"There's a genetic technology that scientists are eager to apply to food, touting its possibilities for things like mushrooms that don't brown and pigs that are resistant to deadly diseases."

"And food industry groups, still reeling from widespread protests against genetically engineered corn and soybeans (aka GMOs) that have made it difficult to get genetically engineered food to grocery store shelves, are looking to influence public opinion."

"The technology is called Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR. It's a technique that Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal genetics professor at University of California, Davis, says can de-activate a gene. Or, as she puts it: "It's editing. It's like going into a Word document and basically replacing one letter, maybe that instead of 'wind,' you want it to say 'wine,' " she says.

"Skeptics, like Dana Perls with the environmental group Friends of the Earth, say food companies are trying to distance themselves from terms like GMO and genetic engineering that have caused them trouble with consumers."