Scientific advances in food production offer the prospect of feeding a growing global population with less environmental damage, but such technologies are often mistrusted.
The first such technology that has been under critical scrutiny in the EU is the use of genetically modified (GM) crops, and the end result of high-level debate is a muddled policy.
Decisions on GM crop cultivation are partly made at EU level but in 2010, the European Commission proposed member states should be allowed to make national decisions on whether to grow them or not (the opt out" proposal), allowing some countries to ban commercial cultivation. The new law was adopted in 2015, although the Scottish Government has never allowed GM crops to be grown in Scotland.
Spain, Portugal, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia grow small quantities of GM maize for use in animal feed, with most of the area in Spain. England has conducted trials on GM crops.
Elsewhere in the world GM crops are commonplace. About 70 per cent of US supermarket processed food contains GM, while in the UK it is reckoned that 40 per cent of takeaway meals are cooked using GM cooking oils.
In the UK, foods containing GM material for human consumption are currently required by law to be labelled. However, human foods derived from GM-fed animals do not need to be labelled. Around 30m tonnes of GM animal feed (predominantly GM soya and GM maize) is imported into the EU each year - to feed pigs, poultry, dairy and beef cattle as well as farmed fish. The UK imports an estimated 140,000 tonnes of GM soya and as much as 300,000 tonnes of GM maize annually for animal feed.
Yet while many European consumers are wary of GM, they seem more ready to embrace the emerging technology of novel, synthetic foods (SF).
SF is the umbrella term used to describe the process of making animal products without the animals. There's also a range of products other than food being made synthetically like leather, spider silk fibre, rhinoceros horn, gelatine and dyes to name a few.
The concept of SF isn't new as soymilk has been made for over 100 years. Then there are Quorn, that brand of imitation meat made from mycoprotein extracted from a fungus grown in large vats, or tofu, that cheese-like protein food made from curdled soybean milk.
Then there is "test-tube" meat where stem cells - which have the power to become any other cell type - are turned into meat. Smooth muscle cells were first cultured in 1971 and in 2013 the first burger made from cultured cells was cooked and eaten in London. This year chicken and duck meat was produced from cultured cells of each bird.
Even before we are eating lab-grown meat, we could be consuming cow-free milk and chicken-free eggs. Such products are possible thanks to synthetic-biology technologies that genetically modify yeast to "brew" animal proteins.
Food scientists are making big advances in using the basic components from plants to reconstruct something that looks, tastes and performs similarly to the products they're mimicking.
Then there is the sorry saga of whether or not meat and milk from cloned animals is safe to eat, a debate that was triggered by the birth of Dolly the sheep at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh in 1996. Faced with strong public opinion against cloning of any kind, the EU does not allow the technique in animal husbandry, although it is practiced elsewhere in the world.
Cloning is a method of speeding up the multiplication of high-merit breeding animals. Scientists take an egg from a female animal and replace its gene-containing nucleus with the nucleus of a cell from the animal they want to copy. The egg cell forms an embryo, which is implanted in the uterus of a host female. The surrogate carries the pregnancy to term and delivers a calf, lamb or whatever.
Clones occur in nature - identical twins are clones - and many plants, such as strawberries, propagate in this way. Some animals also clone themselves, such as amoeba (a microscopic single-celled organism) and some insects, such as greenfly.
Cloning is widely used in horticulture, as plants grown from a cutting or a graft are genetic copies of the original plant, while potatoes, bananas and grapes are also derived from clones.
It is right to examine new food technologies critically, but we shouldn't allow ignorance to make us afraid of them.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here