It’s been an interesting few weeks for those considering the prospect of eating genetically engineered animals.

From the September 19-21, the US Food and Drug Administration held two public meetings on AquAdvantage Salmon, the first genetically engineered animal built with the intention of being food. The FDA found “a reasonable certainty of no harm from consumption of food from this animal” earlier in the month. Martha Rosenberg from Counterpunch has a good summary of the hearings and here is the 180 page briefing packet if you’re keen to dig into the deep background and make your own assessment.

The hearings neither produced a big thumbs up for the fish nor an outright rejection – not exactly the most newsworthy of results, but produced some great footage of big fish that the world seems no closer to eating and the opportunity for journalists to append "franken-" to another living creature.

The salmon is produced by taking a portion of the gene that protects the ocean pout fish from freezing, transplanting it into the growth gene of a Chinook salmon and then moving that genetic material into the fertilised eggs of a North Atlantic salmon. Your regular salmon only produces the growth hormone in warm weather, but with the ocean pout antifreeze genes, the growth hormone is turned on year round.

The resulting salmon reaches maturity in 16 to 18 months rather than the regular 30 month period, producing a beautiful, newsworthy image of an anemic-looking non-engineered salmon lined up next to her beefy engineered brethren and the tantalising possibility that food will reach the plate faster than ever before.

The reason why a faster growing salmon is at all necessary is the increasing demand for salmon in industrialised nations. For example, while the fish makes up around 1 per cent of the meat eaten in the US (and comes in third behind prawns and canned tuna as most popular seafood), but between 1989 and 2004 consumption of salmon more than doubled.

In the wild, Atlantic salmon stocks (according to the FAO) are ranging from fully-exploited to depleted. There aren’t enough fish in the sea. As for farming, and as with farming any carnivore, the salmon requires more meat to eat than is output in the final product: a different (and less palatable) fishery is depleted in the service of the farmed salmon.