New frontier in apples — never brown
By Ben Tinker, CNN
The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Friday approved America’s first genetically modified apples. Their appeal: They don’t turn brown when bruised or sliced.
“This is really huge. It’s what we’ve waited almost five years for with regulatory approval,” says Neal Carter, founder and president of Okanagan Specialty Fruits, the Canadian company that engineered the apples. “Now we can get down to business planting trees and selling Arctic apples. We’re stoked.”
The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service granted its approval “… based on a final plant pest risk assessment that finds the GE (genetically engineered) apples are unlikely to pose a plant pest risk to agriculture and other plants in the United States … [and] deregulation is not likely to have a significant impact on the human environment.”