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amounts of the Liberty Link had mysteriously made their way into the commercial rice supply in all five of the Southern states where long-grain rice is grown: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Missouri. Bayer and Riceland then informed the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which announced the contamination last August. By then the tainted rice was everywhere. If in the past year or so you or your family ate Uncle Ben's, Rice Krispies, or Gerber's, or drank a Budweiser - Anheuser-Busch is America's biggest buyer of rice - you probably ingested a little bit of Liberty Link, with the unapproved gene. (A very little bit - perhaps ten to 15 grains of transgenic rice in a one-pound bag of rice, which contains about 29,000 grains.) Last November, over the howls of anti-GMO (that's generically modified organisms) activists, the USDA retroactively approved the Liberty Link rice, known as LL601. The department said the genes that it approved are similar to those inserted for years into canola and corn, with no apparent ill effects. The experts at the USDA, the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration, all of which bear some responsibility for regulating transgenic food, say the contamination is nothing to worry about. Then again, the experts also have dismissed repeated warnings that genetically modified crops can't be managed or controlled When organic farmers worried that their fields could be invaded by genetically modified plants grown nearby, regulators told them there was nothing to fear. The biotech industry promised that experimental, gene-altered plants could be grown in open fields and never, ever end up in the neighborhood Safeway. Oops. In any event, after last year's contamination became public, and after rice prices took a tumble, and after Europe said it no longer wanted any American rice, and after several other courttries, including Japan and Iraq demanded rigorous testing of U.S. rice, the industry moved to contain the damage. Rice growers were told not to plant Cheniere, a popular seed variety that had been tainted by Liberty Link genes. Regulators set up a comprehensive testing program to keep future harvests clean. Last December, Bruce Knight, a USDA official, assured worried rice farmers, "The good news is that the only foundation seed to test positive for Liberty Link was of a single variety - 2003 Cheniere." And then the tests that had been put in place uncovered a second contamination, and then a third, involving new, unapproved strains of Liberty Link, which turned up in another popular variety of rice seed, called Clearfield 131 (CL 131). This seed variety is made by the German chemical giant BASF Corp. So the CL 131 seed had to be banned as well. Yes, it's the attack of the mutant rice, and its spreading. The Industry Takes a Hit "This is a new kind of pollution," says Andrew Kimbrell, director of a Washington advocacy group called the Center for Food Safety, which opposes transgenic food "You don't see it It disseminates. It reproduces. It mutates. Its living pollution."