Meet Your New Gene-Edited Salad

Minh Chung Bui/Shutterstock

Mustard greens that have been genetically altered to remove their pungent flavor are coming to U.S. grocery stores.

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

• Pairwise, an agricultural biotechnology company, created Conscious Greens Purple Power Baby Greens Blend, the first CRISPR-edited food available to U.S. consumers.
• The company used CRISPR—clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats—to edit mustard greens’ DNA, removing a gene that gives them their pungent flavor.
• The greens are first being rolled out in restaurants in St. Louis, Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, before heading to U.S. grocery stores—beginning in the Pacific Northwest.
• In 2022, researchers with Boston Children’s Hospital revealed that using CRISPR in human cell lines increased the risk of large rearrangements of DNA, which could increase cancer risk.
• Because regulators don’t consider gene-edited foods to be genetically modified organisms (GMOs), they don’t have to be labeled.

Mustard greens are a nutrient-dense source of vitamins and minerals, but their bitter flavor makes them unpalatable to many. To remedy the problem, Tom Adams, cofounder and CEO of Pairwise, told Wired, “We basically created a new category of salad.”[1]