Pumplin says that USDA evaluated their tomato (as it does for all approved GM crops) to make sure it was unlikely to start spreading like a weed. We never thought we'd be facing a GMO issue with tomatoes.' 'We were absolutely over the moon about finding this really unique variety,' Brazaitis says, 'The comedown from that has been really hard. 'It's going to happen again and again as we see more GM crops come to market for consumers,' says Brazaitis.īaker Creek's Brazaitis says the whole experience of pulling the seed from their collection was very painful and worries about the long-term implications. The USDA approved the orange petunia for sale in 2021.Įven if the GMO purple tomato seeds were not spreading in the wild, Baker Creek's Brazaitis is concerned that GM seeds could show up in surprising places and growers won't know if they have GM seeds or not. When the USDA asked for a recall in 2017, there were nine varieties growers had to destroy with names like Trilogy Mango, Petunia Salmon Ray or Sweetunia Orange Flash.

Most of Europe has a GMO ban, so government agencies asked growers to destroy the orange varieties. The culprit plants were all over Europe and the United States, not growing in the wild, but in gardens, parks and train stations. It was never released to the public, but almost 30 years later, it was found in Finland, again almost certainly from someone illicitly breeding them. In 1987, a German lab created an orange petunia by inserting a maize gene. This isn't the first time a genetically engineered plant ended up with unwitting producers or consumers. 'Maybe it's a collaborator in France had some and their technician took it, and then their technician gave it to a friend who knows, right?' he says, 'Somebody took it and said, hey, I'm going to play with this.' The GMO Purple Tomato was in development for 20 years, which means access to plant materials was long and sustained. 'For the same reason that regular tomatoes don't become weeds,' he says, 'They just don't have the characteristics that allow them to compete well in a crowded environment.'įrancis says humans were most certainly involved. You could easily argue that Baker Creek has it in their catalog because somebody misappropriated it and didn't do their due diligence,' Ohio State's Francis says, 'Whether that was just incompetence or a mistake, who knows?'įrancis says this isn't a case of the modified tomato genes escaping into the wild from a UK lab and traveling by wind across the English Channel to France because tomatoes don't spread like dandelions, purslane or ivy. This result supports the fact that the only reported way to produce a purple-fleshed tomato rich in anthocyanin antioxidants is with Norfolk's patented technology.'īut the next mystery is one that's harder to answer: How could seeds get from a closed lab in the United Kingdom to a hobby gardener in France? Pumplin wouldn't say definitively either, but their website says this: 'We are told that laboratory testing determined that it is, in fact, bioengineered (GMO). The seed company refused to say whether or not the seeds were GMO and wrote in a statement: 'After repeated testing, we are unable to conclusively establish that the Purple Galaxy does not contain any genes that have been genetically modified.'

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