Kevin Folta’s blog is well worth following. His latest post sounds weird though. A company wants to release a new potato. If you don’t have any worries about that, then you should read about the _Lenape_ potato. This was a non-GM potato developed in the 1960s. There was plenty to like about it, but it had a drawback and you could have happily sold it as an organic potato. It was poisonous.

In the case of these new, genetically-modified, potatoes, poison is the problem they tackle. When you cook a potato you create Acrylamide. If you read the Daily Mail you’ll have heard of Acrylamide because it causes cancer. The new potatoes reduce production asparagine, which becomes Acrylamide when it’s cooked, using genes from potatoes.

It seems odd that someone would want to do this. After all we evolved to eat plants, so natural should be good enough, right? That overlooks the other half of the equation – that plants also evolve to avoid being eaten. An earlier example this week was Cassava, the staple food that requires a lot of preparation to avoid cyanide poisoning.

I think it could still be a hard sell. The potatoes are made by Simplot, which is a big company. Some of the problems they’ll solves simply aren’t visible to the end consumer. We don’t see food waste in the supply chain till we get the food home from the Supermarket. We don’t routinely test our food for Acrylamide and measuring health benefits will be difficult. If cancer rates do fall, will that be due to the potatoes, to health programmes or something else?

There have been concerns about contamination. Potatoes might not be quite as safe as apples for avoiding contamination, but there are still plenty of reasons to think it can be done safely. For a start commercial potatoes are grown from tubers. They’re also bad at cross-pollinating – which is good news for conventional farmers because it makes growing different varieties of potato much easier. Simplot say that research shows a 20 metre buffer will stop any outcrossing to wild potatoes, but farmers grow potatoes commercially where there aren’t wild varieties.

The risks seem low, no more than the release of any other new potato variety. The benefits for this first generation of potatoes will be judged in the marketplace. The next goal for many companies will be to develop a potato that can resist late blight. That could have major impact on the environment.

You can read Kevin Folta’s thoughts in GMO Technology and a Safer Spud.

Photo: Potato Head – Couch Potato by Ian Burt. [cc]by[/cc]