Miso

Description of product

Miso is a thick paste, which comes in different variations in flavour. It is normally available from health food and natural food shops. It is used as a natural flavour enhancer for seasoning all types of dishes or as a basis for soup.

• Miso is produced by fermenting soya beans, rice or barley in several steps, in which specific fungi, lactic acid bacteria and yeast are also used. Maturation can require up to 3 years.
• See also: tofu, soya milk, soya sauce

Possible application of gene technology

If miso is prepared from soya beans, application of gene technology is in principle possible. However, it is not possible to say whether and to what extent this assumption can be applied to a particular product.

Raw material soya beans:

• soya beans: Internationally traded primary product soya stems in general completely or in part from genetically modified plants. GM-soya beans are grown on a large scale in the USA, Argentina and Brazil. Each year the EU imports over 30 million tons of soya and soya primary products from these countries.
• some food companies process exclusively conventional soya raw material. However, it is not technically possible to keep a strict separation of conventional and GM-soya beans through all the processing steps. Therefore, even raw materials that are declared as "free of gene technology" contain a small amount (possibly up to 0.9%) of genetically modified material.
• traditional soya products such as miso are generally produced not from mass-produced soya but from soya beans with special attributes. These soya beans are cultivated and handled separately. Therefore, these products do not contain any appreciable amount of GM-soya beans.

Labelling: Miso prepared from genetically modified soya beans have to be so labelled.