When your potato browns if cut, you...

Another strange item from my "at last we can begin to live" files: a story in today's National Post says a new GMO potato has been approved for use in Canada that "is less likely to bruise or turn brown when cut." A solution to which, again, I search in vain for the problem. I'm not convinced that all the criticisms made of GMOs are entirely rational. But I do think that when we're messing with nature for reasons as trivial as this one we're risking trouble for nothing.

To be fair the story says the "Innate" potato has less asparagine, and that this "amino acid found in many starchy foods produces acrylamide, suspected to be a human carcinogen" when you cook potatoes above 120 C which many people probably do. But honestly, whose life was really rendered less fulfilling because potatoes turn brown when cut or produce trivial quantities of something "suspected to be a human carcinogen" when cooked?

In the entire history of mankind, how many lives have been lost because of the difference between the quantity of asparagine in a natural potato and the quantity in an Innate potato?

Either we're using science for such trivial purposes because we've run out of real problems that can be solved through science, as could arguably also be happening with the latest breathless improvements in smartphones, or because we don't know what real problems are.

So again, don't run screaming into the woods, or out of the fields, because of this new GMO potato. It won't eat Etobicoke. But it also won't solve any problem that matters.