cheese!!

that's right i'm talking about one of my favorite foods, cheese. see, thousands of years ago, it was discovered that if you added a tiny quantity of extract from the inner lining of the 4th stomach of a freshly-slaughtered calf to cow's milk, it would turn into cheese. this is how cheese was produced for a VERY long time; calf stomach extract. in the past 100 years, biochemists found the agent responsible for the cheesy transformation, it's called Chymosin. Chymosin is only produced in mammals that chew their cud, and only before they are weaned off mom's milk.

along comes DNA recombinant technology! the gene that codes for Chymosin production was isolated and inserted into bacteria. the bacteria-produced Chymosin is indistinguishable from its calf-produced counterpart (and hey, no baby cows need to die) and in 1990, it became the first approved product of DNA recombinant technology to enter the US food market. by 2004, over 90% of the cheese sold in supermarkets across the country was produced using bacteria instead of calf stomachs.

this is all well and good, but of course controversy has been sparked, as tends to happen when this kind of technology is applied to food.

1) If a company that uses the bacterial Chymosin is advertising "natural" production, do they have the right to claim that? what do we view as natural in this case?

one argument that i've heard for this and many other applications of this technology is that humans are natural beasts, so the things we do and what we create must be natural as a consequence of our being natural. by this argument, everything from nuclear power to stuffed animals is natural... right. i'm kind of indifferent on this except for false advertising laws. i, personally, don't consider this process really natural, but that doesn't stop me from eating it.

2) a lot of people are opposed to the idea of ingesting genetically engineered food products, and try to pressure the FDA to require labeling of them. in this case, since the calf-produced and bacteria-produced Chymosin are indistinguishable, no labels are required. both the FDA and food companies are well aware that a food product labeled "genetically engineered" will stop 50% or more consumers from buying the food.

i think the FDA is wise not to label these and other genetically engineered foods. as i've said before, humans have been selectively breeding organisms for a variety of purposes (but mostly food) and really, genetic modification at the DNA level is just a sped-up version of the same process. yes, bacteria is producing a mammalian-specific enzyme. and yes, they may as well be the exact same thing. the many companies using this process would suffer for integrating this technology into their business if the cheese was labeled, and that 50% (or more) of consumers would be "forced" by their aversion to genetic modification to buy the "natural" cheese, which now makes up less than 10% of cheese available and would drive the price up unreasonably.

3) organic food is allowed by the FDA to advertise that no product of recombinant DNA technology is used in their food (also that no genetically modified organisms are used). so cheese produced with bacteria Chymosin is not allowed to be called "organic." this means that organic cheese uses the cow product, making it unsuitable for strict vegetarians and vegans - but they are not necessarily labeled as containing animal products.

this is interesting, as the organic market generally caters to health-minded individuals, a good portion of whom are vegetarians. and hey, veggies like cheese too! but if the organic market starts labeling their organic cheese as containing animal products, they will lose a good part of their consumer base (at least for cheese). oh the dilemma! i think it should be labeled, vegetarians should know what they're eating. though i suppose that kind of conflicts with my opinion that genetically modified foods should NOT be labeled. oh well, thats how i roll.