed companies that specialize in one-size-fits-all seed. That one-size-fits-all seed has been selected to do well in a variety of environments, and that does very well for most farmers, but it doesn’t give farmers or consumers many choices.

In order to allow for breeding, traits need to be licensed or released. Since corporations are legally bound to turn a profit, they can’t afford to give their research away, except in certain cases (as in Monsanto’s pledge to provide drought tolerant maize royalty free, but this still doesn’t allow for breeding). The big companies do license their traits to smaller breeding companies, but leads to some questions about monopolies and such. What we need to balance private research is public research, such as what used to be done by the USDA and what is currently being done by the Indian Ministry of Science and Technology.

Unfortunately, negative public opinion about biotechnology has been a factor in shutting down public research in the US, as well as a willingness to let the private sector take over research. Based on the uproar of activists in India against Bt brinjal, and the subsequent caving of Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh to fear mongering despite approval by all of the relevant Indian authorities, India may be on the way to reducing or eliminating public funding for research as well. That would leave India depending on only private companies for biotechnology, just as the US already left the grand majority of plant breeding and biotechnology to private companies. The best way to guarantee that traits will be developed that benefit the environment and the consumer (not just shareholders’ portfolios) is to encourage public research.

*We don’t have any guest bloggers or regular bloggers who are opposed to biotechnology so far, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t welcome authors who are critical of biotech as long as they base their criticisms on evidence.

**Not every biotech trait, mind you. There certainly could be some traits that wouldn’t contribute to my vision of an ideal farming system, and some traits that wouldn’t be appropriate in any farming system. Traits must be taken individually, but as a whole, the technology is sound.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but there are currently no genetically engineered tomatoes on the market. For a short time in the 1990s Calgene sold the Flavr Savr tomato in California grocery stores, but they weren’t able make a profit doing so, so they stopped. The poor taste of most tomatoes for sale in the grocery store today is purely the result of conventional breeding (my post on the subject and Mat_kinase’s).

Before getting into the how, let’s talk about why this research is important. According to Enhancement of fruit shelf life by suppressing N-glycan processing enzymes in this week’s PNAS, post-harvest fruit and vegetable softening is a big problem, with losses accounting for almost 50% of all produce in developing countries. India, the country that funded the research, and the world’s 2nd largest fruit and vegetable producer, loses 35-40% of produce to softening.

Squished tomato by limaoscarjuliet via Flickr.

We all know that post-consumer food waste is a big problem, and we can alleviate this somewhat in our homes and by choosing restaurants that try to reduce waste. But there isn’t much we can do about pre-consumer waste – from grain that rots in the silo due to fungus to tomatoes that rot in transit due to ripening. By reducing pre-consumer food waste, we can reduce the number of acres needed to produce the same amount of food. In India, preventing all fruit and vegetable softening would be like reducing the amount of land needed to grow fruits and vegetables by 35-40%!

So, how could that softening be prevented?

Researchers have been working for a long time on different parts of the ripening and spoiling process, trying to find ways to slow it down. Nothing has been really effective in getting produce to last longer, and we’ve ended up with produce that is more bland than it used to be, especially when it comes to tomatoes. In short, neither breeding nor genetic engineering has been successful… until now.

In Enhancement of fruit shelf life by suppressing N-glycan processing enzymes, Meli* and fellow researchers found two enzymes that contribute to fruit softening. The enzymes are α-mannosidase and β-D-N-acetylhexosaminidase, α-Man and β-Hex for short. Both of these enzymes break the glycosidic bonds between carbohydrates, as well as between carbohydrate and noncarbohydrate. The role of these enzymes in ripening and softening is to help break down the cell walls that keep the fruit firm. If the enzymes are stopped from breaking down the cell walls, the tomato stays fresh!

Meli and fellow researchers turned off the genes that code for these two enzymes α-Man and β-Hex with biotechnology, but they didn’t use any whole genes from tomatoes or any other species. Instead, they used some pieces of the tomato α-Man and β-Hex genes. These gene fragments are transcribed into RNA under control of the constitutive (always on) CaMV 35S promoter. They then twist and bind with themselves, resulting in double stranded RNA, which activate the RNA interference mechanism that plants and other organisms naturally use to combat double stranded RNA viruses.

The results are pretty striking, as you can see from these pictures. The control tomatoes were unappealingly wrinkly by 20 days, and rotten by 45 days. The tomatoes with α-Man or β-Hex turned off were still firm even at 45 days.

Control and experimental tomatoes over time, from the PNAS article "Enhancement of fruit shelf life by suppressing N-glycan processing enzymes" by Meli, et. al.

RNAi can be used just about any time you want to turn off a gene – it’s even being tested for human use to help combat genetic diseases. For an overview of RNAi that’s a little more detailed than the picture below, check out the RNA Interference interactive video by Nature Reviews (via ERV. Note: the video wouldn’t play on my Mac in Firefox but worked great in Safari).

Overview of RNAi from Huntington's Outreach Project for Education, at Stanford.

The researchers used Agrobacterium to carry the DNA sequences into very young tomato plants, along with a marker gene for kanamycin resistance. Biotech plants can be made without markers but it’s much easier to use them, and there is no risk (for more on antibiotic resistance markers, see GMO Compass).

This work, as far as I can tell, is funded purely by the Indian government – not by private corporations. Specifically, it is funded by the Department of Biotechnology which is part of the Ministry of Science and Technology. They have some pretty impressive goals, as listed in the Plant Biotechnology section, including:

• Genetic engineering and molecular biology tools for forest tree improvement including reduction of generation time, production of horticultural and plantation crops with desired characteristics.
• Transgenics for improved yield, stress tolerance, balanced nutrition, keeping quality of flowers, fruits and vegetables, better nutrient and water utilization capacity should be produced.
• Cataloguing of accessions of wild and land races to study genetic diversity for resolving taxonomic problems.

Tomatoes at Union Square by Lindsay Beyerstein via Flickr.

One of the biggest arguments against biotechnology is that it has been under corporate control. Unfortunately, that’s been true in the United States, where publicly funded research in agriculture has been all but ended. Happily, that’s not the case in India and China. These governments are researching biotech traits for the benefit of their farmers, not for the benefit of shareholders.

If this biotech trait is available royalty-free, then it will presumably be available for breeding by small seed companies and by farmers. I’m imagining beautiful genetically-diverse heirloom tomatoes that have this amazing ability to stay firm on your counter well past the tomato growing season. This means that fewer tomatoes will need to be shipped around the world, and that more can be grown locally. I hope to see some long-lasting tomatoes in my CSA share soon!

* You may have noticed that I usually use the name of the first author rather than the name of the last author when I’m referring to a peer-reviewed paper. In biology-related papers, the first author is the graduate student, or sometimes post-doctoral researcher, who did most if not all of the labwork and writes most if not all of the paper.The last author is the PI (Primary Investigator), who generally provides guidance, helps with experimental design, and edits the paper. The authors in the middle are usually other grad students and their PIs who helped with the project. While all of the authors usually have put in a lot of time and effort, it’s that first author who worked the hardest, and I like to recognize that.

Meli V, Ghosh S, Prabha T, Chakraborty N, Chakraborty S, & Datta A. (2010). Enhancement of fruit shelf life by suppressing N-glycan processing enzymes Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0909329107

Having a CSA share is such a good experience in so many ways, but the most important one for me is that I know the farmers who grow the food I put on my table are getting honest pay for their labor, that they can afford to take care of their land and to take care of their employees. I also like the idea of keeping my food dollars in the local economy and of giving the money straight to the producer instead of through a string of middlemen and packagers. Another benefit that small vegetable farms provide is high biodiversity due to the many species of plants (and often animals too!) on the farms. They are often certified organic, but due to the high cost of certification,some farms forgo the label and just list their practices on signs or websites. Customers can actually meet the people who grow the food, ask questions, and make friends.

CSA’s are just one of many ways that farmers can receive fair pay for their produce; others include farmers markets and direct sales to restaurants. The one common factor across these is that they need to convince their customers that an increased cost is worth it. While there are certainly times when a certain fruit or vegetable is so locally abundant that it can be cheaper than the same fruit or vegetable from a large farm, there is no doubt that the economy of scale is lost on smaller farms. In order to break even, small farms have to charge a realistic amount for their produce. I’m ok with that. Are you?

You can look for CSAs (and farmers markets, etc) near you at Local Harvest.

“The half-pint of nonfat chocolate milk with sucrose served to students at lunch will have 150 calories and 27 grams of sugar – the same caloric and sugar content as the old formula,” according to Schools switch sugars in chocolate milk in the San Fransisco Chronicle. From the same article:

Switching from high-fructose corn syrup to sucrose in the chocolate milk is nonsense, said Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF. It’s not how the sugar is made that’s the problem, he said – it’s that Americans, and especially kids, are eating too much sugar, period.

“The difference between high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose, molecule for molecule or ounce for ounce, isn’t worth discussing. They are both equally dangerous,” Lustig said.

If you choose not to believe Dr. Lustig, check out Rule # 4 from Michael Pollan’s recent Food Rules, or more importantly, check out the text explaining the rule (emphasis added):

Avoid products that contain high-fructose corn syrup.

Not because high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is any worse for you than sugar, but because it is, like many of the other unfamiliar ingredients in packaged foods, a reliable marker for a food product that has been highly processed. … don’t fall for the food industry’s latest scam: products reformulated to contain “no HFCS” or “real cane sugar.” These claims imply these foods are somehow healthier, but they’re not. Sugar is sugar.

So, if sugar is sugar, what can actually be done to make school lunches healthier? To me, it seems that the problem is systemic.

In Florida, where I grew up, schools get some amount of funds from the state, but property taxes are the primary source of funding for schools. As far as I know, California’s schools are funded in the same way. California is worse off than Florida, though, after Prop 13 in 1978 capped property taxes at low levels (I learned about this from a member of DAMN while Karl and I were in California). Ideally, schools would be funded differently, but for now we’re stuck trying to do more and more with smaller and smaller budgets. Schools simply have to work within these cost constraints.

Instead of targeting one ingredient, why don’t parents work to find creative ways for schools to feed healthy meals to their children within the budget that exists?

Since their budgets for food are so small, schools can’t afford to pay staff to cook. Instead, they pay staff to reheat. I hadn’t really thought about this before I stumbled upon Mrs. Q’s blog Fed Up: School Lunch Project. She’s a teacher, and plans to eat school lunch every day in 2010. Mrs. Q says: “I think every child no matter how much money their family has deserves to eat quality food at school”, referring to the kids who may only get one meal per day.

Based on her pictures and descriptions, I don’t think I could do it. The one lunch that she’s had so far that really got to me is the one that’s pictured here: Day 16: peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

PB&J with fruit and milk is such a perfect lunch, so it’s really sad to see it bastardized into this sugary pre-packaged mess. It seems to me that the parents of this school, and of every school, should find out exactly what their kids are being served and come up with alternatives that still make budget. Can a school buy bread, peanut butter, and jelly and make the sandwiches for the same cost as these pre-packaged PB&J on graham crackers? Can they achieve the same calorie count and nutritional requirements with healthier ingredients? I bet the schools can, but maybe they just don’t have the time to find out, or the budget to hire someone to look into it.

There has to be at least one parent in San Fransisco who took time to protest corn syrup who has skills related to accounting. There has to be at least one parent in San Fransisco who took time to protest corn syrup who has skills related to creating menus. Where are these parents, and why aren’t they putting their skills to use? If they don’t have the skills needed, why don’t they contact undergrad and graduate students at local colleges to help them out? What a great resume builder or even thesis for a college student!

The school district employees responsible for nutritional quality of school meals are obviously open to discussion, judging by this quote from the SF Chronicle:

“My job is to provide nutritious meals that the students want to eat and that their parents want them to eat,” said Ed Wilkins, district director of Student Nutrition Services. “When a group of parents advocate for a particular change and it is feasible with the resources available to us to make that change, I will try to meet their demands.”

Chez Panisse by ian_ransley via Flickr.

We just got back to Karl’s parent’s house from Berkley, we’re trying to unwind, but I think it’s going to take a while! Dinner with Michael Pollan and Karl (and Frank, of course) was a really wonderful experience. The conversation was fast paced and fabulous, covering the map from science journalism to specific details on certain genetically engineered traits to the deliciousness of local produce. All my nervousness was for naught, as Michael is extremely nice. He listened to Karl and I blab about science very politely, even with interest. Hopefully we weren’t too enthusiastic. I really hope that we opened long lasting lines of communication. Time will tell. It is obvious that there are a lot of people hoping for Micheal’s attention, including the fan boy that came up to him as we were leaving, so I can only hope that we left at least a small positive impression. Ok, now for the important part… the food!

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Chez Panisse because I found reviews that went to both extremes. I was trying to not have expectations that wouldn’t be met – but it was fabulous. I know, it seems weird that a genetic engineer would be a pro-local foodie, but there it is. I’d of course heard of Alice Waters before and all the hype around her restaurant, and I was very excited to experience it for myself, particularly with such a knowledgeable dinner partner.

I so very much wanted to run around snapping pictures to share on Biofortified, but kept myself under control, which unfortunately means I have no photos to share. The ones you see here are courtesy of nice people on Flickr who did not control their urges to take photos and who post their photos with a share and attribute license.

Chez Panisse Café kitchen, by emptyhighway via Flickr.

We ate in the Café, which is supposed to be a bit more casual than the restaurant. I felt comfortable in a nice sweater and jeans with heeled boots. The decor was a little cramped, but felt homey, with wood and bricks and warm colors all around. My favorite part was the open kitchen. It had huge bowls of fresh, local kumquats (which I gushed over, so Michael had the waiter bring me some) and other beautiful fruits on the counter which looked stunningly fresh among all the warm colors.

The food was fabulous – you may stop here if you don’t want to hear about the deliciousness! I hope I can do it justice.

I was actually happy when I found out we’d be in the Café, because I wasn’t quite sure if they’d accommodate a vegetarian in the restaurant – it has an ever changing set menu that’s heavy on local meats and seafood.

Michael ordered the olives to start, which were so delicately flavored with rosemary, unlike every over-salted olive I’ve had before. The crusty sourdough bread was just perfect. We shared a delicious bottle of organic mixed white with from Oregon with our appetizers, recommended by our gracious and knowledgeable server.

Garden salad by sleung via Flickr.

For an appetizer, I chose the Garden lettuce salad, which was just lettuce. It’s funny, normally I’d be very disappointed with a lettuce only salad, but the baby greens really shined with a light vinaigrette that was barely detectable. For my main, I had one of the starters: Pizzetta with wild mushrooms and gremolata. I’ve had better crust on pizza, but the mushrooms were very good and gremolata is apparently the perfect pizza topping! It’s a sort of pesto made of garlic, parsley, and lemon zest – a perfect balance to the earthy mushrooms. I don’t know what kind of cheese was on the pizzetta, it was very mild. Don’t let the diminutive name pizzetta fool you, it was large enough that I only ate half.

Michael had the Cannard Farm rocket with pecorino and pine nuts followed by the Fried petrale sole saor with sweet onions, pine nuts, currants, polenta, and spinach. Karl was adventurous with the Blood orange, red onion, and black olive salad with olio nuovo followed by the Cattail Creek Ranch lamb leg with artichokes, turnips, and anchovy salsa verde. Who would have guessed that oranges and olives would be a great combination? Karl said the lamb was very mild, the mildest he’d ever had. The turnips were surprisingly delicious, while the artichokes weren’t stellar, he said, but he still ate them all.

The best part of the meal, unsurprisingly, was dessert. After the meal, we were brought A bowl of Churchill-Brenneis Orchard Kishu tangerines and Flying Disc Ranch Barhi dates with a pot of fresh mint tea. Karl and I didn’t order these, and I didn’t see Michael order these, perhaps it’s his typical end to a meal and they just bring it? The tiny tangerines were so cute, and the fresh dates were like chocolate. Karl and I still decided to have dessert, because when would we get another chance to have dessert at Chez Panisse with Michael Pollan? I ordered the Passion fruit-tangerine sherbet with citrus compote and a coconut tuile while Karl had the Meyer lemon cream puffs with huckleberry coulis. He liked the cream puffs, but I think my tangerine sorbet far surpassed it (it tasted like a fancy version of Moose Juice from Universal Studios Orlando).

All together, the meal lasted almost three hours. I feel honored to have shared the time with someone who has such an important voice for agriculture and food, as well as my good friend Karl.

Stay tuned for a post from Frank, with a group photo of the four of us!