How gene editing is changing the meat in our diet, from fast-growing fish to heat-tolerant cows

Do you wonder where your meat comes from? Maybe it is organic, wild harvested, or farmed.

Or perhaps it was designed in a lab.

Faster-growing fish, heat-tolerant cows and disease-resistant pigs are among a new class of animals that are being genetically engineered for the dining table.

In the past six years, several gene-edited animals have been approved for consumption in Japan, the US and several South American countries.

And similar meat products could soon be sold in Australia without lengthy regulatory testing or labels indicating what DNA alterations have been made.

That is because of recent changes to how Australia's food regulator defines "genetic modification", which have come in response to technological advances.

The adoption of new gene-editing technology into Australia's food production systems has the potential to speed up traditional breeding of animals and plants by decades.

Mark Tizard, a principal research scientist at the CSIRO's division of health and biosecurity, said a new era was dawning for animal biotechnology and genetic editing.

"There's going to be much more of it and it's really important … it's...