Helloo and welcome the incredible inbox extravaganza that is your Daily Fun Fact From Flora ,

Today’s fact is part fact and part rant. We are going to have a look at one example of the awesome potential that genetic modification has in helping with global food security.

Now firstly, GM crops get a lot of shit.

But WHY? We"ve been genetically modifying crops for THOUSANDS OF YEARS. Want to know what the ancestors of the potato looked like?

Doesn’t really look like the potatoes you find in the supermarket, does it? We bred the potatoes that had the traits we liked and thus modified their genetics. But no one is protesting those potatoes are they.

The example we are looking at today is Golden Rice. Now rice is consumed all over the world, but there is a problem with how it is processed.

But the problem is that it’s very unstable (what a mood) as a food source. Fats can accumulate in the outer layers and when the rice is de-husked these fats mix with enzymes and creates a toxic by-product.

Essentially, a few days after de-husking the rice is totally inedible.

Now don’t go rushing to your cupboards!! You won’t be poisoned I promise. Your brown rice is fine because it has been heat treated to denature those enzymes which stabilises the rice. This is quite expensive though.

The cheaper option is to take off that brown layer and just use the white grain underneath and as long as you keep it dry, it can stay good to eat for genuinely hundreds of years.

But there is a problem with this. All the vitamins, minerals and amino acids are in the brown layer that you just removed and you are just left with a grain that is 95% carbohydrate. So for the people who rely on rice as a key food source and can’t afford to heat treat the brown rice — this is a big problem. They need proteins, fats, minerals, vitamins!!

One particularly heart-breaking vitamin deficiency is vitamin A deficiency. If you don’t eat enough vitamin A it leads to blindness and death, especially in children. In South East Asia, 250 million children under the age of 5 suffer from vitamin A deficiency.

Of those, 25 million will go blind and 2.5 million will die.

FOR LITERALLY NO OTHER REASON THAN NOT GETTING ENOUGH VITAMIN A.

To tackle this, some very cool science dudes decided to put the gene for beta-carotene (a precursor of vitamin A) into rice. (Yes beta-carotene is found in carrots and yes it helps prevent blindness so yes carrots do help you see in the dark). And by putting this gene in the right place you can make sure the vitamin ends up in the grain (important it isn’t in the roots or the flowers or somewhere else totally useless)

They used two different genes and you can see the result here.

Golden Rice 1 — they tried using a gene from a daffodil. This did make some beta-carotene in the rice grain but not very much. In fact to get your daily allowance of vitamin A you need to eat 3kg of rice every day not so ideal.

Golden Rice 2 — they tried using a gene from the soil bacterium Erwinia uredovora. As you can see. Much better. This time you only need to eat 150g of rice to get your daily vitamin A.

Now I bet you’re all thinking WOW THIS IS FANTASTIC. What a lot of kiddie-winkles can be saved. This must be hitting the fields all over Asiaand the worldimmediately!

Well not so much. Trials are needed to prove beyond any doubt that the rice is safe to use and farm and there are no detrimental effects. You basically just gotta show that it’s the same as normal rice for all intents and purposes.

But Greenpeace have been paying people to vandalise these trials. And people are still hugely and weirdly opposed to genetic modification.

Golden rice was produced in 2005.

It wasn’t until 2018 that the US approved it for cultivation and in 2019 it was approved for use for humans in the Philippines. BUT it still has to go through more checks to allow it to be commercially farmed.

WHAT THE HELL PEOPLE!?

We have a LEGITIMATE and SAFE WAY of saving 2.5 MILLION CHILDREN EACH YEAR who are needlessly dying of deficiencies of JUST ONE VITAMIN.

WHY IS THIS NOT BEING IMPLEMENTED. WHY ARE PEOPLE STILL LETTING OUTDATED FEARS HOLD US BACK FROM IMPLEMENTING SERIOUSLY BENEFICIAL TECHNOLOGIES.

• ahem *

Rant over.

Hopefully time will show that it is safe and people will learn that GM is something to be embraced and not to be feared.

Hope you’re having a lovely day,

Flora xx