Biotech Pork: Tasty, Healthful Treat or Hideous, Kamapua'a/Dagon Monstrosity?

For those of us under 40, lacking any genetically-based crippling diseases, and pretty sure we don't need wings or gills, one of the biotech frontier's--so ably explained and defended in our own Ron Bailey's brilliant new book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution--most exciting areas is food that's better for us in interesting ways.

The Los Angeles Times today reveals the coming, via experiments unveiled over the weekend in Nature Biotechnology, of pork that is unnaturally rich in omega-3 fatty acids, supposedly good for protection against heart attacks. The first batch of bio-altered pigs have only one-fifth the omega-3 found in salmon, but researchers think they can improve that with more breeding.

A don't-whip-out-the-bibs-yet caveat: no one has yet eaten any of these altered pigs to see if they taste good, or properly pig-like. One of the scientists working on the project does assure us they do not "smell fishy."