Cell-cultured meat: Lessons from GMO adoption and resistance.

This article discusses the choices and strategies that can hasten or delay the adoption of novel food technologies. We start by examining how genetically-modified food became an object of controversy in the United States and Europe. Then, we present lessons suggested by the history of GMOs for cell-cultured meat adoption. The history of GMOs suggests at least eleven concrete lessons for cultured meat adoption that remain under-discussed in the literature. This paper's findings diverge in several ways from received wisdom on cultured meat adoption. We argue, among other things, that genetic engineering firms understood their work to be humanitarian and environmentally-friendly and so were unprepared for popular backlash, that technology adoption is more readily affected by consumer activism when buyers in a supply chain exert more pressure on sellers than the reverse, and that focusing on the positive aspects of a technology is more successful for encouraging its adoption than responding to negative perceptions.

Unintended Effects in Genetically Modified Food/Feed Safety: A Way Forward.

Identifying and assessing unintended effects in genetically modified food and feed are considered paramount by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), World Health Organization (WHO), and Codex Alimentarius, despite heated debate. This paper addresses outstanding needs: building consensus on the history-of-safe-use concept, harmonizing criteria to select appropriate conventional counterparts, and improving endpoint selection to identify unintended effects.

Laboratory Rodent Diets Contain Toxic Levels of Environmental Contaminants: Implications for Regulatory Tests.

The quality of diets in rodent feeding trials is crucial. We describe the contamination with environmental pollutants of 13 laboratory rodent diets from 5 continents. Measurements were performed using accredited methodologies. All diets were contaminated with pesticides (1-6 out of 262 measured), heavy metals (2-3 out of 4, mostly lead and cadmium), PCDD/Fs (1-13 out of 17) and PCBs (5-15 out of 18). Out of 22 GMOs tested for, Roundup-tolerant GMOs were the most frequently detected, constituting up to 48% of the diet. The main pesticide detected was Roundup, with residues of glyphosate and AMPA in 9 of the 13 diets, up to 370 ppb. The levels correlated with the amount of Roundup-tolerant GMOs. Toxic effects of these pollutants on liver, neurodevelopment, and reproduction are documented. The sum of the hazard quotients of the pollutants in the diets (an estimator of risk with a threshold of 1) varied from 15.8 to 40.5. Thus the chronic consumption of these diets can be considered at risk. Efforts toward safer diets will improve the reliability of toxicity tests in biomedical research and regulatory toxicology.