ABSTRACT
Mankind has been engaged in a constant process of modifying what we eat, both the original foodstuffs and the end products of food processing. We have been intervening in the heredity of plants and animals (and more recently, microorganisms) 198for 10,000 yr, since the move from hunter-gatherer progressed to agriculturist (Diamond, 1998). For several millennia the genetic makeup of plants has thus undergone changes through selective breeding, including the use of techniques such as controlled pollination, hybridization, and, lately, cloning (Halford and Shewry, 2000).
