On Food and Cooking

with rennet made by microbes into which
the cattle gene for the enzyme has been
inserted. But in general, our raw
ingredients remain relatively untouched by
genetic engineering.
This will certainly change in coming
years, and not just in the West: China also
has a very active program in agricultural
biotechnology. Genetic engineering is the
modern fruit of agriculture itself, an
outgrowth of the ancient human realization
that living things can be shaped to human
desires. That shaping began when the first
farmers selectively cultivated plants and
animals that grew larger or tasted better or
looked more interesting. In its own way,
this simple process of observation and
selection became a powerful biological
technology. It gradually revealed the
hidden potential for diversity within
individual species, and made that potential
real in the form of hundreds of distinct