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There is a fear of the unknown in the U.K.

“I can’t stress enough how enlightened the Canadian regulatory process towards these types of [genetically modified] foods is — it has truly been fantastic,” Prof. Martin says.

“There is a fear of the unknown in the U.K. I think people here viewed genetically modified food as a new technology that wasn’t controlled enough to be able to say for certain that there were no risks associated with it, and I think the traits that were originally engineered for in plants, such as herbicide resistance or insect resistance, didn’t offer consumers anything tangible in terms of an advantage.”

But Canadian-grown purple tomatoes theoretically do. Red tomatoes, as a whole, are good for you, though deficient in anthocyanins, a wonder substance found in abundance in the skins of purple-hued fruits — plums, blueberries, blackberries and eggplants.

Tests involving mice with cancer found that mice on a diet of genetically modified purple tomatoes lived 30% longer than mice consuming red tomatoes. Studies also indicate purple tomatoes contain anti-inflammatory properties.

The professor’s problem: where to grow her purple tomatoes. (She pronounces tomatoes — “toe-maa-toes.”) The European Union hasn’t approved a GM food crop since 1998. Public-opinion polls in Europe from as recent as 2010 indicate a 3:1 opposition to GM foods. It is a fear factor the proponents of GM foods attribute to the legacy of the mad cow disease outbreak in Europe in the 1990s, a catastrophic event that killed people, and millions of cows, and that was blamed on lax regulatory standards and political duplicity.