VANCOUVER — Growing an apple that doesn’t turn brown is no pie-in-the-sky feat, but the British Columbia company that’s got the technology on the ground still needs health regulators to declare its product isn’t forbidden fruit.
Okanagan Specialty Fruits, a tiny biotech firm based in Summerland, B.C., has asked regulators in Canada and the U.S. to put their stamp of approval on its genetically modified crop.
If that goal comes to fruition, the fleshy insides of an age-old symbol of health and nutrition would stay a smooth, gleaming white long after being sliced or days after being dropped.
“The apples look exactly like what you’d expect — a Golden or Granny or Fuji — and it tastes like a normal apple,” said company president Neal Carter, a fruitgrower and bioresource engineer. “Their composition is, if anything, better or more nutritious, because as you’d expect, browning is a bad thing in an apple.”
The company has already submitted a whopping report to the U.S. Drug Administration, crunching the science at its concoction’s core. That includes data from third party labs which, Carter said, found anti-oxidants and vitamin-C are preserved with the apple’s colour when a protein driving the browning reaction is turned off.
Discussions are also ongoing with Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which Carter believes will follow the American lead but he won’t present with facts until sometime early next year.
Yet the apple of Carter’s eye is considered poison fruit of a toggled tree to critics of genetically modified foods.
“If this apple doesn’t decompose, it can remain longer on the shelf,” said Eric Darier, Greenpeace’s Quebec director and anti-GMO campaign co-ordinator, who warns it could provide a false sense of health security. “As consumers we’re going to be deceived by perfect fruits in the stores.”
Others object to altered apples because of possible repercussions of cross-pollination with conventional trees, gaps in knowledge about GMO’s long-term environmental and human health effects and potential economic ramifications of raising seed prices so high developing world farmers can’t afford their livelihood.
“A botox apple is not what people are looking for,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., who explained genes that define those traits are one small part of a complex system.
“Scientists have been saying they’re only turning one thing off, but that switch is connected to another switch and another switch. You just can’t do one thing to nature. It’s nice to think so, but it just doesn’t work that way.”
It’s not mandatory to label genetically modified foods in Canada, and organizations including Greenpeace would like the government to change the rules so consumers know whether they’re buying such products.
Carter isn’t concerned his fruit will take a bruising from anti-GMO academics or activists. He’s branded the product “Arctic” apples, to reflect the pristine and natural quality of the Far North. “It’ll be identified at retail by the ’Arctic’ name and if people don’t want that for their feelings associated with GM crops, then they’ll know that and they don’t have to buy it,” he said.
“But other people think that’s a great trait and they find the science to be acceptable. We’ve done, I think, a very credible job of applying the science in a very safe and innocuous manner.” Many companies already rinse their fruit in calcium and ascorbic acid to maintain freshness.
The company is targeting niche markets including the food service and fresh-cut industry, where slices might be tossed on a salad or in a pre-made lunch pack. Carter said the product has been in the works for more than a decade, using technology licensed from Australian researchers who pioneered it in potatoes. His company would eventually license nurseries to propagate the trees, he said.
If all goes according to plan, the genetically modified apples will land on teachers’ desks by 2015.