This summer, researchers at the University of Minnesota announced they had built a cell entirely from non-living molecules, a lab creation nicknamed “SpudCell” that can feed, grow, copy its own DNA, and divide for about five generations. The headlines called it a breakthrough, and it is. It is also, importantly, not alive, it makes no energy of its own, and it is nowhere near your dinner plate.
So why should anyone who cares about food safety pay attention to a blob in a petri dish? At the rate that synbio has been going over the last thirty years, it will only take about a decade for the technology used to create SpudCell to be introduced into food and farming.
A brief history of synbio food
To understand why the synthetic cell matters, it helps to see what came before it.
The first genetically modified organism (GMO) hit the U.S. food supply in 1994: Monsanto’s recombinant bovine growth hormone, rBGH (also called recombinant bovine somatotropin, rBST). To make it, scientists took the gene a cow uses to produce growth hormone, inserted it into E. coli bacteria, and turned those bacteria into tiny factories that produced the hormone, which dairies then injected into cows to push milk production higher.
The technology continued to develop. In 2010, geneticist Craig Venter demonstrated something genuinely new: that, rather than taking genes from another organism, you could design DNA on a computer, synthesize it from scratch, and install it in a living microbe. It took less than a decade for Venter’s 2010 invention to make it from laboratory experiments to food ingredients.
The industry now markets this technology under a more neutral name, “precision fermentation.” The name is new. The underlying idea, reprogram a microbe to manufacture a molecule for you, is three decades old. The rebrand is intended to overcome consumer revulsion at the idea of eating GMOs.
What’s already on the shelf
Many of these engineered foods are already for sale, and they’re not labeled as products of synthetic biology or genetic engineering.
Precision-fermentation ingredients, proteins brewed by genetically engineered microbes, are in stores and restaurants now. Impossible Foods’ fake blood, synthetic soy leghemoglobin, is produced by genetically engineered yeast. Perfect Day makes a synthetic whey protein the same way. The Every Company’s engineered egg-white protein is worked into products at major retailers. As one trade report noted, the companies buying it often keep the relationship confidential, and rising egg prices, not veganism, may be the real reason it’s being swapped in.
Mold is another synthetic-biology product entering the food supply. The meat substitute sold as Quorn is a “mycoprotein”, a fungal biomass. There are newer brands following in Quorn’s footsteps: MyForest Foods’ MyBacon, Juicy Marbles’ Kinda Cod, and others, some grown from fungal microbes the companies have engineered in the lab.
The labels, where they exist at all, are actively misleading. The Every Company’s “animal-free egg white protein” is marketed by Healthier Comforts as “real egg white proteins, free from GMOs” but the fine print on the back of the packaging admits it’s made by precision fermentation using a genetically modified microorganism. Both claims cannot be true.
The Regulatory Gap that Keeps Growing
All of this reaches us without review through a gap in the law that has been widening since the 1990s.
In 1958, Congress passed the Food Additives Amendment, which requires new food ingredients to undergo rigorous safety testing before they can be sold. But the law carved out an exception for substances “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS), everyday things like vinegar and salt with long histories of safe use. In 1992, the first Bush administration established a policy of “substantial equivalence”: if a product of genetic engineering is meant to mimic something already found in nature, it can be treated as equivalent to the natural version and pass through the GRAS exception.
Over time, more and more companies have used the GRAS loophole. All a company has to do is decide, on its own, that its novel engineered ingredient is GRAS, and it doesn’t even have to tell the FDA it has done so. When companies do file a voluntary notice, the agency’s typical response is a “no questions” letter, which sounds like approval but means only that the FDA has no further questions about the company’s own GRAS determination. Perfect Day’s synthetic whey received one; so did Impossible Foods’ soy leghemoglobin. Both have used it as a seal of approval. Food-safety lawyers argue this arrangement violates the 1958 law, but they have not yet won that argument in court.
The result is alarming: there is no reliable public record of which synthetic-biology ingredients have entered the food supply, no mandatory safety testing, and no required labels. It’s a big experiment and we are the test subjects.
It doesn’t have to be this way
Other places have drawn firmer lines. The European Union’s 1997 Novel Food Regulation is roughly what the 1958 law might have been had the GRAS exception not grown so large: new foods must be reviewed and authorized before they can be sold. It’s why the Impossible Burger’s signature fake blood still isn’t cleared for sale in the EU. Its engineered leghemoglobin is regulated there as a GMO requiring pre-market authorization, a process that’s been stalled since 2019.
Some countries are even more proactive. In 2023, Italy became the first country to ban lab-grown (cell-cultured) meat from its food supply, but it hasn’t weighed in on foods made from GMO microbes.
Watching the road ahead
None of this means the synthetic cell is about to show up in your milk. It means the synthetic cell is on a familiar path, the same fast, unlabeled, unreviewed path earlier products took, where regulators still fail to enforce safeguards.
We don’t yet know enough about synthetic cells to say what they’ll become. Before this technology follows GMO microbes into our food, we should insist on what was never imposed in thirty years of synthetic biology: independent, mandatory safety reviews, honest labeling, and regulations that protect us. Until the federal government starts doing that, all we can do is to hope state legislators will keep this stuff out of stores and restaurants.
Further Reading and Sources
SpudCell / the synthetic cell
Craig Venter’s 2010 synthetic genome
The Every Company egg-white protein (Walmart, Target)
Quorn / mycoprotein and GRAS
Adverse-reactions study (notes the 1986 petition, 2001 self-affirmed GRAS)
Mycoprotein market / newer producers
“Animal-free egg white” labeling contradiction (Healthier Comforts / EVERY)
How GRAS works (voluntary self-affirmation, “no questions” letters)
Perfect Day’s own GRAS explainer (says notification is voluntary)
Perfect Day “no questions” letter
Impossible Burger, EU/GMO status
UK launch without heme; regulated as GMO
Italy’s 2023 lab-grown meat ban (Law 172/2023)
Osborne Clarke (legal summary, notes the EU-procedure flaw)
Euronews fact-check (scope + legal-effect nuance)
OCA v. Perfect Day lawsuit
