Chefs Join Campaign Against Altered Fish
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/18/dining/18WELL.html?ex=1033490935&ei=1&en=9
099b98a1e8598b4

September 18, 2002
By MARIAN BURROS
IN a pre-emptive strike against the newest genetically
engineered food, 200 chefs, grocers and seafood
distributors across 40 states plan to announce today that
they have pledged not to purchase fish that have been
altered through biotechnology.

The campaign says it is concerned that if genetically
engineered salmon are approved by the Food and Drug
Administration, they could escape from the pens in which
they are raised and interbreed with wild salmon,
endangering some species.

The F.D.A. is considering an application to market
transgenic salmon. If the application is approved, salmon
would become the first genetically modified animal allowed
onto American dinner plates, where it would sit alongside
genetically engineered corn and potatoes, which have been
available for several years.

The biotech company producing the salmon says they will be
better for the environment than current farmed salmon.

The boycott is being led by the Center for Food Safety,
Clean Water Action and Friends of the Earth, all groups
that have been critical of genetically modified, or
transgenic, foods. The list of chefs allied with them
include high-profile names like Thomas Keller of the French
Laundry in Yountville, Calif.; Michel Richard of Citronelle
in Washington; and in New York, Mario Batali at Babbo,
Jean-Georges Vongerichten of Jean Georges, David Pasternack
at Esca and Eric Ripert at Le Bernardin.

The chief concern is environmental - whether genetically
altered fish are dangerous to native species. The groups
cite a study requested by the F.D.A. and issued last month
by the National Research Council, a part of the National
Academy of Sciences, which pointed out that genetically
engineered salmon, bred in pens in the sea, could escape,
crossbreed with their wild cousins and edge them out for
food and mates, thus endangering the already dwindling
Atlantic salmon fishery. Opponents say a large body of
scientific evidence indicates that genetic and ecological
interactions between wild and aquaculture salmon can
adversely affect wild populations.

One-third of all fish consumed in the United States is
farmed.

Todd Gray, the chef and an owner of Equinox in Washington,
described transgenic fish as "Frankenfood." "We'd like to
keep our food unengineered, un-laboratorized," he said.

Other environmental groups have signed on to support the
boycott, along with 42,000 individuals. Even some salmon
farmers say they are worried about transgenic fish.

This is the latest skirmish in a war that has been going on
for more than a decade between those who believe that
genetically modified food is a boon to the world's needs
and those who think that it is a bane.

Elliot Entis, the president of Aqua Bounty Farms of
Waltham, Mass., the company seeking government approval for
transgenic salmon, said the environmental groups are
twisting the facts for their own selfish reasons.

"I truly believe these groups operate on a sectarian basis
of how they can forward a private agenda at the expense of
a public good," Mr. Entis said. "Their private agenda is to
raise money for their organization and misuse information
to incite fears for that purpose."

The new breed of salmon can grow twice as fast as its
conventional farmed counterpart because it has genes
inserted from Chinook salmon and ocean pout that allow the
fish to produce growth hormones year-round, instead of only
in warm weather months as normal salmon do.

Salmon are the first biotech animal to go through the
F.D.A. review process, but the agency has permitted a few
transgenic animals to be rendered and used in animal feed.
The Center for Food Safety is concerned that the agency is
not addressing the novelty of these new animals. Other
critics say the F.D.A. is the wrong agency to be making
these decisions, since it has little expertise in the area.


A spokesman for the F.D.A. would say only that transgenic
salmon from Aqua Bounty is under review and had no comment
on how long the approval process might take.

Opponents are citing the report released by the National
Research Council last month. It found that while the risk
to human health from transgenic animals appears to be low
to moderate (some new proteins produced through adding
genes from other species might prompt allergic reactions in
a few people) there is the specter of transgenic fish
getting out and crossbreeding, with the possibility of the
modified fish replacing their wild relatives.

But the report also said there appeared to be many benefits
if the technology is applied and regulated carefully.

Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the Center for Food
Safety in Washington, said, "The report recognizes there
are many risks and virtually no controls protecting the
environment or the public from the potential impact of
genetically engineered animals."

Those who have followed the controversy over genetically
modified crops recognize that all of these arguments have
been made before.

Some countries already prohibit growing or importing
transgenic foods. Recently Zambia, which is facing famine,
rejected an offer of genetically modified food; it later
agreed to accept the food in refugee camps once it had been
milled.

The F.D.A. is treating transgenic animals as new drug
applications, which means all of the agency's deliberations
are conducted in secret.

Dr. Anne Kapuscinski, professor of fisheries and
conservation biology at the University of Minnesota and an
international expert on the safety of genetically modified
organisms, said: "Secrecy encourages black and white
positions. It's human nature when people are left in a
vacuum. Citizens won't know until after the F.D.A. has made
a decision about the fish on what kind of evidence it was
based, and even then you don't know how much information
will be released," she said. "If transgenic salmon are
approved it will be a precedent."

In the January-February 2001 issue of its magazine FDA
Consumer, the F.D.A. acknowledged that the subject of
genetically modified food is controversial. It said,
however, that "transgenic technology promises more and
better crops and food animals to feed a continuously
growing world population."

Even before the National Research Council report, the Fish
and Wildlife Service of the Interior Department and the
National Marine Fisheries Service of the Commerce
Department, warned about the potential problems of
transgenic fish. In a joint letter to the F.D.A. a year
ago, the agencies said that "the introduction of
genetically modified salmon by the salmon farming industry
has the potential to adversely affect endangered wild
salmon and thus is of concern to the Services."

The agencies base their concern on the adverse impact
farmed conventional salmon, thousands of which have escaped
from their pens over the years, have already had on the
wild population.

A 1999 study by William M. Muir and Richard D. Howard at
Purdue University concludes that "a transgene introduced
into a natural population by a small number of transgenic
fish will spread as a result of enhanced mating advantage,
but the reduced viability of offspring will cause eventual
local extinction of both populations."

But some argue that transgenic fish may actually help save
wild populations, among them Dr. Rex Dunham, professor of
fisheries and allied acquacultures at Auburn University in
Auburn, Ala.

"It's been demonstrated that there is good potential to
improve traits such as growth rate and disease resistance
that would increase aquaculture production and make it more
efficient," he said. "From an environmental standpoint,
since the world fish populations are under duress from
overfishing, overexploitation as well as pollution and
habitat destruction, we are just not going to be able to
get fish protein from wild populations. If we can get more
protein efficiency from fish farming, hopefully, that takes
some pressure of the natural populations."

Mr. Entis, the Aqua Bounty president, said his company was
also experimenting with ways to make fish farming more
productive by nontransgenic means, for example, by finding
alternatives to antibiotics to control disease. "We do
share some of the same concerns as environmentalists," he
said.

The company is conducting tests to answer questions raised
by its critics and by the government. Mr. Entis said in a
telephone interview last week that only sterile transgenic
fish would be put in pens, so even if they escaped they
could not crossbreed with salmon in the wild. He said that
he did not think they would be very good at competing in
the wild and that he was "quite sure" there would not be
any allergenicity problems.

Dr. Kapuscinski said that because Aqua Bounty has not
released its data, "the trouble is right now we just have
to take Elliot's word for it." She takes issue with Mr.
Entis's contention that the sterilization process is, as he
says, 99.9 percent effective.

Aqua Bounty is also growing transgenic arctic char and
trout. Around the world there are at least 20 other fish
species that have been genetically engineered. China is
raising transgenic carp, and Cuba is raising transgenic
tilapia. It is not clear whether any of this fish is being
sold.

The International Salmon Farmers Association has also
voiced concerns about the safety of transgenic fish. And
with the continual decline in prices of farmed salmon, its
members may not be eager to produce more fish in less time.


Transgenic salmon, for which farmers will have to pay more,
might reduce their already slim profits even further. In
addition, many environmental groups criticize farming
practices that they say despoil the waters. And because
thousands of the farmed fish have already escaped into the
wild, fish farmers may hesitate to give the public any
additional reasons for not buying their product.

"But privately," Mr. Entis said, "the large fish companies
say transgenic fish are inevitable."