The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a letter to the public on Thursday, informing them that they refuse to regulate a GMO vegetable, in a move which has caused many healthy food advocates concern. The letter says that the agency will not regulate a mushroom that has had its genes edited to prevent it from turning brown. Yahoo News reports: This is widely different from the approach it’s taken with GMOs, which are regulated by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which keeps an eye on new genetically modified organisms that “may pose a risk to plant health.” The mushroom, developed by Yinong Yang at Penn State, is not the first crop to be modified using the controversial gene-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9, but it is the first one that the USDA has said isn’t subject to regulation. And that means that everything we know about genetically modified food may be about to change. At its essence, CRISPR is a far more accurate method of modifying genes than scientists have had access to before. At the center of the agency’s decision not to subject the new crop to its rules is the fact that the CRISPR-edited mushroom doesn’t contain any “introduced genetic material” [...]