Since the mid-1990s, a US company called AquaBounty Technologies—now partially owned by the synthetic biology company Intrexon—has been trying to get the Food and Drug Administration to approve a salmon variety genetically engineered to put on weight faster. On Thursday, the FDA finally did so. Theoretically, at least, US retailers can now stock the fast-growing fish, and they don't have to label it.

But don't expect it to take over the seafood counter of your local supermarket anytime soon. We import about two-thirds of the salmon we eat, the great bulk of it grown on large farms in Chile, Canada, and Norway. But the FDA is hyper-specific about where AquaBounty's engineered salmon can be grown:

The AquAdvantage Salmon may be raised only in land-based, contained hatchery tanks in two specific facilities in Canada and Panama. The approval does not allow AquAdvantage Salmon to be bred or raised in the United States. In fact, under this approval, no other facilities or locations, in the United States or elsewhere, are authorized for breeding or raising AquAdvantage Salmon that are intended for marketing as food to U.S. consumers.

Why the caution? Standard salmon farming takes place directly in the ocean in net cages. Escapes are inevitable. In areas like the North American west coast from California to Alaska—home to some of the globe's last remaining wild salmon runs—escaped fast-growing salmon could out-compete and displace their wild peers. A highly detailed 2013 risk assessment from Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans found that, without strict containment, the AquaAdvantage super-salmon presents a "high" risk to wild populations. 

So for now, until the FDA approves other facilities, the only GM salmon that makes it onto US store shelves will come from eggs produced in one approved facility on Canada's Prince Edward Island, which will be shipped and raised into fish at another approved facility in Panama, only to be shipped back to North America as filets. That one facility in Panama is not likely to pose much competition to, say, Norway's vast salmon farms.

Meanwhile, the biotech-watchdog group the Center for Food Safety has vowed to sue the FDA to reverse the decision, claiming that "the review process by FDA was inadequate, failed to fully examine the likely impacts of the salmon’s introduction, and lacked a comprehensive analysis."

Add limited supply and a legal challenge to the fact that several regional grocery powerhouses—including Kroger, Safeway, and HEB—have pledged not to sell GM salmon, and it seems unlikely that many consumers will be savoring AquaBounty's bounty anytime soon.

According to the National Pork Producers Coalition, the way the meat industry currently uses antibiotics is no problem. "Existing FDA regulations are increasingly strict and provide adequate safeguards against antibiotic resistance," the group insists on its website.

But Jerome Paulson and Theoklis Zaoutis disagree. Pediatricians who serve on the American Academy of Pediatrics' Council on Environmental Health, they have published a blunt report in the journal Pediatrics, arguing that systemic overuse of antibiotics in livestock production is a key driver of the resistance crisis, which, they show, sickens 2 million Americans every year, kills 23,000, and runs up an annual healthcare bill of $21 billion annually.

With their developing immune systems, children are particularly vulnerable—salmonella alone causes more then 120,000 illnesses, 44,000 physician visits, 4600 hospitalizations, and 38 deaths annually among kids younger than five, the authors report.

They point out that US livestock producers used a staggering 32.2 million pounds of antibiotics in 2012 (the last year for which data exist), more than four times the amount used to treat people. Fully 60 percent of those farm-dispensed drugs "are considered to be important in human medicine," they add.  This annual bombardment of farm antibiotics, they show, kills susceptible bacteria and allows resistant ones to proliferate. Of the Salmonella that commonly show up in the US meat supply, 5 percent are resistant to 5 or more classes of antibiotic drugs—and 3 percent can withstand ceftriaxone, the "first-line therapy for salmonellosis in pediatrics," the authors note.

Paulson and Zaoutis then run through the various ways these superbugs move off of farms and threaten people. "Increasingly, food animals are raised in large numbers under close confinement, transported in large groups to slaughter, and processed very rapidly," they write. "These conditions can cause increased bacterial shedding and contamination of hide, carcass, and meat with fecal bacteria." Resistant bacteria can also escape the farm through farmers, farm workers, farm families, and casual visitors, who then can spread the germs throughout the communities. Then there's the vast concentrations of manure from these facilities, which "can contaminate foods when manure containing resistant organisms is applied to agricultural soils and the organisms are then present in farm runoff."

They end with a critique of what those pork producers claim are "increasingly strict" FDA rules on farm antibiotic use. Currently, the rules allow farmers to use antibiotics not only to treat disease but also "prevent" it—a loophole that, as I and others have shown, allows meat producers to maintain current practices. That practice "can harm public health, including child health, through the promotion of resistance," the authors warn. Who are you going to believe—the folks charged with keeping your kids healthy, or the ones charged with profitably churning out billions of meat animals each year?

Protein is the macronutrient of the moment, embraced by Paleos, low-carb enthusiasts, and other dieters. Sugary breakfast cereals, meanwhile, are out—sales are in the midst of a long, slow decline. Might adding the word "protein" to a hoary old cereal brand spark a sales renaissance? That's the experiment General Mills launched last year when it debuted Cheerios Protein. "I think the protein trend is real. I think it started with [the Atkins diet] back in the day, leveled off and now is gaining steam again," a General Mills exec told The Wall Street Journal at the time.

There's no word on how the product is doing at the supermarket checkout. "We do not release individual product sales data," a company spokesman told me. But the Center for Science in the Public Interest has taken a hard look at the product's label. In a class-action lawsuit filed in a California federal court, CSPI alleges that "General Mills falsely and misleadingly markets Cheerios Protein to children and adults as a high protein, healthful alternative to Cheerios."

In fact, CSPI claims, Cheerios Protein offers just marginally more protein per equivalent serving than the old product—plus, it claims, a startling 17 times more sugar. Insult to injury, General Mills charges a premium for the product: "about 70 cents more per box at stores like Walmart, Giant Foods, and Safeway," CSPI claims in a press release. The lawsuit demands damages for the plaintiffs (aggrieved Cheerios Protein buyers) and an "injunction to stop General Mills’s false and misleading marketing practices with regard to Cheerios Protein."

"We don't normally respond to these publicity-seeking lawsuits from CSPI—but we do reject their comparison," a General Mills spokesman wrote in an email. He added:

Original Cheerios does contain 3 grams of protein per serving—and it’s clearly a great cereal choice. Cheerios Protein contains 7 grams of protein per serving – and it does qualify as a good source of high-quality protein under the FDA standard.

So, who's right? Turns out, General Mills is playing games with serving sizes on its labels.

Here's the regular Cheerios label:

Note that a 28 gram serving delivers 3 grams of protein and 1 gram of sugar.

Now check out the Cheerios Protein label:

Now, we're talking about a much bigger serving size: 55 grams. This new-and-improved Cheerios iteration delivers 7 grams of protein and 17 grams of sugar at this enlarged serving size.

To compare the two, I adjusted the original Cheerios numbers to reflect a 55 gram serving. Just for fun, I added another sought-after ingredient to the mix: dietary fiber. The results are in the chart at the top.

So it's true that the protein-enhanced version delivers marginally more protein—7 grams vs. 5.9 grams per 55 gram serving. That's an 18.6 percent difference. That may sound like a lot, but we're talking about just 1.1 grams. According to Institute of Medicine, adult men need 56 grams of protein per day, and adult women require 46 grams. The extra bit provided by Cheerios Protein doesn't move the needle much.

On the sugar front, the Cheerios Protein delivers about eight times more, my label comparison suggests. That's less than the 17-fold sugar jump alluded to in the CSPI lawsuit, but still a hell of a lot more sugar. For perspective, 17 grams of sugar is equal to about 4 teaspoons—about a third of the Food and Drug Administration's recommended maximum intake. Anyone who drinks a single can of soda (about 10 teaspoons of sugar) after a bowl of Cheerios Protein has instantly leapt above the FDA's threshold.

So how did this happen? How did a major food conglomerate set out to infuse a fading legacy product with one trendy nutrient, and instead lace it with a decidedly non-trendy one like sugar? I imagine it was all about trying to keep the new product palatable despite adding stuff not normally associated with cereal.

To goose the protein content, General Mills opted to add bite-sized "clusters" made up (see label above) of oats, soy protein, and lentils. I'm going to venture a guess that soy protein doesn't taste very good on its own; and its hard to imagine what lentils taste like without salt and savory spices. Perhaps all the added sugar—CSPI notes that Cheerios Protein brings it in no fewer than eight forms, which you can confirm in the label above—is there to overwhelm those legume flavors in this grain-based cereal.

Reporting on a taste test he organized not long after Cheerios Protein's 2014 launch, Huffington Post's Joe Satran wrote that:

Mercifully, our taste testers did not report the cereal tasting like dal. Instead, they found Cheerios Protein to be, broadly, a lot like regular Cheerios. Many noted that the texture was a little more "robust" and firm than traditional Cheerios, but no one reported off flavors. It seemed like they were sweetened and flavored a little more aggressively than normal Cheerios, perhaps to mask the taste of the clusters.

Whatever the thinking behind Cheerios Protein, consumers should know they're getting just a "smidgen more protein"—to quote the CSPI lawsuit—and dramatically more sugar, when they pay up for the new product.

Elanco chief Jeff Simmons addressses the Atlantic Food Summitt, brandishing a tiny table.

Elanco, the animal-health division of the pharma giant Eli Lilly, makes one of the world's most controversial growth-promoting chemicals for meat production: ractopamine, marketed as Optaflexx for cattle, Paylean for pigs, and Topmax for turkeys.

A member of the class of medicines known as beta-agonists, which are also given to asthmatic people to help relax their airway muscles, ractopamine makes animals rapidly put on lean weight—but it also mimics stress hormones and makes their hearts beat faster. Studies suggest that it makes livestock more vulnerable to heat. Ractopamine is banned in the European Union, China, and more than 100 other countries, and it faces mounting criticism here in the United States.

To clean up his company's image, Elanco's president, Jeff Simmons, has launched a "counteroffensive,"  reports Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Andrew Martin. In addition to his responsibilities operating a $2.3 billion-dollar global animal-drug business, Simmons runs an initiative called ENOUGH Movement, which calls itself a "global community working together to ensure everyone has access to nutritious, affordable food—today and in the coming decades." Combating global hunger is one of ENOUGH'S major themes. Simmons uses a "grainy photo of [himself] carrying a small African child on his back" as his Twitter avatar, Martin reports.

Elanco served as the primary underwriter of The Atlantic magazine's 2015 Food Summit, held last week in Washington, D.C. Simmons delivered a sponsored presentation at the event. In it, he complained that a group he labeled the "fringe 1 percent," agitating for increased regulation on meat producers, is driving the national debate around food. Simmons also regaled the crowd with ENOUGH's core messages: The world needs to produce 60 percent more meat, eggs, and dairy by 2050; doing so will require "innovative farming techniques that increase efficiency;" and organic methods—which forbid growth-boosting chemicals for animals—aren't going to cut it. Instead, ENOUGH insists, "we must leverage the innovations and technological advances that will allow us to produce more food without using more resources."

One can see why an exec operating in the meat industry might be feeling defensive. Industrial-scale meat production has been linked to the rise of antibiotic resistance in human medicine (which claims at least 700,000 lives per year globally); ecological ruin; increased risk of cancer; and the hollowing out of communities where it alights. Insult to injury, US consumers have been cutting back on meat consumption overall, and turning increasingly to drug-free, pasture-raised product.

And Simmons has rushed into the fray. In short, Martin shows, Simmons is taking a page from the agrichemical/GMO industry playbook: present your industry as crucial to "feeding the world" as global population grows to 9 billion by 2050, and paint your critics as out-of-touch elitists who are indifferent to hunger and poverty.

"Simmons doesn't directly pitch Elanco products during his speeches on hunger, saying he has a higher purpose: alleviating world hunger and changing a conversation that's been hijacked by a vocal fringe of activists," Businessweek's Martin writes. "If the arguments sound familiar, it's because Monsanto and other proponents of genetically modified foods made similar claims."

One key part of the strategy to avoid discussion of existing products, and point instead to future innovation. Generally speaking, Monsanto execs prefer to talk about still-in-development crops rather than current offerings, which are riddled by weeds and insects that have evolved to resist them. Likewise, Simmons doesn't say much on the stump about the company's best-known product, ractopamine.

A 2014 study from Texas Tech and Kansas State researchers found that it nearly doubled the mortality rate of cows fed on it in the weeks before slaughter. As for pigs, the drug has "triggered more adverse reports in pigs than any other animal drug on the market," a 2012 investigation by journalist Helena Bottemiller found. "Pigs suffered from hyperactivity, trembling, broken limbs, inability to walk, and death, according to FDA reports released under a Freedom of Information Act request."

Rather than ponder such troubles, Simmons urges us to imagine a future where meat is abundant and the scourge of malnutrition has been defeated, all driven by "innovation" and "science." Whether or not that vision comes to pass, this much seems clear: We're on the verge of a loud campaign by the meat industry, particularly its pharma sector, to portray its critics as a privileged fringe, untroubled by global hunger.