Our meat could soon be gene-edited. Should we be worried?

Genetically edited pork could be on the market within a year. Here's what you need to know

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From hot dogs to crispy bacon, American food favourites could be made of gene-edited meat as early as 2026.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved the farming of a specific kind of genetically enhanced pig, and regulators around the world may not be far behind.

Should we be worried? Will the pork be safe to eat? And how ethical is it to create these pigs?

The first thing you need to know is that not every gene-edited animal will be directly spawned from a lab. Rather, such livestock are bred from animals whose DNA has been edited – often when they were at the stage of being a single-cell or fertilised egg – to give them beneficial traits.

The second thing to know is that this gene editing isn’t about making pork taste better – it’s about protecting pigs from disease.

For instance, British company Genus has now farmed pigs with a genetic tweak that makes them resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS), a virus that attacks pigs’ immune cells. PRRS can kill piglets, trigger miscarriages in pregnant sows and weaken pigs’ immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to other infections.

These genetically edited pigs become even less of a novelty when you consider that there’s no vaccine that provides effective protection against PRRS.

The stakes are enormous. In the US alone, efforts to control the spread of PRRS cost the pork industry an estimated $1.2bn (£878m) every year.

And when the virus does break through, the consequences can be devastating. In 2006, a major outbreak in China infected over 2 million pigs and resulted in the deaths of 400,000 of them.

CRISPR BACON

How heavily are these pigs being altered and at what cost to their welfare? These are fair questions. But in reality, the change is surprisingly minimal.