That's what I've been wondering since I saw 'The trouble With Tribbles' yesterday-it looks like the people of Earth have stopped treating GMF's as the spawn of Satan in the 23rd century. Anybody agree with me? Or not?
Even today, people who object to genetically modified food only seem to object to recently genetically modified food, as opposed to, say, vegetables that was genetically modified decades ago via selective breeding, which certainly modifies the genetic code of the resulting food in comparison to the earlier source species.
It's probably possible to make a tortured technobabbly explanation that argues otherwise, but I can't think of any other way that it would make sense.
Of course it was genetically modified. Quadro-Tritcalios: The only cereal Khan would touch in the morning.
Real Tricale dates to the 19th century. There is nothing exotic about it. The "quadro" of the Trek variety apparently referes to the shape of the kernel. Wiki has a fairly good writeup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrotriticale
According to Spock, "Quadrotriticale is a high-yield grain, a hybrid of wheat and rye. A perennial, also, I believe. Its root grain, triticale, can trace its ancestry back to 20th century Canada." The implication is that quadrotriticale was created by further hybridization and selective breeding, the same kind of genetic modification we've been practicing on our crops and domesticated animals for thousands of years. Nothing new. Genetic modification of the sort that's being done today, by manipulating individual genes and inserting genes from one species into the genetic material of another, was unknown in the 1960s.