Can Gene Editing Boost Fruit And Vegetable Consumption?

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

The average American still doesn’t consume anywhere close to the daily recommended amount of fruits and vegetables. Pairwise CEO Tom Adams is hopeful that gene edited crops can help to improve that trend. The quality of in-season fruit is already high, but there is room for improvement when it comes to factors like availability and convenience.

Adams… “We started with this idea that 10% of Americans eat the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables a day. The rest of us eat about half of what we should. So we looked at what had driven more consumption. And the things that it's obvious in retrospect we look at is basically making it more convenient and more available. So breed blueberries for 60 years and you now have blueberries every day in the grocery store, 4x increase in consumption of blueberries. Get rid of the seeds and grapes, a lot more grape consumption. Get the easy peel mandarin that is now in every kid's lunch in America, it's now the dominant citrus. It didn't exist until 2013. The dominant citrus that we now have in America is this easy peel mandarin. So those are technologies that drive consumption and that ultimately was part of our mission.”

Founded in 2017, Pairwise is working to deliver breakthrough innovation in agricultural sciences and in healthy consumer foods.