Making a more perfect produce aisle

On this week’s “TechKnow,” contributor Marita Davison gets a rare inside look at Monsanto’s labs, where they are working to make more perfect produce — using cross-breeding and advanced genome mapping, plus an increased emphasis on consumer testing, not GMO seeds.

Here’s some more detail — and some different opinions — about the brand-name superproduce Monsanto is making:

EverMild onions are similar to a sweet Vidalia onion but have a lower lachrymatory factor, which means they won’t make you cry (probably).

According to the Riverfront Times, in Monsanto’s home base of St. Louis, EverMild onions were developed using a mix of cross-breeding and computer algorithms:

"The trait is a little bit tricky to develop because you can't just eat onion after onion," explains Scott Hendricks, a Monsanto breeder based in Madison, Wisconsin. "We can sample a few, but pretty soon you've ruined your palate for the rest of the day. So, we do rely on a lab screening technique that we've come up with to tell us which onions would match this profile."

Beneforté broccoli is a hybrid of a wild Italian broccoli and a commercial variety that is rich in antioxidant-producing glucoraphanin. The Guardian reported that glucoraphanin could help prevent heart disease and some kinds of cancer:

The nutrient is converted in the gut into the bioactive compound sulphoraphane, which circulates in the bloodstream.

Evidence indicates that sulphoraphane has beneficial effects such as reducing chronic inflammation, stopping uncontrolled cell division associated with early-stage cancer, and boosting the body's antioxidants.

Some critics, though, question whether it’s any better than simply going organic. Grist.com writes:

This obsession with glucoraphanin is a silly and myopic distraction. Broccoli, by virtue of being a vegetable, is healthful and does not need to be improved upon. None of the myriad of chronic health issues affecting millions of Americans are due to “faulty broccoli” with low levels of glucoraphanin.

BellaFina peppers are tinier than typical bell peppers, more a snack size akin to baby carrots. They’re sold in multicolor packs and are already pretty popular in recipes, but they still have seeds and stems like full-size peppers.

Melorange is designed to be sweeter and smaller and to have a longer shelf life — while ripe — than cantaloupe. In the past, growers often chose between durability — especially important during the winter, when most melons are grown far from the U.S. — and flavor, and flavor suffered.

Monsanto also sells a honeydew seasonally called Sweetpeak Fuji; a watermelon, Sweetslice, is available as “fresh cut” — containers of cut-up melon rather than the whole fruit.

Frescada lettuce is a mix of iceberg and romaine, which Monsanto says makes it sweeter, crisper, greener, longer-lasting and more full of folate and vitamin C.

It was originally developed and patented by a Monsanto breeder with a long history of lettuce improvement:

Perfecting a new lettuce variety has been a slow journey, involving precise selection of traits in each generation of plants. Waycott has worked on increasing the size of the root mass to reduce irrigation requirements. He helped his plants become resistant to disease by crossing them with a spine-covered wild variety that looks more like an unappetizing dandelion than a tasty salad ingredient. And he wanted an upright lettuce head that would be easier to harvest than traditional iceberg.