On a cloudless September morning, the world’s most infamous apple farmer sat down at a table and carved into a $5 million Golden Delicious.
Harvest had arrived early here in the verdant Okanagan Valley, 50 miles north of the British Columbia border, and fat, shiny apples were practically tumbling off their branches. But the apple Neal Carter was neatly slicing into here on his awning-covered, plant-lined patio wasn’t one of the ones his family orchard sells to distributors around the world — in fact, it wasn’t one any grocery shopper has encountered before.
This apple had been carefully grown somewhere in Washington state, the result of millions of dollars and two decades of labor. Break apart its unremarkable surface to reveal its flesh, wait long enough, and you’ll see what’s different: It remains pure white. It doesn’t start to brown right after you take a bite and leave it on the kitchen counter. In fact, it doesn’t start to brown until it molds or rots. It doesn’t bruise, either. Through a feat of genetic engineering, Carter’s apples hold on indefinitely to the pearly-white insides that inspired their name — the Arctic.
Neal Carter lays out regular and Arctic Golden Delicious slices side by side.
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The Arctic was conceived by Carter’s company, Okanagan Specialty Fruits, which he runs with his wife, Louisa, and four other full-time employees, newly under the umbrella of a large biotech company that bought it this year. It’s an intended solution to what Carter sees as two interrelated problems: First, millions of pounds of perfectly good apples get dumped every year because they look a little too bruised or brown, the victims of an instinctive human aversion to fruits and vegetables that aren’t smooth, shiny, and symmetrical. And at the same time, North American consumers, accustomed to 100-calorie packs and grab-and-go everything, have developed an impatience for food that can’t be quickly eaten. “An apple’s not convenient enough,” Carter, 58 with reddish hair graying at the temples, told me. “That’s the truth. The whole apple is too much of a commitment in today’s world.”
Taken together, these two trends mean that while apple consumption has flatlined in the United States for decades, a staggering amount of apples go wasted. That’s an obvious problem for apple farmers, but it’s also a problem for an increasingly crowded world, and a nation in which only 13% of Americans eat their recommended daily servings of fruit. The way Carter sees it, the Arctic is a solution to all that: nutritious, attractive, always ready to eat sliced, dried, juiced, whole. Natural.
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It’s an innocuous-enough-sounding answer to a very real question, presented by an eminently likable guy running a small family business. But the race to create the world’s most convenient apple — a race that fundamentally blurs the distinction between natural and unnatural — won’t be won without a fight, and getting to the Arctic was far from easy. Browning is a natural and common mechanism in fruit, one that has evolved over millennia; counteracting it isn’t exactly flipping a switch. And even if the science had been simple, Carter would still have had to contend with forces arguably stronger: a vocal movement against genetically modified organisms in general and the Arctic in particular, and a slew of competitors also hoping to make the apple more attractive to consumers. All of this was made harder by his total budget of roughly $5 million for the whole project, a tiny fraction of what biotech-food giants would spend on a single crop.
Even though there’s no evidence that the Arctic is unsafe for consumption — and leading scientific bodies and loads of studies have concluded that genetically modified foods are as safe as conventionally bred foods — will people want to eat an apple they know is engineered not to brown? Will people accept food visibly changed by technology? Up until now, genetic engineering’s benefits may have seemed abstract to the average consumer. Though GM corn, soybean, and canola make their way into animal feed and all kinds of processed foods, only small amounts of a few such crops (papaya, sweet corn, zucchini, squash) are actually eaten directly by humans. So while many people eat genetically modified foods all the time, they’re rarely forced to look at them, to really consider the engineering that went into giving their food the properties it has.
The Arctic will change that. If consumers do embrace Carter’s invention, it’ll be an indication that they may also be ready for other kinds of GM foods in the works, like heart-healthy purple tomatoes and cancer-fighting pink pineapples. If they don’t, it’ll be 19 years of work and millions of dollars down the drain for a product that consumers are afraid to buy.
The Arctic won approval in the U.S. and Canada this spring, but won’t roll into supermarkets for a few years. So I drove to British Columbia to be among the first people in the world to try one. My host smashed an Arctic Golden Delicious against its regular counterpart, carved them into identical pieces, and waited.
Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed News
In the mid-'70s — long before the Arctic and the outcry against it — Carter took a year off from the University of British Columbia to travel with his brother around rural parts of the developing world. In Egypt, Carter watched workers use crude machines to scoop water out of the Nile and pour it into an irrigation ditch. That’s a lot of work, he thought. Don’t these guys know there’s a pump?
The experience would spark in him a lifelong interest in solving world problems with agricultural ingenuity. He returned home, daunted at the challenges farmers face in producing food for a population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. The crisis of insufficient and unequally distributed food and water is becoming acute since most of the world’s available farmable land is already being farmed, and rivers, lakes, and inland seas are disappearing. Soils are eroding. Climate change is wreaking havoc on temperatures and rainfall patterns.
Louisa Carter packs apples to ship.
Stephanie Lee / BuzzFeed News
Whether genetically modified crops have improved yields is debatable, but Carter and other experts believe they can be a — even if not the — solution. And they see genetic engineering as the latest iteration of a process that started thousands of years ago, when farmers began selectively breeding plants and animals for traits such as faster growth or bigger seeds. Apples in particular have been transformed dramatically by commercial cultivation and serendipitous acts of nature over the last two millennia. The apples grocery store shoppers pluck off shelves in 2015 are vastly different from the ones first discovered in Kazakhstan, or even the ones grown by Johnny Appleseed in the 19th century.
“Can we afford to not embrace a life-saving technology like agricultural biotechnology?” Carter asked in a 2012 TEDx Talk. Plant genomics research “is leading us to be able to develop new crops that meet real-world problems like drought, saline soils, poor water quality, and many, many more … This is a huge challenge and biotech crops are leading the way and allowing us to address it.”
In 1982, Carter graduated with a bio-resource engineering degree and married Louisa, a forestry major. He joined Agrodev, an international agricultural development company that helps farmers adopt new technologies and build infrastructure. The two eventually settled in Summerland, a tiny, lakeside British Columbia town filled with wineries, and started their own orchard. By 1995, Agrodev was thinking about agricultural technologies of its own, so Carter went looking for ideas at the government-run Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre in Summerland. There he met David Lane, a cherry and apple breeder newly in charge of crop biotechnology projects.
Lane had an idea on his mind. A team of Australian scientists had recently identified the biological process behind browning in potatoes, and Lane suspected the same force was at work in apples. In intact apple cells, enzymes called polyphenol oxidases, or PPO, stay separate from compounds called phenols. But as soon as a knife rips through the skin, as soon as air starts rushing in, the cell walls break down, the compounds mix, and the flesh deepens into shades of caramel. (This ancient process evolved so the flesh would release the seeds and allow them to propagate, Amit Dhingra, a Washington State University horticultural genomicist, told me.)
If there were a way to tone down PPO, Lane thought, it could plausibly slow or stop the browning process. No one knew how to do this, but Carter wanted to try. “If you’re a grower, you would understand immediately the amount of apples that are tossed out because of superficial scuff marks,” he said. “So there’s a huge cost to the grower, packer, shipper, retailer, processor, all the way down the value chain, and then, ultimately, I think most consumers understand the ‘yuck’ factor around apples going brown.”
They certainly do. In the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, more fruits and vegetables are lost or wasted than consumed across the supply chain, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. A study in the Journal of Consumer Affairs estimated that $15 billion in fresh and processed fruit was lost from the U.S. food supply in 2008 — about $9 billion at the consumer level and the rest at the retail level. Apples, the second-most consumed fresh fruit in the U.S. behind bananas, make up a good chunk of that waste: an estimated 1.3 billion pounds every year, or a $1.4 billion loss, with a sizable yet unknown portion due to off-coloring or soft spots.
Dave Henze of Holtzinger Fruit Company, which packs and ships apples from mostly family-owned and independent growers in Washington, estimates that bruising and browning force him to dump about 5% of his supply, or 2 million pounds, every year. “A lot of apples aren’t packed because maybe they don’t have the right shape or right color, but they’re a perfectly good eating apple,” he said. Some get juiced or sliced, but “there’s a huge amount of food that is thrown away or not used.”
Neal Carter's orchard.
Stephanie Lee / BuzzFeed News
Soon after Carter and Lane met, Agrodev lost interest in potato-browning. But Carter wouldn’t give up on apples. He licensed the Australian scientists’ technology, raised money from family and friends, got a grant from the Canadian government, and rented lab space in the Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre. Now, looking back on November 1996, Carter can only describe himself as “naïve as hell.”
“David [Lane] made it all sound like it was going to be a lot easier than it was,” he recalled. “Classic scientist, right? ‘Oh yeah, two years and all this is done.’”
Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed News
Long before the genetically engineered apple, there was a genetically engineered tomato. The Flavr Savr ripened slower, lasted longer, and in 1994, became the first commercially grown food with a genetic change that U.S. customers could see and feel. Since then, GMOs — mostly designed by agricultural behemoths like Monsanto and beloved by farmers for their ability to fight off pests, diseases, and drought in the field — have quickly and aggressively entered our food supply. Today, about 90% of all corn, soybeans, and cotton grown in the U.S. are genetically modified.
But as GMOs have grown pervasive, their opposition has become organized and vocal. Monsanto in particular became a high-profile symbol when it engineered some of its first crops to resist a weed killer it also made, which critics say forced farmers to buy its products, endangered the environment, and ultimately didn’t solve the problem it promised to solve: Weeds are now becoming immune to that weed killer. Activists stage worldwide rallies against Monsanto and protest in stores believed to carry its products. In 1999, scientists developed “Golden Rice” to counter vitamin A deficiency, which causes blindness in up to half a million children in developing countries every year. Despite studies finding that the nutrient-rich rice is safe and boosts health, activists have destroyed a field trial in the Philippines, filed to block all field tests and feeding studies, and helped keep it off the market 16 years after its invention. In 2005, two organic food retailers launched the Non-GMO Project, which has gone on to label nearly 35,000 products as “GMO-free.” And in 2012, Canadian researchers, in the face of protests, gave up on genetically modifying pigs to produce less environmentally harmful manure.
Buoyed partly by a rising appetite, at least in certain circles, for food perceived or marketed as “natural” — locally grown, minimally processed, organic — supermarkets and manufacturers including Ben & Jerry’s, Whole Foods, General Mills, and Chipotle have banned or restricted GMOs. State and national legislators have passed or tried to pass GMO-labeling laws; Connecticut, Maine, and Vermont all require some form of GMO labeling. Earlier this year, the White House announced it would re-evaluate its regulatory process for bioengineered crops.
As the GMO debate raged on, Carter and his handful of scientists plugged away. They dabbled in peaches, apricots, cherries, and pears, but ultimately, their budget forced them to focus on just two Arctic varieties, one sweet and the other tart: the Golden Delicious and Granny Smith. “Neal never gave up, ever,” Louisa said.
Until its sale, Okanagan Specialty Fruits was a tiny operation, unlike the mega-corporations that spend an estimated $136 million on developing and getting approval for just one GMO. And in many ways, it still is. Headquarters is essentially the Carters’ home, where family and work are indistinguishable. Over lunch, I sat with Louisa, 57, the co-founder and chief financial officer, and Joel, their 28-year-old son who helps part-time, in their kitchen as they chatted about the work left to do and an upcoming wedding. Apple-shaped magnets pinned family photos to the fridge, next to biotech-themed magnetic poetry (“agriculture and genetically modified biotechnology is exciting research”) and a political cartoon poking fun at the Arctic. A running tally of the harvest was scribbled on the chalkboard near the home office where Carter can be found when not in the fields. Carter estimates he’s worked 60 to 80 hours a week for the last 20 years. “Other people might say, ‘If you work out the net-present value of what we put in and what’s going on, we better quit,’” Lane said. “But not Neal.”
Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed News
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