European Union gets it wrong on GMOS. Again.

Teosinte on the left, modern
corn on the right, a hybrid in

the center.

A European Union court just issued a new decision about GMOs. Disappointingly, this decision is likely to confuse rather than clarify this complex and contentious issue. The court announced that plants whose genomes have been modified with CRISPR technology, a very precise form of genome editing, are subject to the EU's very strict restrictions on genetically modified crops.

More specifically, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) decided that:

"Organisms obtained by mutagenesis are GMOs."

If we take this literally, then here’s a list of all the foods that have never been subjected to mutagenesis, and are therefore NOT GMO:

1. Salt
2. Wild boar
3. Wild blueberries

That’s it. (OK, maybe there are a few others.)

We have been modifying the genes of the foods we eat for millenia. Every loaf of organic, non-GMO bread is made from wheat that humans have modified since ancient times. Every glass of milk from your grass-fed, bovine-growth-hormone-free cow comes from a cow that humans have bred for centuries. All cows are genetically modified. Those delicious croissants you bought at the organic bakery? Sorry, those are GMOs, no matter how organic you think they are.

And corn? Have you seen what ancient corn, called teosinte, looks like? I encourage you to Google it (or see the image on this blog, above). Modern corn is the result of many generations of human-driven genetic modifications.

To be fair, the EU court recognized that many of our foods have been genetically modified for a long time, and that it might be impractical to remove all of them from our food supply. So they carved out an exception:

"varieties [of plants] obtained by means of mutagenesis techniques which have conventionally been used in a number of applications and have a long safety record are exempt...."

What's ironic here–though I'm confident that the EU court didn't mean this–is that by this definition, virtually all of the GMO crops in the U.S. are exempt. You see, we've been eating them for decades, and they have a phenomenal safety record.

Two years ago, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a massive report that reviewed over 1,000 studies of GMOs. The bottom line: there are no health risks whatsoever from eating genetically modified foods.

Earlier gene editing technology sometimes added foreign genes to an organism, such as adding a bacterial gene to a plant. The EU court's new decision is intended to clarify that even if a foreign gene is not involved, plants bred using the newest form of gene editing (CRISPR technology) are nonetheless GMOs.

Banning GMOs doesn't make sense, and it never did. Genetic technology is just a tool, one that can be used for countless purposes, some of them highly beneficial–such as golden rice, which has the potential to prevent blindness in countries where many people depend on rice as their main staple food. If someone objects to a particular use of GM technology, such as Monsanto's use of it to create herbicide-resistant plants, that's something we can reasonably debate. But banning all GMOs is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go out to my grill and see how my wild boar is doing. It might need a bit more salt.