In 1992, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decided to allow American companies to market genetically modified foods. That decision prompted Paul Lewis, an English professor at Boston College, to write a letter to the New York Times in which he decried what he called Frankenfood, an innovation as misguided (in Lewis’ view) as Frankenstein’s creation of his monster. Since then, the word’ has spread like wildfire: a Google search for Frankenfood on the Internet returns over 19,000 hits, and it appears in a book title, The Frankenfood Myth, published in 2004.