For each of the ingredients you might find in a pizza, including cheese, wheat, green peppers, onions, and tomatoes, scientists are testing GM varieties. Scientists are testing several different crops for use as edible vaccines against a host of diseases, including hepatitis, polio, cholera, and malaria. Bananas and other fruits may serve as particularly good storage media for edible vaccines, because their skins provide sterile barriers against contamination.
Bananas are also indigenous to many developing nations.
There, conventional vaccines can be difficult to deliver on a broad scale, because they typically need to be refrigerated and administered by health-care professionals. Several biotechnology companies are testing coffee plants engineered to produce coffee with altered caffeine content. If these new coffee beans are approved for public consumption, coffee growers could potentially produce decaffeinated coffee beans, avoiding having to decaffeinate coffee beans after the harvest. The first GM insects are due for release in the United States this summer. Since the GM insect cannot contribute to reproduction and most female pests can mate only once, the pest population in the release area is eventually reduced or even eliminated.