Recently, I did something I had not done in a long time. I ate in a restaurant with my family. Actually, we ate on the outdoor patio, since my kids are too young to be vaccinated and we are somewhat more squeamish than average about COVID, but it was nevertheless a refreshing return to normality and a welcome rest from battling traffic on the way to the Delaware seashore.

I ordered a salad with blackened salmon. If we make the trip again, I will make a different choice.

That’s because last week, biotech company AquaBounty Technologies Inc. announced that it is harvesting several tons of genetically modified salmon, which will soon be sold at restaurants and other “away-from-home” dining retailers around the country. So far just one distributor — Philadelphia-based Samuels and Son Seafood—has reportedly said that it will be selling the novel salmon. But AquaBounty has announced plans to sell its salmon via “food service channels” across the Midwest and East Coast.

Some growers report losses of up to 95 percent.

The volatile nature of the pesticide dicamba has meant that it can wind up miles away from where it was sprayed.

Dicamba, and dicamba-resistant seeds, were meant to be the next huge product for Monsanto, which was bought by agrochemical giant Bayer back in 2018. But “dicamba drift,” the name for the phenomenon in which dicamba particles float through the air onto plants that have no protection against it, has affected farmers and forests across the country. Most often, we’ve seen dicamba drift pegged as a damaging agent on unprotected soybean fields, but soy is far from the only victim. A new lawsuit claims that dicamba drift leveled extensive damage on vineyards—in Texas.

The inaugural harvest of genetically modified salmon began this week after the pandemic delayed the sale of the first such altered animal to be cleared for human consumption in the United States, company officials said.

Several tons of salmon, engineered by biotech company AquaBounty Technologies Inc., will now head to restaurants and away-from-home dining services—where labeling as genetically engineered is not required—in the Midwest and along the East Coast, company CEO Sylvia Wulf said.

Thus far, the only customer to announce it is selling the salmon is Samuels and Son Seafood, a Philadelphia-based seafood distributor.

AquaBounty has raised its faster-growing salmon at an indoor aquaculture farm in Albany, Indiana. The fish are genetically modified to grow twice as fast as wild salmon, reaching market size—8 to 12 pounds (3.6 to 5.4 kilograms)—in 18 months rather than 36.

Public's opportunity to demand more testing and stricter regulation ends on May 7

BELLINGHAM, Wash., May 5, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Genetically engineered animals are being developed at an accelerating pace, and could, with few regulations and limited testing, be arriving on dining room tables in the US in 2021. That's due in part by efforts made by the previous administration to deregulate biotechnologies. On the final day of Sonny Perdue's tenure as head of the US Department of Agriculture, a proposal was made to move oversight and regulation of GE animals from the FDA to the USDA -- a move that would significantly reduce the safeguards that protect the US public dating back to the Obama administration.

On Thursday morning, workers from a British company placed basketball-size cardboard boxes into six yards in the Florida Keys.

Then they added water.

In a week or so, 12,000 male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes will – one by one – begin buzzing out of each box, the first genetically modified mosquitoes to be released in the United States.

SEATTLE—Tomorrow, on Wednesday, April 14, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments in Center for Food Safety's (CFS) ongoing lawsuit challenging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) approval of soy leghemoglobin (a.k.a. "heme"), the novel genetically engineered (GE) color additive that makes Impossible Foods' eponymous plant-based burger, the Impossible Burger, appear to "bleed" like real meat. CFS originally filed the lawsuit in March 2020, challenging FDA's safety review of the genetically engineered color additive.

AquaBounty says its first bioengineered salmon will be harvested in March, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy to buy.

For decades, Americans have been teased with the impending arrival of genetically engineered salmon. If a boycott campaign continues apace, they may have to wait even longer.

Earlier this month, a coalition of environmentalists and grassroots organizers announced they had successfully pressured Aramark, one of the country’s largest foodservice companies, into agreeing not to sell the salmon, should it become available in the United States.

Insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, collectively known as pesticides, are chemicals that are used in agricultural pest control. Learn about their impacts on the environment and public health.

Our industrial agricultural system relies heavily on pesticides, which control weeds, kill insects and stave off fungi. More than 1.1 billion pounds of pesticides are applied annually to crops in the US, mostly in combination with seeds that are genetically engineered to withstand them. The escalating use of pesticides in recent decades has become a public health hazard, an environmental disaster and has even caused the evolution of “superweeds,” which require increasingly toxic pesticide formulas to kill. Consumers can help reduce the demand for products grown with pesticides by purchasing organic or low-spray produce and by joining organizations fighting against the powerful multi-billion-dollar pesticide industry.

A federal judge in San Francisco ordered the FDA on Thursday to take a new and stronger look at the potential consequences on native salmon if AquaBounty’s fast-growing GMO salmon escaped from fish farms and established itself in the wild. District Judge Vince Chhabria left in place the FDA’s 2015 approval of the salmon, the first genetically modified animal approved for human consumption, while the new research is conducted.

New database launched

The US nonprofit GMO/Toxin Free USA has launched GMOResearch.org, the first-of-its-kind searchable science database of studies and reports on the safety and effects of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and associated agrochemicals.

GMO Research is the world’s most comprehensive science database on the topic, with over 2,000 studies and journal publications documenting risks and potential and actual harmful effects of GMOs (also known as genetically engineered or bioengineered organisms) and the related pesticides and agrochemicals. The database contains references culled from around the world documenting health effects, environmental impacts, impacts on non-target organisms, resistance of target organisms, pesticide drift damage, genetic contamination, horizontal gene transfer and other unintended effects, as well as references related to crop yields, social impact, ethics and economics.