It’s all about recognising your target group!

This piece is not technically about something ‘Heard in Brussels‘ – rather a stream of consciousness from the inside of my head – but as my head is in Brussels, that will have to do.

What would we really like GMOs to be able to do? And what would instantly open the door to their warm embrace by people who previously thought that little Petronella would be intellectually stunted if a morsel of food sourced from a GMO passed her lips? Here I am specifically referring to the well-meaning monsters who feed their children organic beetroot-paste sandwiches (ignoring in the process their human rights by denying them actual food).

The brave new world of synthetic biology opens the door to any kind of GM capability that we like, so here‘s a few ideas on how we could sell it as the must-have middle class accessory for the following applications:

• By turning that supermarket T-shirt you guiltily bought for  Euro 2 into an organic, ethically-produced shirt, hand-woven by well-fed adults somewhere sunny that isn‘t falling down, war-torn or underwater
• By transforming your electric car from a mobile ‘rainforest resources on wheels‘ into something that has the energy footprint of a teenager on a sofa on a Saturday morning
• By enabling your local farming system to produce hummus, tahini, South American wine, and all those other things without which you can‘t have dinner parties, and so have to ship from the other side of the world, which rather rains on the ‘local produce only‘ parade embodied in that beetroot paste
• By converting fashionable gluten and dairy-free yoghurt from a habitat-destroying, palm-oil containing crime against food into something that makes you thin whilst containing ingredients that you have actually heard of
• By turning those delicious prawns from the product of a miserable, polluted swamp on the other side of the world into happy seafood that just fell asleep and was harvested by smiling artisan fishermen from the crystal waters of a tropical lagoon. That will probably do it. So boffins, rather than focussing on the undoubted evil of reducing use of pesticides and producing nutritionally superior rice, can you focus on all the critical things that blight the life of suburban Europeans? Then we can embrace GM technology, or at least add it to the list of stuff for which we ignore the production process. After all, we do so very much like the product.