Will Wild Foods Mutate

[nancy1340]

I just saw Alma's post in Wild Foods and got to wondering how long will it take for the engineered foods to start affecting wild foods? Cross pollinating I guess. ???

[Ernie]

Well, we don't really know yet. It may take two hundred years before we start seeing anything. Most truly wild foods don't have much of a domestic counterpart. Queen Anne's Lace (wild carrot) can't cross-pollinate a domestic carrot, as far as I know.

Keep in mind that humans have been "genetically engineering" plants for thousands of years. We took one apple tree that had sturdy trunks and limbs but poor apples and grafted in another apple tree part that had great apples. We hand-pollinated different varieties of tomato to get even more varieties.

I think the true problem has come in where scientists are doing some sort of weird gene-splicing to put salmon genes in a potato so you can get starch and Omega-3 fatty acids in one serving. A lot of that plant DNA is like human dna -- it's junk. Most of a strand of DNA is completely obscure genetic material that doesn't seem to serve any purpose at all, possibly brought in from other species by viral infections. So there's just really no telling what combinations could arise.

Take hemp for example. Those who grow illegal marijuana are absolutely against the legalization of hemp (grown for fiber). Wild hemp, or its fiber-producing domestic strains cross-pollinate with the extremely potent marijuana grown for drug use and then lower the active ingredients down to almost nothing. You can't get high from smoking hemp --- pretty much just a headache. So those folks who grow marijuana out in the woods somewhere don't want hemp anywhere around.

[Ernie]

Really? That's interesting. I think this year I may do a test and let some of my carrots go in order to find out. Although I'm not sure what the end result would be.

We currently live adjacent to about a 1400 acre nature preserve that is almost completely taken over by the wild carrot. Didn't seem to affect my garden though (except for lots of volunteer weeds) but I'm not sure how I would actually tell unless of course the carrots looked more like their wild counterpart.

The references out there seem mixed. I wish there was a way to confirm.

[AlchemyAcres]

Really? That's interesting. I think this year I may do a test and let some of my carrots go in order to find out. Although I'm not sure what the end result would be.

We currently live adjacent to about a 1400 acre nature preserve that is almost completely taken over by the wild carrot. Didn't seem to affect my garden though (except for lots of volunteer weeds) but I'm not sure how I would actually tell unless of course the carrots looked more like their wild counterpart.

The references out there seem mixed. I wish there was a way to confirm.

They're the exact same species.

~Martin