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Synthetic food has long been the subject of speculative fiction, from Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" where poor quality artificial food spawned dissent, to Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions" where food was manufactured from coal and petroleum because fossil fuels had trashed global ecosystems.
Today fiction manifests as reality. If genetic modification (GM) of our food were not enough, biologists continue to push the boundaries of their ability to alter life on earth in novel and unpredictable ways. The latest version is known as synthetic biology, or "synbio."
We are all familiar with chemical based artificial ingredients, especially flavourants and preservatives, in our food. However our evolving ability to manipulate genes enables us to synthesise entirely new living organisms in previously unimaginable ways.
Synbio has become the commercial flavour of the month, with a new supposedly "nature identical" vanilla essence ready to go on sale. But just how nature identical are these synbio products?
From the outset synbio promoters have attempted to avoid both the controversy and the required oversight associated with GM products, claiming that the synbio...