Biotechnology is the altering of natural food to make it better serve human needs. Biotechnology is used to produce improvements over natural foods such as fruit, vegetables, grains, fish, fowl, animals and milk. One level of biotechnology is breeding and crossbreeding using the same species but selecting animals with certain traits. There is no danger here as long as the improvement due to crossbreeding, known as hybrid vigor, is maintained by mating only the same species. The problem, however, is whether rabbis have to check out who the male is. This is very difficult, in fact impossible, because cattle and turkeys are bred using artificial insemination. One bull’s semen is packaged and sent around the world to impregnate thousands of calves. What rabbi will testify where the semen came from when each cow is impregnated? Furthermore, the semen is processed, separating the male and female X and Y chromosome sperm cells, in order to produce mostly females. What rabbi goes down to Fort Collins, Colorado, in America, to Cytomation Inc. and watches this process to see what went in and what went out? We are thus trusting in a process we cannot possibly monitor. This is a problem today, but tomorrow the problem will be much worse.

The next level of biotechnology in foods is the use of growth hormones injected into the embryo. Growth hormones can be blood, and blood can be from a non-kosher species. Growth hormone is commonly used in cattle to improve the production of milk. May we drink this milk? May we eat the meat of the cow? Although this is a problem, the growth hormone itself does not impart specific new characteristics, but grows the existing structure faster than usual. Therefore, it is a problem, but there is a bigger problem, level 3.

Level 3 is when biotechnology improves the quality of a plant, fish, fowl or animal by introducing into it a foreign gene with a new character trait. For instance, if someone wanted to improve elephants by giving them long necks, it could take a giraffe gene and put it into the embryo of the elephant. Maybe, the elephant’s neck would grow! Of course, nobody will do that so soon because there is no money in it. However, the global food companies that produce grain, fish, fowl, milk and meat are constantly studying new ways to make more money by making a stronger product with more weight or tonnage of meat. The new frontier is transgenic biotechnology that could easily involve taking genes from treife animals and introducing them into kosher animals. There is no way for a rabbi to know whether this has been done. Therefore, we must make our own farms, our own fish, fowl and animals, and even our own fruits, grains and vegetables. Indeed, throughout the world a great fear is gripping people about the new genetically modified products. Are they safe? We ask, Are they kosher?

In 1973 Stanley Cohen won the Nobel Prize because he removed a gene from a bacterium and placed it in another bacterium. After 1977, scientists learned how to transfer a human gene to a bacterium. The bacterium had no use for the human gene, but since the human gene had become part of the bacterium, it produced the human hormone along with its own. This level of transgenic bacteria (bacteria to which a gene from a different species has been transferred) opened up the possibility of switching genes between all living things. Now a great problem emerged for kashruth. Would non-kosher genes go into kosher animals?

The new frontier in foods is Genetic Modification, changing foods by changing their genetic composition. By introducing a new gene into a food, the entire genetic map of the food changes and it becomes possessed of a new character or trait. The source of the modification can be any living thing, including treife animals, and it can produce what we do not know. Therefore, many people, not just kosher consumers, fear genetic modification. Already, a large part of the world refuses to buy some American wheat because GM wheat fields are near natural wheat fields and the wind spreads the GM wheat into the regular wheat.

If a chicken is genetically modified from treife genes to the extent that it becomes treife, and is mixed into a million chickens, it is not botel birove. It is a baal chay. How can we protect our kashruth when we know the companies are anxious for "accidents" to happen so the entire food supply is modified, thus "destroying the competition" of natural foods? Even a Sofek Treife being mixed up is a problem.

I realize that talking about fish farming, poultry farms and certainly dairy and meat farms is perhaps ambitious, but the alternative is to have hovering over our food a fear that may be realized.