Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

Food technology is changing what we eat and even how and when. It changes packaging, content production and price.

Probably we are aware of this to some extent when we shop and check out and notice the total. Yikes! A week’s groceries cost a lot more! And we seem to run out of things we need to keep around, sooner.

Items like bread that used to cost a certain amount cost more for the same quantity. Other items cost the same or more for a lesser quantity. It seems we are being programmed to accept higher prices for food in several different ways.

But that’s just the economics of food. Other changes are less obvious,yet they are significant, and some of them impact health.

Remember the FlavrSavr tomato, created in the 1990s by Calgene? It was slow to ripen and therefore slow to rot.  But the durable tomato didn’t help the food industry make more money, so it was phased out.  We still have tomatoes that have tough hides, easy to harvest in one pass, stand up to being bounced across vast distances in chilled trucks, look lovely and are every bit as delicious as plastic.

FlavrSavr was the first genetically engineered food made available to consumers in this country. We weren’t told much of anything about genetic modification of plants, back then, and I don’t recall there being any particular alarm about GMOs or demands that they be labeled as such in the store or on the menu.

Tomato improvement remains a major goal in the industry, though. We want tomatoes that taste sweet and tangy and look wonderful. They should taste like the ones we remember buying locally or growing in our gardens, in the good old days. Probably the way to get those is to grow them ourselves, or buy them at the farm or farmers’ market.

Then there’s corn. We like to buy sweet corn in the area, at local stands, picked a few hours ago, at the peak of quality. Instead of uniformly yellow rows of e\kernels, Golden Bantam type, we look for yellow and white mixed  or all white kernels, because they taste really sweet. But commercially frozen and canned corn still needs to be yellow, apparently.

None of it is much like the maize of the First Nation growers, such a novelty to European settlers. As for the kind some of us knew as field corn, not to be confused with sweet corn, that has been changed so much that cows who have managed to get out of the pasture and into the corn field might wonder what has happened to their favorite stolen pleasure.

Corn is an extremely important crop in the U.S. About 90 percent of feed grain produced is corn, and it requires 80 million acres to grow it.

Maybe we aren’t thinking “corn” when we buy meat and poultry, eggs and milk, but it’s in there, We recognize corn in corn oil, corn flakes, corn meal, corn starch, pop corn and corn dogs, but do we think about all the corn in sweeteners and alcohol?

Most of the corn in our food has been genetically modified to resist pests, disease and drought, and the seed has been treated to repel rodents or resist rot. Even the soil is treated with specialized herbicides. The chemicals migrate, and sometimes suppress other crops in the area.

Corn demands lots of soil nutrients, and there aren’t many ways of providing them in all-natural or organic ways. Those First Nation growers are said to have used a dead fish in each hill of corn, but I don’t believe commercial growers have found that cost effective.

As for fish, it does seem fish farming is taking off, globally. Aquabounty Technologies has developed a genetically modified salmon that is given a growth hormone. The farmed salmon, all female, are big enough for market twice as soon as the wild kind.

Genetically engineered salmon are not yet approved for marketing in the U.S. But much of the salmon we buy is from open-farmed salmon, and the farms use chemicals, hormones, antibiotics and hormones in the process, and produce high volumes of waste.

The wheat that we encounter in baked goods, in restaurants, cereal and flour in the baking aisle is not the wheat our grandparents bought, or that farmers used to raise.

Modern milling processes remove parts of the wheat kernel that contain much of the nutritional value. Protein and fiber are lost.

Wheat varieties have been developed that have short, heavy stalks. These can be harvested sooner and create less plant waste. But the gluten from this wheat may be different enough to account for the apparent rise in gluten intolerance or celiac disease.

Then there’s that legume that we don’t cook and serve as such, but which shows up in our food: soybeans. We grow and export a lot of it. It is fed to animals and winds up in pet food. We find it in the dairy case as soybean milk. I like soy protein mixed into ground beef in a 1:5 ratio, and order batches of this from Carlsons’ Store—great texture and taste, less fat, and a good price.

Now I am starting to fear that prices of soy protein and tofu will be affected the way so many food prices were by ethanol production: by the diversion of quantities of the soybean crop to fuel. Biosynthetic Technologies has received the approval of the American Petroleum Institute for production of a motor oil with a 35 percent synthetic ester content, pressed from high oleic soybeans. Tested in 100 taxicabs, it made engines last longer.

What next? Lab-grown meat, is what. Producing synthetic meat tissue without animals. Replicating beef patties and chicken tenders and boneless chops with 3D printers. A company called Modern Meadows is said to be manufacturing meat pretty well.

It’s bound to be more efficient than running vast quantities of forage and grains through animals and making mountains of waste and methane gas (think global warming).