Growers and Grocers

Ice cream giant Unilever has incorporated a synthesized version of a fish protein into many of their products sold in the US. According to The Independent of London:

It contains an artificial protein copied, through a GM [Genetic Modification] process, from a fish living in the frigid waters of the bottom of the North-west Atlantic.

An “anti-freeze” protein allows the fish - the ocean pout - to survive extreme cold. Unilever, the world’s biggest ice cream maker, says using its artificial equivalent allows it “to produce products with more intense flavour delivery, a wider range of novel textures and more intricate shapes”.

Unilever also says it can improve the “healthiness” of the ice cream by cutting its fat and sugar content - a claim that particularly angers its critics.

Many scientists are suspicious of these assertions. The article continues:

The scientists - Professor Malcolm Hooper, Emeritus Professor of Medical Chemistry at Sunderland University, Professor Joe Cummins, Emeritus Professor of Genetics at the University of Western Ontario, and geneticist Dr Mae-Wan Ho, director of the Institute of Science in Society - retort that it risks “letting off an immunological time bomb”. […]

The scientists insist that the protein is changed in the processing, and may pose a danger. Professor Hooper told The Independent on Sunday yesterday: “This is a novel protein manufactured by genetically modified organisms and its characteristics have never been fully evaluated. It needs to be checked out before it is widely introduced into the human diet.”

He and his colleagues also dispute the adequacy of Unilever’s safety checks, not least because it checked the protein against the blood of people allergic to cod, not the pout fish.

This kind of rigging is common amongst corporate and governmental tests of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In an email in April to the genetically modified organism monitoring group GMWatch, the aforementioned Professor Joe Cummins said of Unilever:

In the FDA GRAS application the main focus of safety was the allergenicity of the ice structuring protein from the pouter fish. The main test was to examine effect of the ice structuring protein (ISP) on blood from 10 people with cod allergy. There was no indication that the blood contained IgE antibodies (allergic response) to the ISP. This experiment seems very strange to me because it tests blood that is allergic to cod but that allergen is a calcium binding protein called parvalbumin which is unrelated to ice structuring protein. Cod has an ice structuring protein but that protein is not at all related to the pouter ISP in the ice cream.

What I am saying is that Unilever’s main allergy test seems to be a dummy test that could never produce results relevant to the GM ice cream, it could only provide results showing no allergy, in other words it seems rigged to produce favorable results. Unilever provided a GRAS panel of experts who ignored the fecklessness of the allergy tests.

Shortly after the first article was published in The Independent on Unilever, Ben and Jerry’s repudiated the usage of the synthesized protein:

Ben & Jerry’s, the self-styled “all natural” ice cream manufacturer, has broken ranks with food giant Unilever amid controversy about GM ice cream. […] A spokesperson for Ben & Jerry’s said: “We would not dream of including anything like that in our products. One of the biggest problems is that we are affected by Unilever’s actions even though they are nothing to do with the way that we behave. The fact that we are not using this GM ingredient shows that we are not following all of their decisions.”

This controversy gets to the heart of an issue that is rarely explicitly discussed in many countries’ debates on allowing GMOs into the marketplace - children are often the primary targets of the foods. One of Unilever’s main brands in the US is Good Humor, one of the largest purveyers of ice cream treats for children. According to the shopper’s guide to modified products being sold in the US, many baby foods, cookies and other snack foods targeted at children, and children’s cereals all contain GMOs. Because many governments around the world have failed to inform consumers which products contain GMOs, much less protect consumers from potential dangers, it is up to consumers to educate themselves and their families. Children are considered by many to be most susceptible to developing allergies since their bodies are still growing, so the possibility that GM products can contain unknown proteins that one wouldn’t think of as being in said product – such as a corn protein in tomato puree – means that parents should be especially vigilant.