The FDA’s announcement today that cloned beef and dairy is safe was met with criticism by several consumer groups, which isn’t surprising, and the US Department of Agriculture, which is—they say that food producers should continue to honor a “voluntary moratorium” for the indefinite future until consumers have time to learn to love cloned beef. [Washington Post]
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@ancientsociety:
You seem to be conflating cloned animals with gentically modified crops. At this point, the FDA’s deciding only on allowing cloned animals into the marketplace, not GM livestock. I don’t think they have those yet.
As to corn prices not dropping dramatically in the past five years, for one thing haven’t you noticed the rising oil and gas prices? Or heard about the extra demand for corn and soybeans for bio fuel? Both of those have pushed prices UP, nullifying any possible price drops. And for another thing, as a net exporter of food, we’re already over supplied for our market, so increased supply doesn’t have as dramatic an effect on domestic prices.
But personally, I’m not worried about prices here at home, anyway. I’m worried about the majority of the world who DO have a food supply problem.
@Candyman:
Yup. still reading things and interpreting them exactly how you want to, not how they are. You call me ignorant and end up displaying your own.
@Candyman:
Cloning animals is somehow NOT genetic modification?
“Because you can’t ignore the public’s fear, even though the fear is irrational, and baseless, that’s why. Label it and people WILL avoid it…Then there’s the general principal of limiting regulations and governmental interferance.”
So customers should not have all the information available because they’re dumb and afraid or because it’s “gov’t intervention”? This is the same specious reasoning that comapnies use when confronted with disclosure of manufactuing processes or ingredients that can hurt the consumer (lead paint in toys, anyone?). I think perhaps you miss the point of “THE CONSUMERIST”.
“Another reason is simply the logistics of it. How do you expect them to track individual animals all through slaughtering and packing? And since most clones will be breeding stock, we’re really talking about their ancestry, so how many generations back have to be declared?”
This is EXACTLY the problem with modern industrial agriculture. There is NO way to track the food supply. It’s precisely the reason why, in the past few years, contaminants which make it into the food supply have been able to spread quickly and have been difficult to track. Doesn’t that give anyone pause? Shouldn’t that be a concern that you have NO idea where your food coame from or what it may have in it?
@czarandy:
The answer to your question of “why doesn’t labeling just solve this?” is pretty simple – the harm may damage more than just the purchaser reading the label. Genetic modification (and some but not all cloning also involves genetic modifications) can be dangerous to the animal, the animal’s species, or the greater environment.
Labeling coal with “mined in China with no worker protections” helps inform a consumer, but it still has negative impacts on said miner. Labelling doesn’t cure the underlying problem, even though it may help.
@guymandude: Hey “guymandude,” can you tell me where in my comment it says I only buy organic? Cause I don’t only buy organic, and I didn’t say that…go learn how to read.
And DDT is not organic. Wha?
@Falconfire:
Patented animals aren’t the same as cloned animals, so the post was kinda off-topic, but I can guarantee you that every step up to and including the offspring of these clonings are probably patented up the wazoo. What makes you think a patent on an animal doesn’t give you a patent on all that animal’s offspring too? Who cares how promiscuous the bull is? If anything, that’s better for the patent-holder – they can sue anyone who buys the calves too. Multiple courts have already ruled that farmers planting second or third generation crops from patented soybeans have to pay the patent owner, and the Supreme Court just upheld one of those cases earlier this month, even. I don’t think that’d change because its a cow and not a soybean.
@youbastid: There have been independent tests done on GM food. Do a search on PubMed. There are hundreds of articles out there.
It’s your brand of anti-scientific zealotry that allows waves of paranoia like the vaccines-cause-autism stupidity.
@tinyrobot:
What’s this? Rationality? On consumerist?
Feeding (and nutrienting) people is good for their life expectancies, and healthy cows are usually better for the planet and the humans that eat them than sick and subsequently drugged-up normal cows, and genetic modifications that make these things happen maybe even in some cases be “more good” than some envirnomental damage that might result even.
But to all the “where’s the problem, there’s no problem” people, tinyrobot is also right that some of these genetic modifications (which strictly speaking, refers to genetic modifications, not the clones that this article is about) can really screw up the animals, plants, and their environment. Introducing pesticide resistance to a commercial plant that then spreads it to the weeds it grows with results in “superweeds.” Doh! Genetic modifications do already have actual, not hypothetical bad side effects in some (maybe many) cases.
@mbprice: “Anti-scientific zealotry”? I don’t think anything I said was anti-scientific. To make a point, I’m completely for stem cell research in all it’s varieties. I am, however more about questioning the motives of giant corporations that seem to REALLY care about getting this stuff out there without doing much to ensure the safety of the public.
For some reason, I don’t think the health and well being of every living creature is what they’re setting out to do. And I question where this will take us ultimately. Calling me afraid of science is like calling someone who doesn’t like Barack Obama a racist.
@youbastid: He was referring to the chemistry definition of “organic”, which is different from the one you used. I suspect he did so deliberately, not ignorantly. In any event, what he was referencing was how chemistry defines an organic compound to be any compound consisting mainly of a hydrocarbon chain. The simplest organic compound is then methane, aka natural gas. In that sense, DDT is an organic compound, as are, among others, gasoline and antifreeze.
His deliberate use of a different definition would likely be due to sharing an annoyance of mine, that is the redefining of certain terms to imply that scientific progress is inherently bad.
If they can’t even keep feces out of the meat, how am I supposed to believe that they can mass clone their livestock without screwing it up?
I also don’t see how this is going to make meat cheaper. How is cloning cheaper than just letting the animals go at it? We’re going to kill and eat them, can’t we at least let them get a little action?
Label the cloned meat.
I agree that the cloned meat should be labeled. People will still buy it anyway, if it’s cheaper than regular meat, and those people who like living on the edge. Why not label it so those of us who feel that it’s morally and ethically wrong don’t have to be confused about what meat to buy?? I don’t trust the FDA. The FDA DOES NOT CARE about the American people. They’re courted to by so many special-interests groups, it’s impossible for them to put us first. For goodness sakes, the FDA is doing a terrible job with food contamination and all that e.coli stuff, how can you trust them to make sure that cloned meat is safe?! The sooner everyone wakes up to the fact that the FDA couldn’t care less about our safety, the better.
@ShadowFalls:
Really? Then refute my points.
@ancientsociety: “Cloning animals is somehow NOT genetic modification?”
That’s right. Cloning is genetic duplication, not modification. That’s the entire point, to duplicate it WITHOUT modification. GM crops have genetic modifications intended to produce new or improved qualities; cloning OTOH seeks to duplicate animals so their existing traits can be passed to others.
“I think perhaps you miss the point of “THE CONSUMERIST”. I miss the point of a warning label which warns of a NON-danger. Would you also advocate a hazardous substance warning label on CF bulbs? A cloned meat label would be just as stupid.
“Doesn’t that give anyone pause? Shouldn’t that be a concern that you have NO idea where your food coame from or what it may have in it?” That’s a seperate issue from whether cloning meat animals is safe, but yeah I would like more inspectors, too bad no one wants to pay the taxes for that. No, though, I don’t care if they track individual animals, tracking lots is good enough for quality and disease control, tracking individuals would be wasteful.
@Candyman:
You are somehow under the impression that I thought what you said didn’t have logic to it, or that for some reason I have to take a side, one or the other.
Since there is not likelly to be a 100% success rate, I wonder what rate of mutations will develop, how long before they are identified, and what steps will be taken to improve the process. We all know mistakes can happen and do, one can not really predict how hazardous they could be.
There is a saying, like this and many other things, “Time reveals all”.
@youbastid: Right off the bat, no, I never worked for anything even remotely close to Monsanto; I was working on finding/exploiting weaknesses in multi-drug resistant Pseudomonas strains to extend the lives of people with Cystic Fibrosis and colonized indwelling prosthetics, thank you very much.
Back to our beefy subject now – as a consumer, citizen and scientist, I feel comfortable consuming cloned meat for the simple reason that this ain’t processed food; this is living tissue. Why this matters is when you’re cooking up gross processed snacks, you can add whatever you want to the vat and we won’t know if it’s safe or not till half a million people are sick. But the cows/pigs themselves are the canaries in the coal mine in this case, and here’s why:
Cows are mammals, and really physiologically not that different from us on the cellular level. Similar to the point where bovine-derived growth supplements/hormones are used in the lab to coax human cells into thriving in a culture dish; without these supplements, they die. Mammalian cells are by and large very similar across the board when it comes to their needs, but also when it comes to what is dangerous (cytotoxic) for their ability to continue living. If the cow looks happy, healthy, has all ten fingers and toes (KIDDING!), and only shows signs of discomfort when faced with a cleaver, then fire up the BBQ! If the animals are turning up with all sorts of gross cancers, tissue necrosis, or random unexplained deaths, then some sort of intrinsic cytotoxic effect is at hand, and we need to stay away and figure out what’s going on.
So all that said, we need to remember that there are zero scientific reports of any cloned animal products being harmful, or even detectably different in any way to us carnivores. And most importantly, if something is off, we don’t need a lab or several decades of people consuming the product for this to come to light – the “product” here is living tissue, and if there is anything biologically off of wrong with it, that cow itself will demonstrate any ill effects of it’s cloned condition.
One final note on Genetic Engineering – let’s all note that while more precision techniques have put custom-genomed on the market for 13 years now, humans have been carrying out genetic engineering for centuries now. Look at a toy poodle, pluots, Peppermint and many other fruit varietals – all very un-natural species that came about through humans monkeying around with hybridization and introducing extragenic DNA into a species by whatever techniques they had on hand. It’s easier to cross two plants than to get a fish to mate with a peanut, but it’s the same principle in the end – introducing alien genes into an existing species to produce an outcome we desire for some economic or other reason. GM ain’t new, we’re just getting really good at the hardest bits and REALLY lousy at the easiest ones: “pollen can be carried by the wind into non-GM crops?” (smacks head). Not that I’m an ecologist, but it still angers me how badly mismanaged GM crops have been, turning them into de facto invasive species.
One more thing – you can make cows 100% Mad Cow-proof by altering the prion pre-protein gene (or removing it completely, I think). Makes for a fun game: would you rather eat “natural” beef that could give you a fatal, incurable prion-based disease that might not manifest for months or years following consumption, or eat the same cow that had been genetically modified to eliminate the possibility of contracting or hosting (and passing on to us) prion disease?
There’s also a solid Wired article that talks about the real cloning advocates here – it’s not mega-corps, usually smaller farms that really like their best cow or hog:
[www.wired.com]