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Cloning Cows for Cuba
AVIDLY INTERESTED writes: "You've got to hand it to the Cubans. They have been surviving by hook or by crook since the collapse of Communism without the subsidies the USSR used to afford them. Now, according to this article at The Age they are using the ingenuity of their scientists to clone White Udder, the cow of all cows, that will cover an entire nation in healthy milk moustaches."
My grandfather used to work on cross breeding plants to have weak genes.
If you cross bred a weak gene plant with a normal plant then the offspring will inherit nearly all genes from the second plant.
This way when he found a particular wheat plant with very high level of protein he would cross breed it with the weak gene plants in order to reproduce it nearly intact.
This research was quickly forgotten when cloning came along.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Doesn't matter. Human beings have been using dairy products for millennia. The fact is, when it comes to human nutririon, we are omnivorous. If our brains weren't so clever about finding ways to eat just about anything, that might not be the case, but it's not. While it's true we cause ourselves nutritionally-related illnesses, historically that was a small price to pay to be able to subsist on animal husbandry. In addition, I think it's more common not to be lactose-intolerant than to be lactose intolerant. Apparently being able to consume dairy products is adaptive for humans.
No there is no such thing as a dairy food group, and indeed the USDA food pyramid is a scheme to support the agriculture industry and protect it from consumers radically changing their eating habit. But technically, there are no food groups at all, period. There is no such thing as a perfect human diet, we eat whatever we can figure out how, and that's just the way it is. Perhaps someday in the future we'll figure out ways to preserve our dietary variety without sacrificing our health, but until then, food technology (like other technologies) is imperfect. If everyone could enjoy their food as much as they do now and be Vegan, it might happen. But few people have the mettle for that.
Of my five best friends in high school, four were vegan. They've all reverted to being lacto-ovo vegetarian. The reason? They hated to eat what they were eating, and wanted to enjoy it again. Maybe some people can be happy with the vegan options, but that's a personal choice, and not the "objectively correct" one.
In short, it doesn't matter what mammals eat in nature. All that matters is what people eat, period.