For over a decade, Vittoria Brambilla has been trying to improve crops’ quality, yields, and nutritional value. But the botany researcher at the University of Milan feared her studies might never see the light of day. Her initial problems were not scientific but political.

Italian farmers had long sought a variety of short-grained arborio rice that was resistant to blast, a devastating fungal plant pathogen that destroys enough rice globally to feed 60 million people each year. After years of work, Brambilla used CRISPR to create a new blast-resistant arborio rice variety called RIS8imo, a nod to arborio’s popular use in risotto.

“We wanted to use genome technology to make something that the farmers would understand and would appreciate,” Brambilla says.

But the Italian Parliament’s strict interpretation of 2003 European Union rules on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) meant that Brambilla couldn’t conduct any field studies of her new rice.

In 2023, after intense lobbying by farmers and scientists alike, the Italian government changed its law. Brambilla’s trial could go forward. The University of Milan scientists planted the rice earlier this year, but protesters struck overnight, ripping all the plants out of the ground. For Brambilla, it was a stark reminder that policy changes around genetically modified crops, including those altered with new genomic techniques (NGTs) like CRISPR, don’t guarantee the public’s acceptance.

“People are pretty OK with using biotech or genetic modification or even gene editing on things that they don’t eat,” says Rutgers University psychologist William Hallman, who studies attitudes toward GMOs. “Food is fundamentally different. What happens to food is personal and cultural and symbolic in ways that lots of other things aren’t.”

Ever since humans began to deliberately farm grains, fruits, and vegetables, plant breeders have searched for ways to improve their crops. Some plant varieties are more drought tolerant. Others have higher yields or allow for easier harvesting. Plants have been bred for shelf life, flavor, and seeds (or lack thereof), either by crossing two existing breeds or by taking advantage of mutations that have naturally cropped up.

The biotechnology revolution of the 1980s and 1990s widened the range of genetic changes that plant breeders could create. Scientists could now modify a plant’s genome by inserting DNA that came from a completely unrelated organism. The prospect has generated hope—and controversy.

The first GMO food to arrive on store shelves, the Flavr Savr tomato, was approved in the US 1994, but disappointing sales meant it was pulled from the market 2 years later. Rice genetically modified to contain β-carotene (golden rice) was hailed for its potential to reduce vitamin deficiencies and malnutrition in low-income Asian countries. But the green movement has consistently fought against its use, saying that the rice is unsafe. Farmers have also raised concerns about the price of bioengineered seeds and contamination of non-GMO fields with pollen from gene-edited plants. In May 2024, courts in the Philippines blocked production of golden rice and bioengineered eggplant.

Many genetic modifications, however, are more subtle. These modifications often increase an organism’s resistance to pathogens, insects, or pesticides, but to consumers the GMO plants are virtually indistinguishable from their nonengineered counterparts. The outward similarities, combined with Western culture’s declining awareness of agriculture, mean that the public has viewed GMO crops with suspicion, says Kai Purnhagen, chair of food law at the University of Bayreuth.

That suspicion has echoed loudest in the EU, which passed some of the most stringent legislation governing GMOs in 2003. GMOs were traditionally defined as crops or livestock that contained genetic modifications that could not occur via natural breeding. One EU requirement for the approval of GMOs is that manufacturers would provide a method to test for the presence of foreign DNA. For first-generation transgenic organisms, such as plants carrying genes from bacteria, detection is straightforward using standard genetic sequencing techniques.

The advent of CRISPR and other gene-editing techniques challenged this. Gene-editing methods clearly modify DNA, but the changes would be possible via conventional breeding with enough time, luck, and money. As well, the new genes aren’t sourced from a foreign species. As a result, DNA sequencing doesn’t reveal any telltale signs of genetic modification.

“The mutation is exactly what can happen in nature; therefore, it is impossible to go through the authorization process,” Purnhagen says.

These nearly undetectable changes make it all but impossible for any food to pass the testing standard, Purnhagen says. Without checking that crucial box, the food can’t be legally marketed in the EU. “This has created a huge problem,” he says.

Other parts of the world have taken a different approach. The US has divided GMO regulation between the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Agriculture. The government’s premise is that the biotechnology itself isn’t harmful, so it regulates the final products rather than the genetic engineering process—the opposite of the European approach.

According to Hallman, the problem for the public is that “the people who know the most about these products tend to be the least trusted by consumers. The companies that have been involved in producing them have been demonized.”

To improve consumer transparency, the US government began requiring in 2022 that GMO foods be labeled as “bioengineered,” but only if the modified DNA is present in the final product. This means that sugar from genetically modified sugar beets and canola oil from modified rapeseed don’t need to be labeled, because the sugar and oil are free of DNA.

More recently, in May 2024, the three US agencies released a joint plan that clarifies regulation and oversight for biotech products. The resulting Unified Website for Biotechnology Regulation was designed to make regulations more coherent and transparent as well as bolster consumer confidence in the regulatory process. This followed February 2024 FDA guidance for industry about how developers of bioengineered plants can inform regulators of the steps they have taken to ensure that the resulting products are safe.

Europe’s attempts to widen the door to foods made with NGTs such as CRISPR have proved more controversial. Unlike the US, which regulates the safety of the final product, the EU regulates the process of genetic modification itself. So it wasn’t clear whether food produced using NGTs such as CRISPR should be considered a type of GMO or should have separate regulatory standards. In July 2023, the European Commission proposed a middle ground by easing restrictions around genetic modifications if the resulting changes could also occur via traditional breeding methods. This would exempt NGT-produced organisms from the lengthy safety tests required for other GMOs. Plants with fewer than 20 nucleotides altered via editing would also be exempt.

Gerd Winter, a research professor at the University of Bremen, questioned this proposal in a recent paper in Environmental Sciences Europe (2024, DOI: 10.1186/s12302-024-00867-z). “Small changes in the genome can have large effects,” Winter says. As such, he promotes conducting a more qualitative risk assessment rather than counting the number of modifications.

The University of Milan’s Brambilla agrees with Winter’s suggestion. “From a scientific point of view, we didn’t have the tools 30 years ago to say that the genomes were really safe. Now we have the power to sequence genomes and to check what happened,” she says.

But for lawmakers, the sticking point has proven to be patents. European law does not allow patents on plants created by traditional breeding methods. The proposed European Commission changes, however, would allow patents on seeds made with NGTs. Supporters of the bill say that patent protection is necessary to encourage innovation in crucial areas like sustainability and climate change. But the majority of European members of parliament want NGTs exempt from patents, citing the current situation in the US, where a few large companies dominate the market in gene-edited seeds.

These concerns, Purnhagen says, ultimately sunk legislative approval of the 2023 proposal. Whether advocates will try to revive alterations to NGT rules in a new parliamentary session is not yet clear. That debate still rages around GMOs after 30 years and hasn’t abated points to the centrality of food in our culture and the high emotional stakes involved in the battle.

In Hallman’s estimate, the debate will likely continue for years to come. “Each side has their view; each side has something of a point. So the question is, Where do we come out so we’re not we’re not standing in the way of creating products that are really beneficial to human beings and to the environment, while still giving people the ability to choose what it is that they want to eat?” he says.

What this means for Brambilla is that even if her RIS8imo proves safe and effective, European consumers may never get a taste of NGT-made risotto.