The technology is called Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR. It's a technique that Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal genetics professor at University of California, Davis, says can de-activate a gene. Or, as she puts it: "It's editing. It's like going into a Word document and basically replacing one letter, maybe that instead of 'wind', you want it to say 'wine'," she says.
Skeptics, like Dana Perls with the environmental group Friends of the Earth, say food companies are trying to distance themselves from words like "GMO" and genetic engineering that have caused them trouble with consumers.
"These new gene editing technologies like CRISPR are genetic engineering. And if this is genetic engineering, then call it that," says Perls. She says these producers are just trying to pull the wool over consumers' eyes with a strong public relations push.
Dozens of crops and livestock developed with CRISPR technology are years from the market, though the U.S. Department of Agriculture already said it won't regulate CRISPR-developed products like other genetically engineered food, since no foreign genetic material is introduced in the process. The Food and Drug Administration will decide which new products are safe.
The board's CEO, Bill Even, says the food industry missed a chance to do this when the earlier wave of genetically engineered food made it to the market.
People don't often trust big companies, says Charlie Arnot, who leads the coalition and is the CEO of the Center for Food Integrity. But when it comes to CRISPR, there are three key strategies Arnot says will help get consumers on board.
"Those in technology have to be more transparent and be much more engaged in a public conversation and dialogue, in order to answer those questions, address the skepticism and ultimately result in earning consumer trust in what they're doing in gene editing," he says.
And that's the third strategy: These companies want consumers to know that CRISPR isn't like other forms of genetic engineering. CRISPR changes the way genes are expressed; it doesn't add genetic material from another species.
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