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If biotech firm A/F Protein gets its way, though, soon consumers may ingest something other than mythic wisdom with their sushi and salmon steaks. A/F Protein has managed to jigger the genetics of 15 million salmon eggs on a fish farm in Prince Edward Island, Canada, to create a new, human-engineered species blandly branded "AquAdvantage," which grows four to six times faster than the standard Darwinian variety. The Canadian company has asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for permission to start marketing its product -- one referred to as Frankenfish in some circles -- in the U.S. a year from now.

On Wednesday, the Clinton administration issued the first U.S. regulations governing genetically modified food. But the behind-the-scenes story of those fast-growing salmon shows why the new rules are unlikely to quell what has emerged as a major transnational revolt against both genetic engineering and the corporations that have staked major investments in it.

Indeed, the administration's new rules come just as McDonald's -- the very epitome of a global corporation -- announced that because of "consumer reluctance" it would no longer buy genetically modified spud potatoes. Suddenly potatoes and fish are as much at the center of global politics as are the World Bank and the IMF.

A/F Protein may be the first company to bring genetically altered fish to the U.S. market. But it is not the first corporation to experiment with salmon's growth hormones. In New Zealand in the mid-1990s, NZ King Salmon, the country's largest salmon producer, began its own genetic-engineering program along much the same lines as that of A/F Protein. But last April, reports surfaced -- eventually confirmed by the company -- that some fish had been spawned with deformed heads.

The prospect of mutant fish escaping from farms and crossbreeding with wild fish immediately set off alarm bells. The New Zealand government promptly set stringent new restrictions on the research, and the country's influential Green Party called for an investigation. In early February, NZ Salmon announced it was dropping its research program, killing its Frankenfish and freezing whatever genetically altered sperm remained.

Word of both A/F Protein's pending FDA application and the New Zealand controversy simultaneously reached Scotland, whose $260 million salmon industry produces 120,000 tons of fish a year. Scottish environmentalists worried about a Purdue University study showing that, if accidentally released into the wild, the larger genetically modified fish attract four times as many mates as wild salmon attract, but produce weaker offspring, thus potentially decimating fish populations in just a few years.

To Scotland, this was no theoretical threat: An estimated 700,000 salmon have escaped from Scottish fish farms in the past three years alone. Two weeks ago, the trade group representing Scotland's salmon industry voted to reject "any use of transgenic salmon" within the country's borders.

As the ongoing Frankensalmon saga demonstrates, genetic modification of food puts American biotech companies and agricultural giants like Monsanto on a head-on collision course with multiple constituencies worldwide: environmentalists, consumers and small food producers, whose interests have until now often seemed at odds.

Next page | Agribusiness likes the Clinton regulations