My beef with genetic foods

MODIFIED MEAT: Fish oil-enhanced beef, anyone?

IT IS never nice to come face to face with a huge gap in my education, but last month it was genetics.

Of course, I have been conscious of my ignorance of the subject for some time. Indeed, I have tried to remedy it by reading most of the 574 pages which make up Darwin's Origin of Species (all right, that isn't quite true - but reading the first 100 pages three times in the hope of absorbing them sufficiently to justify moving on surely amounts to much the same thing).

Still, even the third reading has left me ill-equipped to understand how scientists in China have managed to modify cattle so that the beef becomes rich in the acids which are more commonly found in fish.

As I understand the early chapters of Darwin, genetic modification is achieved by exposing animals to different circumstances, so that the species gradually adapts to cope with them.

How did they do that with the cows? Did they perhaps drive a herd down to the shore to see which cows liked the look of the sea the most and marry them off to each other?

It's how Darwin would have done it, but I doubt if his approach would really have worked. That isn't because conventional breeding involves both cows and bulls rather than just cows - we will have no truck with sexual stereotyping - but rather because the average gestation period of beef cattle being just over nine months, it would all take an awfully long time.

Unless the Chinese found that some of their cows were abnormally attracted by the sea, they would have to have started their programme some time before the dinosaurs which, on the face of it, seems unlikely.

Perhaps, then, they fed the genes to the animals in their food or injected them into their eggs - and, for my fellow non-biologists, yes, I have checked the textbooks and cows do have eggs.

Whatever the technique, it seems that the new acids will make the beef much healthier for us to eat but there could be other upsides ...

Surf and turf will become much cheaper to produce; you will be able to drink white wine with beef; and, if the new technology develops into combining cows with vegetables, it should become possible to have horseradish with your beef without buying a separate jar.

Lamb could be impregnated with redcurrant jelly, pigs with a hint of apple sauce and, perhaps, as the technique becomes of more general application, potatoes with just a hint of garlic. Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay will become geneticists.

The one fly in the ointment is marketing. Although consumers in the United States and the Far East are fairly easy with the idea of genetic modification, Europeans are traditionally suspicious. How can the new techniques benefit them?

It is here, I think, that the Chinese will have to go a step further. In deciding whether a particular form of food suits a human there are two variables - one is the composition of the food and the other is the digestive system of the human. To be successful you need to match the two.

If Europeans don't like the idea of the food being modified, the other approach would be to modify the Europeans so that their digestive system is better able to absorb the food which is already available. Perhaps then, we should try to adapt the human race so that it no longer needs its fish oils and is content with traditional beef.

Again, we come back to the question: "How?" Human beings have been eating much the same food for millions of years and digestive systems already vary across the world to match the diet available.

Progress has been patchy - after all, the rationale of the Chinese experiment is that we have never fully adjusted to fish oil-free beef - and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that if we want to achieve change in a reasonable timeframe, human eggs will have to be fiddled about with.

It is going to need quite a lot of work and investment so, before we start, we should consider whether there are other things about the human race which should be adjusted at the same time. We won't all agree on which, of course, but I have rather a long list. If you want to get your own bid in, now is the moment, before the men in the white coats get started. It is truly a once in a generation opportunity.

-John Watson is the editor of the UK weekly online magazine The Shaw Sheet where he writes as "Chin Chin".