Story at a glance:
- Pairwise, an agricultural biotechnology company, created Conscious Greens Purple Power Baby Greens Blend, the first CRISPR-edited food available to U.S. consumers.
- The company used CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat, to edit mustard greens’ DNA, removing a gene that gives them their pungent flavor.
- The greens are first being rolled out in restaurants in St. Louis, Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, before heading to U.S. grocery stores — beginning in the Pacific Northwest.
- In 2022, researchers with Boston Children’s Hospital revealed that using CRISPR in human cell lines increased the risk of large rearrangements of DNA, which could increase cancer risk.
- Because regulators don’t consider gene-edited foods to be genetically modified organisms (GMOs), they don’t have to be labeled.
