Coming Soon to A Salad Near You

For people who don't like the idea of tampering with genes at all, the idea of eating genetically altered food is downright horrifying. Yet even the proconsumer FDA Commissioner David Kessler sided with an Administration decision, announced last week, that some bio-engineered fruits and vegetables will be allowed on the market without pre-testing, and without a warning label.

Genetic engineering involves adding or subtracting characteristics from an organism by either suppressing the action of a specific gene or by adding a gene from another plant, or even an animal. A few years ago, in an extreme example, scientists spliced a gene from a firefly into a tobacco plant, and the plant glowed in the dark. The kinds of changes allowed under the new policy are much less exotic: vegetables will be exempted from pre-testing only if their nutritional value hasn't been lowered, if they incorporate only new substances -- proteins or sugars, for example -- that are already eaten in other foods, and if they don't have new allergenic substances added (like peanut oil, which is deadly to some people). One of the first products likely to hit the market is a tomato in which the gene that produces a rot-inducing enzyme has been deactivated. Another is a potato in which an enzyme that promotes bruising has been removed.

Critics, like anti-biotechnology activist Jeremy Rifkin, decried the FDA decision, arguing that tampering with nature could endanger consumers. In fact, though, many seemingly natural foods, including corn, nectarines and navel oranges, never existed before humans began to cross-breed -- a form of genetic engineering that simply takes a little longer than the laboratory version.