Green Options » GMOs

Part Corn, Part Cow. Freaky Ethanol Process Commercialized.

Nick Chambers — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:33:33 +0000

It was a weird and improbable shotgun wedding of genetic material — one conducted by your drunk uncle Larry in a brothel on the outskirts of Las Vegas. One in which researchers successfully combined enzymes from a bacteria that normally resides in a cow’s gut with the genes of the leaves and stalk of a corn plant — and one in which the offspring from that marriage is a corn plant that can digest itself into the components needed to make ethanol.

Certainly, anything that can digest itself warrants a closer look — and now a company in Kansas has licensed that proprietary corn offspring, dubbed Spartan Corn III (it even sounds like a name your drunk uncle Larry would approve of), for the ultimate consummation of the marriage in a baptism of commercialization.

Read more of this story »

Slow Food Nation Opening - World Food Crisis

Keith Rockmael — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:58:41 +0000

Even at 9 a.m. in the morning, a buzz filled the air even before the first official Slow Food Nation event kicked off in San Francisco’s War Memorial Palace. One of the food rock stars Michael Pollan moderated the discussion topic: The World Food Crisis with panelists Raj Patel, Vandana Shiva, Carlo Petrini, and Corby Kummer. Things got popping quickly with spirited remarks about the worldwide food shortage including one poke about biofuels by Patel, “It’s preposterous that we should grow food to set it on fire” , as well as a comment about the famine in Haiti where local rice farmers have no chance to compete against subsidized U.S. rice imports. Haitians rioted against rice labeled “gift of the USA.” Some gift, huh?

We loved the passionate Shiva as she spoke out about the spin toward getting GMOs into the world food chain. She noted that there has always been famine but now she sees this “pseudo crisis” as a movement to bring GMOs into the fold. She noted the difference between food and commodities. We agree with Shiva in her thinking the diversity of food that we help balance the playing field.

Read more of this story »

Half of All Americans Wouldn’t Buy FrankenFoods…If They Could Tell The Difference

mcmilker — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:42:37 +0000

A recent New York Times/CBS poll bears good news for ecopreneurs in the food industry. Fifty-Three percent of consumers said they would not buy genetically modified food. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell the difference between Frankenfoods and the real thing.

A new CBS News poll found that 87% of consumers would like GMO ingredients to be labeled, just as they are in Europe, Japan and Australia. Yet the U.S. Congress has never even held a vote on the issue, to give shoppers the opportunity to exercise their most basic right - to make a choice.

Once again, labeling decisions made by the FDA and USDA, influenced heavily by big agriculture are keeping consumers from understanding what is in their food. The FDA’s position is: GMOs are the “substantial equivalent” of conventional crops and so does not require “disclosure of genetic engineering techniques…on the label.”

Read more of this story »

Gene from Cow’s Stomach Engineered to Create More Affordable Biofuel

Carol Gulyas — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 12:31:10 +0000

As we pointed out in an earlier posting, one of the problems with biofuels such as corn-based ethanol is that they are diverting food crops from food source to fuel source. Miriam Sticklen, a crop and soil scientist from Michigan State University, announced this week that she has used an enzyme from a cow’s stomach to create a new strain of corn.

This new kind of corn, in an ideal scenario, would allow the kernels to be used as food, while the (formerly) wasted part of the corn plant could be converted to biofuel. A gene from a cow’s stomach, one of the most effective digesters of plant sugars in the world, is implanted into a corn cell using genetic engineering, fundamentally changing the corn plant. As reported in Biofuels Journal:

Read more of this story »

GMO Corn-Stover Eats Itself, Makes Ethanol Processing A Breeze

Clayton B. Cornell — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:50:55 +0000

Researchers at Michigan State are trying to get corn-stover to digest itself after harvest. Doing so would mitigate the costly pretreatment steps needed for the production of cellulosic ethanol from the non-edible parts of the corn plant.

MSU’s scientists are adding genetic material to the corn’s genome, genes that would normally be responsible for the digestive enzymes produced by fungi and the microbes in cow rumens. The newly transgenic plants store these enzymes in vacuoles in the leaves and stalk in a way that doesn’t affect the plant while it’s alive.

Read more of this story »